"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... required now; we are required for something else." And Miss Birdseye looked at him with a wandering, tentative humour, as if he would ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... dogmatic of succeeding times is found in the connection of philosophical theology with the baptismal confession, that is, in the "scientific theology of facts," Justin is, in a certain fashion, the first framer of Church dogma, though no doubt in a very tentative way. (1) He tried to distinguish between the appearance of the Logos in pre-Christian times and in Christ; he emphasised the fact that the whole Logos appeared only in Christ, and that the manner ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... really now—?" said Lichfield. Then there was a tentative invitation or two, and I cut the knot by accepting all of them, and talking to every woman as though she were the solitary specimen of feminity extant. It was presently agreed that gossip often embroidered the actual occurrence and that wild oats were, after all, a not unheard-of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... heaven she seemed to point, into a vast and profound blackness, that, as the Master snicked off the no-longer needed searchlight, unleashed myriad stars—stars which leaped out of the velvet night. Already man and the works of man lay far behind. If there had been any tentative pursuit, the Legionaries knew nothing of it. Outdistancing pursuit as an eagle distances sparrows, the liner gloried in her ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the truth, mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans—tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the sphere ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... however, was not the author, and no certain evidence as to who he was can be derived from any source, nor does the chronicle itself supply many of those incidental indications from which it is often possible to learn much regarding the author of an anonymous book. The tentative suggestion of Bishop Stubbs that it may have been written by Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus de Scaccario, is now generally regarded as inadmissible. The work begins in 1170, and from a date a year ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... him a tentative offer to that effect, my boy, and, now that the first flush of his rage is over, he is a coyote lacking the courage to kill. He will agree to your proposal, and I shall take occasion to warn him that if he should ever break his word while I am living, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... which the soul of reality has passed away. On this subject I could have said much, but I will confine myself to one point which I think at the present juncture to be of importance. The Government of Bengal has been foremost in a tentative way in encouraging research. What is necessary is the extension and ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... very cold one to those at the cottage who were used to the mild west country. But at last spring came; late and with bitter winds and showers of sleet, but none the less wonderful, especially as one had to look to see the tentative signs of its coming. March in Marbridge used to mean violets and daffodils, tender green shoots and balmy middays. March here means days of pale clean light and great sweeping wind which chased grey ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... towards the hotel door again; I followed suit and then our eyes met once more, this time intentionally. A tentative, uncertain intimacy was springing up between us two. She said simply: "You are waiting for Mr Fyne to come ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... great uses and benefits, have numerous defects. There are faults in the details of their organization and management, whilst many of them are financially unsound. Like other institutions in their early stages, they have been tentative and in a great measure empirical,—more especially as regards their rates of contribution and allowances for sick relief. The rates have in many cases been fixed too low, in proportion to the benefits ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... I here give a tentative list of some Celtic words found in dialects. Their etymologies are discussed in my Etymological Dictionary (1910), as they are also found in literary use; and the words are fully explained in the English Dialect Dictionary, which gives all their senses, ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... people had done heroic work under adverse conditions. A tentative theory of the mechanism involved had already been formulated, and the search had started for a means to duplicate the super-dielectricity in materials otherwise more suitable to man's needs. But as he grew familiar with the place and the job, Lancaster wondered ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... outline, bewildering and discouraging the imagination. Intuitive knowledge was disturbed by the incursion of scraps of disconnected experience. This condition of mind made her an almost insoluble psychological problem. Since she was evidently a woman of pronounced character, her bewilderment and tentative attitude were not allowed for. Her actions were regarded as deliberate and cool-headed, when often they would be the outcome of sheer confusion, or chance, or perhaps ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... room, going over her dresses with that French maid. I don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner," Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Ferris with a laugh, yet a little annoyed that a question so purely tentative as his should have met at once such a definite response. "Are you quite sure you can do what they want?" He unfolded to him, as fully as he understood ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... mission to Austria; and Mr. Hutchison had scarcely entered the Turkish department of the Bebek Seminary, when the failure of his wife's health required a return to the United States. The mission of the Rev. James L. Merrick to the Persian Mohammedans, in 1834, was little more than a tentative exploration of the field, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... movement, and turned him, not towards the gate, but in the opposite direction, which further puzzled Shannon. But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on foot, ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in all the rude nations that have attained civilisation. These nations seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative absolutism. The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress rebellion, no organised ESPIONAGE to spy out discontent, no skilled bureaucracy to smooth the ruts of obedient life. The early king was indeed consecrated ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... 1975 civil war has seriously damaged Lebanon's economic infrastructure, cut national output by half, and all but ended Lebanon's position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. Following October 1990, however, a tentative peace has enabled the central government to begin restoring control in Beirut, collect taxes, and regain access to key port and government facilities. The battered economy has also been propped up by a financially sound banking system and resilient ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... throughout the Antipodes the public demand is confined, as in England, mainly to the 'general' literature of the hour. 'Whatever has succeeded in London will usually succeed in Australia' is the invariable remark of the exporter and the first principle that guides his tentative selection in the case of all newly-published works. The circulation of the best British weekly and monthly reviews by some of the principal subscription libraries helps the reader to choose for himself, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... I was no further advanced in the morning than at midnight, but Kennedy seemed to have evolved at least a tentative programme. It started with a visit to the public library, where he carefully went over the ground already gone over by the police. Finding nothing, he concluded that Miss Gilbert had not found what she wanted at the library and had continued the quest, even as he ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... careful study of all data attainable, may be considerably increased. The mere collection of facts, however, cannot be prosecuted to advantage without predetermined rules of judgment, nor can they be classified at all without the adoption of some principle which involves a tentative theory. More than a generation ago Baader noticed that scientific observers only accumulated great masses of separate facts without establishing more connection between them than an arbitrary and imperfect classification; and before him Goethe complained of the indisposition of students of nature ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... religious doctrine of brotherhood. This speculation is entirely opposed to the historical facts, but it will easily be realised that when the workers had, in their own interest, asserted afresh the doctrine of human brotherhood, the Churches had a new occasion to preach it. How timid and tentative that preaching was, and even is, we have not to consider here. On the whole the brotherhood of men was re-affirmed by the Churches both in the social and ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... paralyzes it incompletely.[73] But, because instinct is, like intelligence, fallible, because it also shows individual deviations, it does not at all follow that the instinct of the Ammophila has been acquired, as has been claimed, by tentative intelligent experiments. Even supposing that the Ammophila has come in course of time to recognize, one after another, by tentative experiment, the points of its victim which must be stung to render it motionless, and also the special treatment that must be inflicted ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... gave his fancy play in the choice of an oval, greater at one end than the other, endeavouring to satisfy some ideas about epicyclic motion, but could not find a satisfactory curve. He then had the fortunate idea of trying an ellipse with the same axis as his tentative oval. Mars now appeared too slow at the apses instead of too quick, so obviously some intermediate ellipse must be sought between the trial ellipse and the circle on the same axis. At this point the "long arm of coincidence" ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the principles that had governed not only our ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the lazy ungainliness of Southwestern architecture. A collection of temporary make-shifts of boards, of logs, of canvas, prematurely decayed, and in some instances abandoned for a newer erection, or degraded to mere outhouses—it presented with singular frankness the nomadic and tentative disposition of its founder. It had been repaired without being improved; its additions had seemed only to extend its primitive ugliness over a larger space. Its roofs were roughly shingled or rudely boarded and battened, and the rafters of some of its "lean-to's" were simply covered with ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... 65, the tender outline of Boutet de Monvel, the telling, masterly sweep of Gibson, or the short, crisp line of Vierge or Rico. Compared with any of these the line of the beginner will be either feeble and tentative, or harsh, ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... cowbird hatched and reared by the sparrow, or the warbler, or the vireo does not sing the song of the foster-parent. Why? Did its parent not try to teach it? I have no evidence that young birds sing, except occasionally in a low, tentative kind of way, till they return the following season, and then birds of a feather flock together, robins staying with robins, and cowbirds with cowbirds, each singing the song of its species. The songs of bobolinks differ in different localities, but ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service on this planet.... Now, general, I have a tentative setup. We're going to need the Elmoran for patrol work south and east of Konkrook, and the Gaucho and Bushranger to the north and northeast, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the Aldebaran at Kankad's, and use her for emergencies. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... he spelled it 'cozen;' but he didn't seem to mind my wickedness at all." There was a pause, during which Katie looked at her smiling friend, and her own face dimpled bewitchingly. "This is exactly what you would have done, Elizabeth," she said. "You would have heard that tentative remark of Madam's, of course you would, and you would have stood still in the hall and explained that Stephen was your cousin, instead of your brother, and have lost your walk beyond a doubt, you know the Flamingo. Now, I was just as good as you ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... how timid, tentative, and dear the postal and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience fight in these departments against ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... His voice had been low and tentative at first; but now, gathering courage, he lifted it upon a note of high challenge. He could not have told why, but he sang because he was steering towards his fate. It might lie far, very far, ahead; but somewhere ahead it lay, beyond the gradually unfolding hills; somewhere in the west these would ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... two empty pages that stare significantly. The empty pages are a lapse. It was during this lapse that Mallare smiled with interest at the spectacle of his disintegration. There follows, then, a sudden excited outburst, undated. In it the beginnings of his madness pirouette like tentative dancers. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... the metallic brilliancy went out of the sky, and it became softly, mistily blue. All that forenoon Hazel prowled restlessly out of doors without cap or coat. There was a new feel in the air. The deep winter snow had suddenly lost its harshness. A tentative stillness wrapped the North as if the land rested a moment, gathering its force for some ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sons of some of his principal officers to be instructed in arts and religion.' This was four hundred years ago! And now the Portuguese can be safely snubbed and sat upon, even by a SALISBURY! But if your prudent Premier doesn't 'stiffen his back' a bit, with regard to the tougher and tentative Teuton, 'the arts and valour' of the Britishers will not make as great an impression on the minds of the Africans as your ill-used East African ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... to this tentative remark; but it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard for any one in her condition to see, why a man and ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the head of a hundred sail. The Dutch, who were commanded by Opdam, were in no less ardent mood, and both sides were equally eager for an engagement. They soon got into touch with one another; and in June, 1665, and after some tentative attacks, a general engagement took place in Southwold Bay, off the coast of Suffolk, on the 3rd of that month. The result was a great victory for the English fleet. The Dutch lost some twenty ships, and 10,000 men in killed and prisoners. On the English side some 800 men were killed, and ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... consists of a few tentative rules advanced with the notion of fixing classification practice within the office in ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... and rips in sleeve and body, but she was not going to sew. On the contrary, she felt about with delicate, tentative fingers, searching through the loosened lining until she found what she was looking for, and, extracting it, laid it on her knees—a photograph, in a thin ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... in the 15th century; Cape Verde subsequently became a trading center for African slaves and later an important coaling and resupply stop for whaling and transatlantic shipping. Following independence in 1975, and a tentative interest in unification with Guinea-Bissau, a one-party system was established and maintained until multi-party elections were held in 1990. Cape Verde continues to exhibit one of Africa's most stable democratic governments. Repeated droughts during the second half of the 20th century ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... These new principles involved a complete revolution in the previously recognized principles of government. The French sought to make a master-stroke at immediate achievement and they incurred counterrevolutions and delays. The Americans moved in a more moderate and tentative manner towards the great achievement, but with them also a counter-revolution finally appeared in the rise of an influential class who, by openly defending slavery, repudiated the principles upon ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... was not entirely of this strange half-caste, whose beauty was provoking, although he resolutely repelled her tentative advances, that Grantham was thinking. In that last gesture when she had scornfully tossed her head in turning aside, had lain a bitter memory. Grantham stood for a moment watching the swaying draperies. Then, dropping the end of his cigarette ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... experience were the very richest possible, are but an infinitesimal drop in what must be a full bucket of industrial education before a person should feel qualified to speak with authority on the subject of labor. Certain lessons were learned, certain tentative conclusions arrived at. They are given here for what they may be worth and in a very humble spirit. Indeed, I am much more humble in the matter of my ideas concerning labor than before I took ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... adventure, Watson carried away no bitterness. It was a social experience of a new order, and it led to the writing of another book, which he entitled, "POLICE COURT PROCEDURE: A Tentative Analysis." ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... turned to The Alexander, but she had never in her life known such an aching loneliness as had been Miss Toland's fate for many years. To such a nature the solitary years in Paris, the solitary return to California, the tentative and unencouraged approaches to her nieces, all made a dark memory. Rich as she was, independent and popular as she was, Miss Toland's life had brought her nothing so sweet as this young thing, to teach, to dominate, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... through which this line was to pass is described as surpassing in its difficulties the conception of any European. It consists of impervious forests, steep ravines, and dismal swamps. A survey for the line was impossible, and a tentative process would have broken the spirit of the best men. I therefore arranged a plan of operations founded on a determination of the absolute latitudes and the difference of longitudes of the two extremities. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... the name of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not come for organic changes ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... say a clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... while there were rumours of a military rising. The trial of Babeuf and his accomplices was fixed to take place before the newly constituted high court of justice at Vendome. On Fructidor 10 and 11 (27th and 28th of August), when the prisoners were removed from Paris, there were tentative efforts at a riot with a view to rescue, but these were easily suppressed. The attempt of five or six hundred Jacobins (7th of September) to rouse the soldiers at Grenelle met with no better success. The trial of Babeuf and the others, begun at Vendome on the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... four dollars a week. And the lady had been sought by prosperous men! The lowliness of Lincoln's origin went ill with her high notions of her family's importance. She was downright, high-tempered, dogmatic, but social; he was devious, slow to wrath, tentative, solitary; his very appearance, then as afterward, was against him. Though not the hideous man he was later made out to be—the "gorilla" of enemy caricaturists—he was rugged of feature, with a lower lip that tended ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... readers who are not professed students of philosophy. And, secondly, my subject is one which belongs to the sphere of right opinion and perception, rather than to that of logic and demonstration; and seems therefore to be properly approached in the tentative spirit favoured by the Dialogue form. On such topics most men, I think, will feel that it is in conversation that they get their best lights; and Dialogue is merely an attempt to reproduce in literary form this natural genesis of opinion. ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... I would. What concerns you concerns me. But I'd no business to assume it's the other way about. That is, when it's Dick. You're bound, you know," he said, in a tentative way he thought he ought to venture and yet not quite sure of it, "to ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... less easy of access, these communities were forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender, settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation. Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... Burke's phrase of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to be Dick who was suddenly awakened at what he judged to be the middle of the night. And the manner of his awakening was this. He seemed to be dreaming that he was buying a new pair of shoes and, after having tried on several tentative pairs in a shop, the salesman, who was attired in the full regalia of a cowboy, gave Dick's left foot a sharp kick as if to indicate that he should ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... the world still colourless and mysterious, the house a long black bulk against a slowly lightening sky. Only the earliest sparrows were twittering; in the trees only the most wakeful rooks were uttering tentative caws. The outburst of joy and life and music which would attend the sun's rising was ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... a social phenomenon is to be reckoned as a religion, not as an ordinary political movement. The important and effective mental attitudes to the world may be broadly divided into the religious and the scientific. The scientific attitude is tentative and piecemeal, believing what it finds evidence for, and no more. Since Galileo, the scientific attitude has proved itself increasingly capable of ascertaining important facts and laws, which are acknowledged by all competent people regardless of temperament ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Advertising.—To have charge of all printing, such as Advance Notices of Conference, Registration Cards, Banquet Tickets, Tentative Program, Completed Program, Crusade Folder, Newspaper Articles, Conference ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... them no promise of stability or of fruit after their kind. Only, by the increasing number of them, they have given proof of an unrest on this subject which at last is beginning to embody itself in organization and concerted study and enterprise. A fifty years of mere tentative groping is likely to be followed by another fifty ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... clue, and the human mind is impelled to do the best it can with the confessedly imperfect data which it finds at its disposal. The result, therefore, in this region, is no system of definite and certain truth, as in Physics, but is either suspense of judgment altogether, or else a tentative scheme or working hypothesis, to be held undogmatically, in an attitude of constant receptiveness for further light, and in full readiness for modification in the direction ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already—a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little houses that had been open all along were trying to ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... was ever evoked by observation lessons, and for experiments full of meaning and full of zest. Naturally we do not despise correct information, but these children are very young and all this work is tentative. We are never dogmatic, it is all "Do you think they might have ..." or "Well, I know what I should have done; I should have ..." and the teacher's reply ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... faith is always vague, tentative, and inconclusive. He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he knows that he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his certainty in any old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; but ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... rang—she remembered it afterward—with a loud thrilling note. It was what they used to call the "visitor's ring"; not the tentative tinkle of a neighbor dropping in to borrow a sauce-pan or discuss parochial incidents, but a decisive summons from ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... himself stupid with drugs, or I was much mistaken—Macartney, and myself to run it; with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing the work of six men instead ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... enforced companionship would at all events be relieved of tedium, but he was in a quandary as to what should be his attitude. Later in the seclusion of the smoking-room he shaped a tentative policy of such deferential courtesy as he would have tendered a new acquaintance. He fancied that she would appreciate a manner which neither bordered on intimacy nor presumed upon ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... divided into three parts. (1) Tentative classification of the languages of Mexico; (2) notes on the immigration of the tribes of Mexico; (3) geography of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... places of the city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... city invested, we rested idly for another time of sleep. Occasionally we made a tentative tower attack which came to nothing. Tarrano waited; his barrage remained the same. We tried to provoke a move from ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... cannot this association block out at least a tentative nut research program for the whole United States? What are the problems that should have first consideration? What do you think the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station should do for nut culture ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... parts of the world to continue the work, the problem of getting money from public and private sources to pay expenses, and finally the organisation to be set up in Belgium, England, America and Holland, to handle the work. Before we left a tentative organisation had been established and people despatched on various duties with orders to get things started without loss of time, so that food could be pushed across the line into Belgium at ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... measure the source of his excellences also. For, taking his works in the order of their production, we can perceive very clearly that his faults of style kept disappearing as he became more and more himself. He advanced in the path of improvement by slow tentative methods, and was evidently careful not to deviate from what was before him till he saw unmistakably how he could do better. As he was thus "most severe in fashion and collection of himself"; so he worked in just the true way for disciplining ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... arrived at. Socrates maintains his character of a 'know nothing;' but the boys have already learned the lesson which he is unable to teach them, and they are free from the conceit of knowledge. (Compare Chrm.) The dialogue is what would be called in the language of Thrasyllus tentative or inquisitive. The subject is continued in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and treated, with a manifest reference to the Lysis, in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. As in other writings of Plato (for example, the Republic), there ...
— Lysis • Plato
... but he did not turn to look at her. Nan reached out a tentative hand and touched his sleeve. "Please, Mr. Pete," she said. "I, I want to see you. I, I have heard something about your having been hurt in a fire. I am sure you must think yourself a more hateful ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... lay down the law. Do you allow yourself the tone of positive, almost dictatorial, assertion, which, coming from a girl, so sets an old-fashioned person's teeth on edge; or do you try to speak in the tentative, suggestive, inquiring tone, which is not only required by good manners, but is also a real help to ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... To this tentative remark Robert Grant Burns made no reply whatever. He went off down the path to meet Jean, critically watching her approach to see how nearly she resembled Muriel Gay, and how close she could come to the camera without having the substitution ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... proceedings at Rome had anything to do with it, but he thought that they had a great influence on the mind of the President; that, doubtless, his action was not determined solely by that, and, therefore, that the Secretary of State first made a tentative application to see whether a proposition for another Conference was acceptable, and that he found all countries here represented answering the circular in the affirmative; that they agreed with him that a conference ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... he definitely conceived the idea of monarchy, and, looking beyond his own requirements, pictured to himself a successor at some future time inheriting the authority which he had established, no one can say. In such vast schemes there must have been much that was merely tentative. But had he lived and retained his influence we may be sure that the Empire would have been established a century ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... so far as the two wishes are compatible with each other—contains a suggestion that there may be cases in which the function of the dream suffers shipwreck. The dream process is in the first instance admitted as a wish-fulfillment of the unconscious, but if this tentative wish-fulfillment disturbs the foreconscious to such an extent that the latter can no longer maintain its rest, the dream then breaks the compromise and fails to perform the second part of its task. It is then at once broken off, and replaced by complete wakefulness. Here, too, it is ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... courtesy of the Governments of Russia and the Netherlands, a proposal to call The Hague Conference together at a time which would conflict with the Conference of the American Republics at Rio de Janeiro in August was laid aside. No other date has yet been suggested. A tentative program for the conference has been proposed by the Government of Russia, and the subjects which it enumerates are undergoing careful examination and consideration in preparation for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to reading through masses of books, correspondence, and other documents, and studied maps until I felt as if I had lived in the country concerned and was personally acquainted with the Dutch governors on the Cuyuni and the Spanish monks on the Orinoco. As a result lines more or less tentative were prepared by each of us, Judge Brewer and myself agreeing very closely, and the others not being very distant from us at any important point. One former prime minister of Great Britain I learned, during this investigation, to respect greatly,—Lord Aberdeen, whom I well remembered ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... with deep interest to the introduction among us of the principles of the Hindoo philosophy and religion (including the transmigration of souls), through tentative articles in our magazines; by which there is opening to us a way of escape from that heaven one exponent of which is, to lie in the bosom ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... at once acknowledged on all sides, even by the press; and I appear to have made some impression in the highest administrative circles, for I shortly afterwards heard from my friend Rudolf Liechtenstein, that tentative advances had been made to him with a view to his accepting the position of manager, associated with which there was certainly an idea of asking me to become conductor of the Grand Opera. Among the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... had been but tentative. It had been understood that, should the storm abate, Mrs. Schuyler, Muriel and Blake would follow on the next train; for he himself was forced by the exigency of his mission to reach the city at least two ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... that day been suggested to him by one who had for some time been secretly pursuing investigations. The facts revealed were so startling, so amazing, that very substantial evidence would be necessary to persuade committee members of their truth. It could at present be only a tentative theory that was set before the committee; but let the committee remember that magna est veritas et prevalebit; that they were there to fulfil a great duty, and not to be deterred by any fears, any reluctances, any personal friendships, any dread of scandal, from seeking to draw out ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... which he had served, sweeping across the bows of a Frenchman, and raking him, gun after gun, from stem to stern. Nor did the warlike mood abate until he reached home and looked his wife in the eyes. He told her all, ending with the half repudiatory, half tentative words. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the brewers will continue, and my Lords Bass, Burton and the rest will merely await future opportunities to plunder the British public. In short, little constructive legislation, even of that mild and tentative character one might expect from a Liberal party, made up of capitalistic units can be expected after the ten years of corrupt and extravagant rule of this band ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... for long occupied my attention," he wrote, "and, in a tentative way, a good deal has been done. But we have reached a point where little more progress can be made without a decision on the main issues. The question is, whether British colonisation is to be undertaken on a large and effective scale, under Government control and with Government assistance, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... been better for Nelly if her father had told her of those tentative advances to Captain Langrishe, for then her pride might have come to her aid. As it was, she had nothing to go upon but those looks of his, and his manner to her when they had met at the houses of friends. For they had met, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city—and ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... companies waged a relentless war, which never ceased until Mr. Wilson disbanded his company. Carl Rankin, who was a Columbus boy and an old friend of Alfred's called on Alfred. He advised that he was dissatisfied with his surroundings and a tentative partnership agreement was entered into for the next season. However, the arrangements went no further as Mr. Rankin's health failed him rapidly and it was not long until minstrelsy lost one of the most versatile performers that ever ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... A tentative knock at the door. The figure on the bed did not stir. Another knock, louder this time. Emma McChesney sat up with a start. She shivered as she became conscious of the icy December air pouring into the little room. She rose, walked to the window, closed it with a bang, and opened ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... occasionally to one another with that detached confidence which proved they were mutually unknown. I also, but without approaching them, stared in the direction of the Green. I saw nothing but the narrow street which widened to the Park. Some few people were standing in tentative attitudes, and all looking in the one direction. As I turned from them homewards I received an impression of silence and expectation ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... resulted in approximately the above program—professional preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... that Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day, after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the "Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious painter, Besnard, imposes ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... the two bladders collapsed into one idea, they actually expanded into four names, two Latin and two Greek, gustus and gustatio, [Greek: geusis], and [Greek: geusma], which all alike express the merely tentative or exploratory act of a praegustator or professional "taster" in a king's household: what, if applied to a fluid, we ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... available surplus must take into account several factors which cannot be accurately measured,—such as financial control in foreign countries, possible tariffs, and foreign competition. For this reason the above statement should be regarded as only tentative, though it is the result of a rather exhaustive study of conditions in relation to the world control of shipping. The classes named overlap to some extent, and it is to be expected that some of the commodities placed in one class may in the ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... possible to be the self he felt that he now was without any drag from that old Ishmael. He knew vaguely that she was engaged, and this seemed to make intercourse lighter and more jolly. Every relationship is new, because to no two people is anyone quite the same, but there was in the first tentative approaches of his acquaintance with Georgie Barlow a novelty that struck him pleasantly. He was shy of her only because he was still so ignorant, but he felt no barriers, rather an overlapping of something they both ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and a man called Jerry, and Peterson, the Swede. But Shanklin, who sent telegrams assuring somebody that Peterson was Number One—Shanklin most of all. Slavens passed his hand with tentative pressure over the soiled bandage which bound his brow, feeling with finger and thumb along the dark stain which traced what it hid from sight. Shanklin! That would explain some things, many things. Perhaps ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... unfortunately, as the patient at stool gave a sudden bend to the left, his testicle slipped up into the abdomen and was completely lost to palpation. Orchitis threatened, but the symptoms subsided; the patient was kept under observation for some weeks, and then as a tentative measure, discharged to duty. Shortly afterward he returned, saying that he was ill, and that while lifting a sack of corn his testicle came partly down, causing him great pain. At the time of report his left testicle ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... unnecessary, and, in any case, Ezekiel would hardly have ventured to contradict a code which enjoyed so venerable a sanction and bore the honoured name of Moses. It is easier to suppose that Ezekiel's programme is a tentative sketch, which was modified and improved upon by the authors of P. Again there was every inducement during and immediately after the exile to formulate definitely the ritual practice of pre-exilic times, and to modify ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... (Schreber).—One adult male Badger (60144) was found dead; the skull and baculum were saved. The subspecific identification is on geographic grounds, and is tentative. In this area T. t. taxus and T. t. ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it is only by iteration and reiteration that the shorter steps of tentative experiment can be urged ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... this day, would be disposed to dispute that the Constitution, as a device to postpone war among the states, at least for a period, was successful, and that, as I have already pointed out, during the tentative interval which extended until Appomattox, the Supreme Court served perhaps as well, in ordinary times, as an arbiter between the states and the general government, as any which could have been suggested. So much may be conceded, and yet it remains true, as the record will show, ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the situation, she looked to Isabel like ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... character of science appears in the form of the statement. Nevertheless, it seems undesirable to call our confidence in Nature's uniformity an 'hypothesis': it is incongruous to use the same term for our tentative conjectures and for our most indispensable beliefs. 'The Universal Postulate' is a better term for the principle which, in some form or other, every generalisation takes ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... hearing the girl's words. At her announcement of going to the island he began to make tentative plans to accompany her. There might be a lot he could do. And she sure needed help. He wondered if he could offer his assistance without again ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... complaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic,—I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously as a solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any possible connection with his one central ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... This conclusion is tentative. It must be remembered that the stratification of rubbish-pits, ancient as well as modern, is often very peculiar. It is liable to be confused by all sorts of cross-currents. In particular, objects ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... it did not seem incoherent to Maisie. She connected it with the false story of her sister's departure to nurse her husband in Belgium, and the wreck of the steamer in which they recrossed the Channel. Her tentative question:—"Did you know of the shipwreck?" only confirmed this. His reply was:—"I was not here at the time, so I only knew that she was going abroad to her husband." He was speaking of Maisie's own voyage to Australia, and took her speech to mean that the ship she ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... back on to food should last just as long as the fast. Your first tentative meals should be dilute, raw juices. After several days of slowly building up to solid raw fruit, small amounts of raw vegetable foods should be added. If it has been a long fast, say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... business here in Newbern—establish yourself, soundly and prosperously, as it were, so that your son, though maturing under different circumstances, would yet feel a pride in your standing in the community. Of course, this is tentative—I'm sounding you, only. You may have quite other ideas. You may have laid out an entirely different future for yourself in some other field. But I wanted to let you know that we stand ready to finance liberally any business you would care to engage ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... ocean telegraphy was broached and made successful during these years. Tentative efforts to operate the current under water were made between Governor's Island and New York City so early as 1842. A copper wire was used, insulated with hemp string coated with India rubber and pitch. In 1846 a similar arrangement was encased ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr. Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they were ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Faggit, plausible, observant, indefatigably cunning, and in business most capable ("No bloomin' flies on 'Orris F." as he would confidently and truthfully assure you) was the first tentative tentacle advanced to feel its way by the fine old British Firm of Schneider, Schnitzel, Schnorrer & Schmidt, in the mazy markets of the gorgeous Orient, and to introduce to the immemorial East their famous ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... world. It is only after a considerable amount of thought and inquiry that I am beginning to understand why for many generations, perhaps, nothing of the sort can possibly be done except in the most marginal and tentative manner. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... to the change. From the pier where we landed, a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing; he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor. At that there came running a fat, kindly looking old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came, who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... with them, are the revelation of God to his children. I would not be misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God—not in the laws themselves, save as his means. For that same reason, human science ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Mrs. Grail's. The good lady was sitting at one of her front windows, sewing. As she looked into the street, her face was seen to have a sad and thoughtful expression. She came to the door in response to a sharp ring by Wesley Tiffles, who was tentative of bellpulls. Mrs. Crull kept two servants, but she could never get over the impulse to answer the door, when she was ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to relatives and guests. The quality he found most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her obviously absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper that her resources should be in her husband's hands. He had, indeed, even in these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence to see what he was aiming at, and he had found himself almost floundering ungracefully in his remarks, while she had looked ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson's tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man's mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson's success in obtaining at least her promise had become ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... PROGRAMME TO THE WORK.—Under Traditional Management the tentative calendar might cause speed, but could not direct speed. Under Transitory Management elimination of waste by prescribed methods and routing increases output. This increase becomes greater under Scientific Management. ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... a tentative list. He named four: first, Farrell Kennedy, who was in town, and said nobody should go if he didn't; Frank Elpaso, the Texan; the Englishman, Tommie Meggeson; and Wickwire, if he could be located—any one of ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... today the representatives of the Church in the different States met to adopt a constitution. There had been tentative efforts to effect an organization and adopt a Book of Common Prayer, all of which were overruled by the good providence of God. Many not of our fold desired a liturgy. Benjamin Franklin published ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... examples of cases where occult causes are active, they are by no means unprecedented. In cases where the cause of lameness is not definitely located, and when by the process of exclusion one is enabled to decide that the seat of trouble is in the hip, a tentative diagnosis of ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... treatise on The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had woefully little patience with that ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... is the true or speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria—now sunk below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which stretched from ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... at once attracted, and regarded each other with a kind of tentative cordiality, which might later become antagonism, for they were on a level ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... disputants who do not define substance) had been invented by Peter of Blois, but not yet enjoined upon the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215. The language of the earlier fathers, of St. Bernard, did not suffice. Peter Lombard's tentative terms had given way to less reserved speech. Thomas Aquinas, not yet born, was to unite the rival factions which forked now into Berengarius, who objected to the very terms Body of Christ, &c., always used for the Sacrament; ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... increase of education, the gentler manners, the new life that has been breathed over art and literature, the achievements in science and philosophy, the drawing together of classes, the bridging over of the great gulf between rich and poor by some incipient and tentative attempts at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... instance, is a principle which is probably more significant for the explanation of human development than natural selection. Darwin himself was conscious that his principles had only a very restricted application in this sphere, as is evident from his cautious and tentative remarks in the 5th chapter of his Descent of Man. He applied natural selection to the growth of the intellectual faculties and of the fundamental social instincts, and also to the differentiation of the great races or "sub-species" ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... could not have told exactly how it was done, but she knew that two minutes later young Gray and Mellicent were at the piano, he, shining-eyed and happy, drawing a tentative bow across the strings: she, no less shining-eyed and happy, giving him "A" ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... meeting at Baltimore, the officers of Synod autocratically convened that body five weeks before the time fixed by the constitution. Shober was sent to Baltimore as delegate, and took a prominent part in drawing up the "Planentwurf," the tentative constitution for the organization of a General Synod. This irregular meeting of the North Carolina Synod was later on known as the "Untimely Synod." It provoked much ill feeling and led to the organization of the Tennessee Synod in 1820. (Tenn. Rep. 1820, 49.) At this ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... consideration of this tentative synopsis, the playwright consulted his watch. Already the incident of the condemnable bandbox had eaten up much invaluable time. He would see himself doomed to unending perdition if he would submit to further hindrance ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... when the soldier made an odd and, as it would seem, tentative gesture with his left hand. All the fingers were clenched, and with his extended thumb he scratched his chin slowly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... terrible possibilities very seriously, Dot took comfort from that fact and went on again cheerfully. Nor did she mind carrying the basket of attractive fruit. One of the peaches on top was a little mellow and she stuck a tentative finger into the most luscious spot she could see upon the cheek of that ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... you so kindly express, I will again make an attempt to "adapt" the 4th movement of the 9th Symphony to the piano, and soon after my return to Rome will set to work upon the required tentative. Let us hope that the variation of the proverb: "Tant va la cruche a l'eau qu'a la fin...elle s'emplit"—may prove true. [So often goes the pitcher to the water that at last it ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... the aerodrome a large packing-case addressed "Sergeant Tam." There was no surname, though there was no excuse for the timidity which stopped short at "Tam." The consignor might, at least, have ventured to add a tentative and inquiring "Mac?" ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... These tentative efforts led the way to busy and widespread activity by Jewish women in various branches of literature at a somewhat later period, when the so-called Judendeutsch, also known as Altweiberdeutsch (old women's German), came into general use. Rebekah Tiktiner, daughter of Rabbi Meir Tiktiner, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had suddenly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... He also told a different story from one he had told before to a certain official who now was present. He seemed rather mixed on a number of points, and this is all the more significant because he had been heartily afraid of being adjudged insane. Our diagnosis at this time was purely tentative as far as exact diagnosis was concerned. We stated that in our opinion he was an aberrational type and the practical point was that he should neither be allowed to go out in the community, nor be sent to a penitentiary, but rather to an ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... she might have prevailed on you to lunch with us on the day of the Confirmation. She was only waiting for the Bishop's acceptance to send you an invitation; but we hear now," he said in a dubitative and tentative way—"we hear now that it is possible that the Bishop may ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... to be considered as a critick; a name which the present generation is scarcely willing to allow him. His criticism is condemned as tentative or experimental, rather than scientifick; and he is considered as deciding by taste[202] rather ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... He began to make tentative friendships, but in spite of the advice of his cousin they were with the men who did not count. Samuel Miller was an example. He was a big, stodgy fellow with a slow mind which arrived at its convictions deliberately. But when he had made sure of them he hung to his ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... own observations; to read, and then to select and record the materials which are the fruits of their readings; to organize and use, in short, their own experience. The whole organization of this volume may be taken as an illustration of a method, at once tentative and experimental, for the collection, classification, and interpretation of materials, and should be used by students from the very outset in all their reading ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... period the Boer leaders had made a succession of tentative suggestions, each of which had been put aside by the British Government. Their first had been that they should merely concede those points which had been at issue at the beginning of the war. This was set aside. The second was that they should be allowed to ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trade. I've had it before. The man will never come to the front. He'll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off." That's what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking at the door of the room—tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door at last, and came in rather peremptorily. He had ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way downtown in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... degeneration and decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of its ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Rebellion, except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern side, {555} Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper's American Civil ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... take Durant, and looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... there were things more solid in life than fine whiskers and a title, and that, in accepting a second husband, she would regard these items as quite subordinate to a carriage and a settlement. Now, she had ascertained, by tentative residences, that the kind of bite she was angling for was difficult to be met with at watering-places, which were already preoccupied with abundance of angling beauties, and were chiefly stocked with men whose whiskers might be dyed, and whose incomes were still more problematic; so she ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot |
