"Theorem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... having no real meaning, since there is no fourth power or dimension. But about one hundred years ago this chimera became an actual existence, and today it is furnishing a new world to physics, in which mechanics may become geometry, time be co-ordinated with space, and every geometric theorem in the world is a physical theorem in the experimental world in study in the laboratory. Startling indeed it is to the scientist to be told that an artificial dream-world of the mathematician is more real than that he sees with ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... b. at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the s. of a small landed proprietor, and ed. at the Grammar School of Grantham and at Trinity Coll., Camb. By propounding the binomial theorem, the differential calculus, and the integral calculus, he began in 1665 the wonderful series of discoveries in pure mathematics, optics, and physics, which place him in the first rank of the philosophers of all time. He was ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... results from the individual temperament of the painter who simply relies on his own perception. And it is true, in theory, that such a conception is more exact. But it reduces the picture to a kind of theorem, which excludes all that constitutes the value and charm of an art, that is to say: caprice, fancy, and the spontaneity of personal inspiration. The works of Seurat, Signac, and of the few men who have strictly followed the rules of Pointillism are lacking in life, in surprise, and make ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... baffled him for a time. However, he set to it again and again and before long mastered it. He threw himself heart and soul into mathematics, and very soon made some remarkable discoveries. First he discovered the binomial theorem: familiar now to all who have done any algebra, unintelligible to others, and therefore I say nothing about it. By the age of twenty-one or two he had begun his great mathematical discovery of infinite series and fluxions—now ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair, enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... of the discovery of the beautiful theorem of Huygens, it required in its author not merely a complete knowledge of the mathematical science of his age, but a genius to enlarge its boundaries by new creations of his own. Such talents are not always united with a quick perception ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... the Sacred Books of the East, the records of the Past, and particularly the psychic phenomena of different ages, finding at last the Constructive Theorem clearer than anywhere else in the "School of Natural Science," from the fact that it is demonstrably cognizant of all preceding work, and definitely conforms to the strict demands of Science—Physical, Mental, Ethical, Psychical and Spiritual, and proves to be the very thing for which ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Gordon to thank for—a Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... or any lesser or greater number, which he might have published with the same ease as he published one, is proof of malice in publishing that one. An inference to be drawn from proved facts or circumstances is something like a corollary drawn from a previously demonstrated theorem ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Whitland mourned him in all sincerity. She was also relieved. One-half of the burden which lay upon her had been lifted; the second half was wrestling with the binomial theorem at Cheltenham College. ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... arranged in strict order of difficulty. And the fact that they have interested and given pleasure to man for untold ages is no doubt due in some measure to the appeal they make to the eye as well as to the brain. Sometimes an algebraical formula or theorem seems to give pleasure to the mathematician's eye, but it is probably only an intellectual pleasure. But there can be no doubt that in the case of certain geometrical problems, notably dissection or superposition puzzles, the aesthetic ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... that Horace literally sat by the plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the noon-hour. It was there that Pythagoras explained his ancient theorem. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... just as difficult as that," said Donald. "While you're talking about peculiar things, I'll tell you one. In class I came right up against Oka Sayye on the solution of a theorem in trigonometry. We both had the answer, the correct answer, but we had arrived at it by widely different routes, and it was up to me to prove that my line of reasoning was more lucid, more natural, the inevitable one ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of any alleged miracle, we have but two things to reply to this: first, that, as Paley says in relation to the question whether any accumulation of testimony can establish a miraculous fact, we are content 'to try the theorem upon a simple case,' and affirm that man is so constituted that if he himself sees the blind restored to sight and the dead raised, under such circumstances as exclude all doubt of fraud on the part of others and all mistake on ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... this even among his earliest sketches. In his account of "Sunday at Home" he says: "Time—where a man lives not—what is it but Eternity?" Does he not recognize in this condensed statement Kant's theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it only exists by divisions of time, and it is man who makes the divisions. The rising of the sun does not constitute time; for the sun is always rising—somewhere. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M. Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment." The above sentence being shown to the Aesthetic Editor aforesaid, he acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and that the theory seems to him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... were necessary, which cannot be, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man's nature. The ambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the world some vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in him side by side with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused. Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led this dual existence? You reviewed for me ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the direction and the velocity of every atom of matter in the universe (including cerebral matter, i.e., the brain, which is a material thing) are strictly determined, it would not at all follow from the acceptance of this theorem that our mental life is subject to the same necessity. For that to be the case, we should have to show absolutely that a strictly determined psychical state corresponds to a definite cerebral state. This, as we have ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... are following out the method of the abstract science into minuter details; inserting among its hypotheses a fresh and still more complex combination of circumstances, and so adding pro hac vice a supplementary chapter or appendix, or at least a supplementary theorem, to the ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... spite of all its pride, must consent to lower its bold pretension of claiming assent a priori and depend for assent to the universality of its propositions on the kindness of observers, who, when called as witnesses, would surely not hesitate to admit that what the geometer propounds as a theorem they have always perceived to be the fact, and, consequently, although it be not necessarily true, yet they would permit us to expect it to be true in the future. In this manner Hume's empiricism ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... discoveries of the century, either as complementary or as prolongations, range themselves. In pure mathematics we have the Infinitesimal Calculus discovered simultaneously by Leibnitz and Newton, mechanics reduced by d'Alembert to a single theorem, and that superb collection of theories which, elaborated by the Bernouillis, Euler, Clairaut, d'Alembert, Taylor and Maclaurin, is finally completed at the end of the century by Monge, Lagrange, and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I have not pursued the matter of cognate linkages (the Watt and Evans linkages are cognates) because the Roberts-Chebyshev theorem escaped my earlier search, as it had apparently escaped most others until 1958. See R. S. Hartenberg and J. Denavit, "The Fecund Four-Bar," Transactions of the Fifth Conference on Mechanisms, Cleveland, Penton Publishing Company, 1958, pp. 194-206, reprinted ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... platitude; in what we once regarded as the formula of the perfect religion—the divinity of man and the humanity of God—we may find quite as truly the formula of the first, not to say the final, sin. To see Christ not in the light of this speculative theorem, but in the light of His own consciousness of Himself, is to realise not only our kinship to God, but our remoteness from Him; it is to realise our incapacity for self-realisation when we are left to ourselves; it is to realise the ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... made geographical charts, which required considerable geometrical knowledge. Anaxagoras employed himself in prison in attempting to square the circle. Thales, as has been said, discovered the important theorem that in a right-angled triangle the squares on the sides containing the right angle are together equal to the square on the opposite side of it. Pythagoras discovered that of all figures having the same boundary, the circle among plane figures and the sphere among solids ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... carpenter who misapplies his formulae for the strength of materials, builds a house which falls down. The properties of the various mechanical powers are involved in every machine. Every machine, indeed, it has been well said, is a solidified mechanical theorem. The surveyor in determining the limits of one's farm, the architect in planning a house, the builder in planning his estimates, and the several master workmen who do the carpentry, masonry, and finishing, are all dependent upon geometric truths. Bleaching, dyeing, calico-printing, gas-making, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... impossible. The conclusion of a geometrical theorem is a truth for all time. There is no difference here between a complicated theorem, having many conditions, and a simpler theorem with fewer. It is indeed easier for a few than for many conditions to be all present together: but the enunciation of the conclusion supposes all the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... ferment that has 'come to stay.' It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... gentleman—bear in mind that what you read in every novel that pleases you is sacred truth. There are busy-bodies, pretenders to "culture," and sticklers for the multiplication table and Euclid's pestiferous theorem, who will tell you that novel reading is merely for entertainment and light accomplishment, and that the histories of fiction are purely imaginary and not to be taken seriously. That is pure falsehood. The truth of all humanity, as well as all its untruth, flows in ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Come, it's time for me to learn my lessons. See here! what I've got to do," said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but presently, becoming quite bewildered, her ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... therefrom by a single interchange (inversion, or derangement) of two columns is regarded as negative; and so in general an arrangement is positive or negative according as it is derived from the primitive arrangement by an even or an odd number of interchanges. [This implies the theorem that a given arrangement can be derived from the primitive arrangement only by an odd number, or else only by an even number of interchanges,—a theorem the verification of which may be easily obtained from the theorem (in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of their effects, though not a quantitative one. But we know more. We read of weights in the earliest records; and we find weights in ruins of the highest antiquity. Weights imply scales, of which we have also mention; and scales involve the primary theorem of mechanics in its least complicated form—involve not a qualitative but a quantitative prevision of mechanical effects. And here we may notice how mechanics, in common with the other exact sciences, took its rise from the simplest application of the idea of equality. For the mechanical ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... length; "the corollary is worse than the theorem, and things are becoming so decidedly mixed that we must begin to go slow. I for one propose to replenish that fire, and then bunk down right here for the rest ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Jimsy's own version of it. She always kept his letter for the last, childishly, on the nursery theorem of "First the worst, second the same, last the best ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... perfectly at home. He fathomed the meaning of every ditch, and formed an entire plan of the fortress from its half-obliterated lines. His description of Ticonderoga would be as accurate as a geometrical theorem, and as barren of the poetry that has clustered round its decay. I viewed Ticonderoga as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a century: where the flags of three nations had successively waved, and none waved now; where armies had struggled, ...
— Old Ticonderoga, A Picture of The Past - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should not only once learn but should forever remember. Not to know them is practically the same thing as being without ordinary means of communication. One may not find it necessary to remember the binomial theorem or the algebraic formula for the contents of a circle, but he should at least have a formal acquaintance with Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Charlemagne, Martin Luther, Francis I, Queen Elizabeth, Louis XIV, Napoleon I—and a dozen or so others. An educated man must speak ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. He is in no need of the capacity of doing rapidly what he does; what he rather needs is patience, to work on slowly until imperfect lights have become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into a theorem. For those, on the contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and perishable—with individual facts, not kinds of facts—rapidity of thought is a qualification next only in importance to the power of thought itself. He who has not his faculties ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... a feeling of growing strength and power when he finds, in algebra, that the formula he used in arithmetic in extracting a square root has grown in importance by leading indirectly to a theorem of which it is only one particular case—a theorem with a more definite proof, and a larger capability for use than he had thought possible. When he finds a still simpler proof for the binomial theorem in his study of the calculus, his feeling of increasing power ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... the algebraical expression sqrt(-1). I think that the original suggestion of perpendicular line came from some book (I do not remember clearly), and I worked it out in several instances pretty well, especially in De Moivre's Theorem. I had spoken of it in the preceding term to Mr Peacock and he encouraged me to work it out. The date at the end is 1820, January 21. When some time afterwards I spoke of it to Mr Hustler, he disapproved of my employing my time on such speculations. About the last day of January I returned to ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... found for the man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes, and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of the eternal things—just so long will we have war and governmental stupidity, and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Pythagoras lived. Whitney[46] places the whole of the Veda literature, including the Vedas, the Br[a]hma[n.]as, and the S[u]tras, between 1500 B.C. and 800 B.C., thus agreeing with Buerk[47] who holds that the knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem revealed in the S[u]tras goes back to ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... brother—his "after clap"—as Archie B. called him. He was timid, uncertain, pious and given to tears—"bo'hn on a wet Friday"—as Archie B. had often said. He was always the effect of Archie B.'s cause, the illustration of his theorem, the solution of his problem of mischief, the penalty ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... came a point after which variations in his intelligence were seized upon more and more exclusively by natural selection, to the comparative neglect of physical variations. After that point man changed but little in physical characteristics, except in size and complexity of brain. This is the theorem first propounded by Mr. Wallace in the Anthropological Review, May, 1864; restated in his Contributions to Natural Selection, chap. ix., in 1870; and further extended and developed by me in connection with the theory of man's origin first ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... financial panic, as a falling away of the metallic reserve indicates its breaking out; and I have only translated that portion dealing with the United States, deeming the rest unnecessary, for this amply illustrates and proves the theorem in hand. ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... 298. I suppose this theorem to be a truism; but I venture to state it, because it is surely desirable that it should be recognized as an axiom by metaphysicians, and practically does not seem to me yet to have been so. I say "animated life" because the word "life" by itself might have been taken to include ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading—a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will—an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... doubtful point come to be debated, it will not bear an oath; it will be a strange madness to dare, a great folly to hope the persuading it thereby. What were more ridiculous than to swear the truth of a demonstrable theorem? What more vain than so to assert a disputable problem: oaths (like wagers) are in such cases no arguments, except silliness in the users ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... analysis of what the mind actually performs in discovering and proving the larger half of the truths, whether of science or of daily life, which we believe; while those who have avoided this inconsistency, and followed out the general theorem respecting the logical value of the syllogism to its legitimate corollary, have been led to impute uselessness and frivolity to the syllogistic theory itself, on the ground of the petitio principii which they allege to be inherent in every syllogism. As I believe both these opinions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... flatterer that when he is sufficiently accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel that Mrs Warren's Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social problem that never yields an inch to ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... cynic meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness: and the reader who turns from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy. He will find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that "the plot is of no use except to bring in the fine things." The plot is in this instance absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of confused and distracting extravagance that the reader's attention may ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... consumption of the whole surface of the sun to the depth of from ten to twenty miles. Of course, ultimately the fuel will be all expended; then the forces of the system will expire, and the creation will die.5 This brilliant and sublime theorem assumes, first, that the heat of the sun arises from consumption of matter, which may not be true; secondly, that it is not a self replenishing process, as it certainly may be. Some have even surmised that the zodiacal light is an illuminated tornado ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main theorem, even as a logical possibility" ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... A fine theorem is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, the Fuggers of the nineteenth century, are princes de facto. A great artist is in reality an oligarch; he represents a whole century, and almost always he is a law to others. And the art of words, the high pressure machinery ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... belonging to systematic collectors than amongst the papers of mere mathematicians—amongst men who never destroy a paper because they have no present use for it, or because the subject does not come within the range of their researches, than amongst men who value nothing but a "new theorem" or "an improved solution." ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... indebted than to any other men of genius from the time of Bacon. The discoveries of Newton are scarcely without a parallel, and he is generally regarded as the greatest mathematical intellect that England has produced. To him the world is indebted for the binomial theorem, discovered at the age of twenty-two; for the invention of fluxions; for the demonstration of the law of gravitation; and for the discovery of the different refrangibility of rays of light. His treatise on Optics and his ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... flying-squirrels, and also birds. When he first brought me a bird, I told him that it was wrong, and tried to convince him, while he was eating it, that he was doing wrong; for he is a reasonable cat, and understands pretty much everything except the binomial theorem and the time down the cycloidal arc. But with no effect. The killing of birds went on to my great ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... which animal forms are modelled. All that I mean is the conception of a form embodying the most general propositions that can be affirmed respecting the Cephalous Mollusca, standing in the same relation to them as the diagram to a geometrical theorem, and like it, at once imaginary and true" (i., p. 176). Again, in his Croonian lecture on the theory of the vertebrate skull, he remarks that a general diagram of the skull could easily be given. "There is no harm," ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... unquestioned truth of the hypothesis of God, also puzzled him. Whatever his books had taught him, and whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word for explaining one's failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars, wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction, and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto, Le temps et moi. The moi, to be sure, was not very prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... theorem of pure mechanics was found wanting every time friction took place—that is to say, in all really observable cases. The more perceptible the friction, the more considerable the difference; but, in addition, a new phenomenon ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... or rather they promptly put themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] but he goes on to find analogies between other passages in HAMLET and some of Bruno's philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr. Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... with relations and meanings than with particular objects, images naturally play a smaller part in reasoning than in memory and imagination. Yet they have their place here as well. Students of geometry or trigonometry often have difficulty in understanding a theorem until they succeed in visualizing the surface or solid involved. Thinking in the field of astronomy, mechanics, and many other sciences is assisted at certain points by the ability to form ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Some work which would be possible for you or me, is impossible for her. I did not realize until we roomed together what a difference there can be in—in—minds. I could not have believed that any one would consider a theorem or a page of French difficult. But," with an arch glance, "these past two years have taught me a great deal. I am more sympathetic, and oh so much more thankful that ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... the houses are rectilineal, the gardens are squares or oblongs; if by chance the land sprawls in billocks and hollows, nevertheless is it partitioned in rigid lines. The architecture is equally austere. The very curves demonstrate the theorem that a curve is made up of little straight lines, the arches are stiff and unbending, and wherever a public building demands an ornament, a fir-shaped cone of straight lines rises in stoic severity. In vain one seeks for a refuge from Euclid—for ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that namely which was accepted by English lawyers; and finally Book ix. deals with a special point, namely, the exclusion of evidence. Bentham announces at starting[419] that he shall establish 'one theorem' and consider two problems. The problems are: 'what securities can be taken for the truth of evidence?' and 'what rules can be given for estimating the value of evidence?' The 'theorem' is that no evidence ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... "flying saucer" were being batted around by every newspaper reporter, radio and TV newscaster, comedian, and man on the street. Some of the comments weren't complimentary, but as Theorem I of the publicity racket goes, "It doesn't make any difference what's said as long as the ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... Septuagint—[Greek: Archonta Magoi]. An antiquarian of Wales, in devising a pedigree for the Oymri, has imported ancestors for the ancient Britons from Ceylon; and a writer in the Asiatic Researches, in 1807, as a preamble to the proof that the binomial theorem was familiar to the Hindus, has traced Western civilisation to an irruption of philosophers from India, identified the Druids with the Brahmans, and declared Stonehenge to be "one of the temples of Boodh." (Asiat. Res., vol. ii. p. 448.) A still more recent investigator, M. MAUPIED, has collected, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... can be got out of premisses, simply because you show what would follow if you had the required knowledge. When the attempt is made, as it seems to me to be made sometimes, to deduce economical laws from some law of human desire—as from the simple theorem that equal increments of a commodity imply diminishing amounts of utility—I should reply not only that the numerical data are vaguely defined and incapable of being accurately stated, but that the attempt must be illusory because the conclusions are not determinable ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... powerful process of thought than Aristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imagination than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of experimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the splendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausible theorem, not a sober and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that you are loved," said the Girton Girl, "is only the beginning of the theorem—its proposition, ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... its clumsy nomenclature, also the algebraic use of letters for quantities; he introduced system into the use of exponents to denote the powers of a quantity, thus opening the way for the binomial theorem; he was the first to throw clear light on the negative roots of equations; his is the theorem by use of which the maximum number of positive or negative roots of an equation can be ascertained. Analytical geometry originated with his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... life, substance or intelligence in matter, it will be comparatively easy to prove that there can be no sensation, for where there is no life in the body, there can be no feeling. Even the physiologists tell us mind must know pain before it can be located in the body. We state therefore a theorem which is practically demonstrated; there is no sensation ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... morning, thinking over the problem of finding two squares whose sum is a square, I chanced on a theorem (which seems true, though I cannot prove it), that if x squared y squared be even, its half is the sum of two squares. A kindred theorem, that 2(x squared y squared) is always the sum of two squares, also ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... destination of the world to another and higher existence in which the law of perishableness and suffering no longer governs. On the other hand, if, as we assume hypothetically, all higher forms of existence in the world could be explained out of the preceding lower ones, and if the before-mentioned theorem of a sensation of atoms should form a needed and correct link in that chain of explanation, those words of sighing and longing would have to be literally taken in a still more comprehensive sense ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Topic. — N. subject of thought, material for thought; food for the mind, mental pabulum. subject, subject matter; matter, theme, [Grk], topic, what it is about, thesis, text, business, affair, matter in hand, argument; motion, resolution; head, chapter; case, point; proposition, theorem; field of inquiry; moot point, problem &c. (question) 461. V. float in the mind , pass in the mind &c. 451. Adj. thought of; uppermost in the mind; in petto. Adv. under consideration; in question, in the mind; on foot, on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio. You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama without a stop. If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no doubt of his own faith. He was still altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... was Wentworth's Algebra—elementary principles. Painful recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as I let the leaves turn under my fingers. "What do you make ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... performs its revolution in that orbit in twenty-seven days, seven hours, forty-three minutes. It is demonstrated, that the moon in its mean motion makes an hundred and fourscore and seven thousand nine hundred and sixty feet (of Paris) in a minute. It is likewise demonstrated, by a known theorem, that the central force which should make a body fall from the height of the moon, would make its velocity no more than fifteen Paris feet in a minute of time. Now, if the law by which bodies gravitate ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... given, to describe a third, which shall be equal to one and similar to the other. And it is reported that Pythagoras, upon the discovery of this problem, offered a sacrifice to the gods; for this is a much more exquisite theorem than that which lays down, that the square of the hypothenuse in a right-angled triangle is equal to the squares of the two sides. Right, said Diogenianus, but what is this to the present question? You will easily understand, I replied, if you call to mind how Timaeus divides ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... and comfortless creature. A few only, half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared his intellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthful enthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold and dispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinary minds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for the most part, people had loved him; ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... devouring mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene? Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... critical and learned preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... eternal. It was just as true at the dawn of creation that the square described on the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle is equal to the square described on the other two sides, as it was when Pythagoras enunciated the theorem. "Thou shall not kill," is a law written by the Divine hand amid tempest and fire, but it stands. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," rings from the portals of heaven through the gates of humanity and its command will not go unheeded. They ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... principles is not, of course, to upset any conclusions which have been correctly drawn from a set of premisses. All that happens is that the conclusion is no longer asserted by itself as a truth; what is asserted is that the conclusion is true if the premisses are true. Thus we no longer assert the 'theorem of Pythagoras' as a categorical proposition; what we assert is that the theorem follows as a consequence from the assertion of some half-dozen ultimate postulates which will be found on analysis to be the premisses of Euclid's proof of his ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... on the choice of the character, and not on any selection or arrangement of the monosyllabic sounds. A character uniting a happy association of ideas has the same effect upon the eye of the Chinese, as a general theorem expressed in symbols has on a mathematician; but in both cases a man must be learned to feel the beauties of the concise expression. Even in speaking the language has few expletives. "English good, Chinese better,"—"to-day ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... in excess; it overdoes the thing only because it has so much energy in it. It is what Charles Lamb said a pun was,—"a sole digest of wisdom." All great thoughts are at first witty, and afterward come to be common and flat. When Pythagoras discovered the theorem of the squares erected on the sides of a right-angled triangle, it had the effect on him of a most preposterous joke. The apple dropping on the head of Newton struck him like a very far-fetched pun. Show a child the picture of a wild Tartar, and his first motion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... swiftly as mental activity becomes intensified. Already many of the scientific doctrines implicitly accepted fifteen years ago begin to wear a superannuated aspect. Dalton's atoms are in process of disintegration; Kirchhoff's theorem visibly needs to be modified; Clerk Maxwell's medium no longer figures as an indispensable factotum; "absolute zero" is known to be situated on an asymptote to the curve of cold. Ideas, in short, have all at once ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... softly, "you must first learn that love is just as much a principle as the Binomial Theorem in algebra. Do you know what that is? And you must apply it just as you would apply any principle, to everything. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... numbers we proceed to speak of Extension, which, considered as relative, is the object of Geometry. The infinite divisibility of finite extension, though it is not expressly laid down either as an axiom or theorem in the elements of that science, yet is throughout the same everywhere supposed and thought to have so inseparable and essential a connexion with the principles and demonstrations in Geometry, that mathematicians never admit it into ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... my Dawn? How if it never break? How if this West by other Wests is pierced. And these by vacant Wests and Wests increased— One pain of space, with hollow ache on ache, Throbbing and ceasing not for Christ's own sake? Big, perilous theorem, hard for king and priest; 'Pursue the West but long enough, 'tis East!' Oh, if this watery world no turning take; Oh, if for all my logic, all my dreams, Provings of that which is by that which seems, Fears, hopes, chills, heats, hastes, patiences, droughts, tears, Wife-grievings, slights ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... writer could prevent a populace from feeling the heaviness of an oppressor's hand, and striving to find relief from unjust burdens. As if any nation endowed with enough of the spirit of independence to assent to the right of resistance when offered to them as a speculative theorem, would not infallibly be led by the same spirit to assert the right without the speculative theorem. That so acute a head as Hume's should have failed to perceive these very plain considerations, and that he should moreover have perpetrated ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... of content completes the theorem of the independence of art, and is also the only legitimate meaning of the expression: art for art's sake. Art is thus independent of science, as it is of the useful and the moral. Let it not be feared that thus ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare," he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous conditions ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... to Galileo's discovery known as the theorem of the Parallelogram of Forces. The illusion which has been woven round this theorem expresses itself in the way it is described as being connected ideally with another theorem, outwardly similar in character, known as the theorem of the Parallelogram of Movements (or Velocities), by stating ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew, Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder," while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn by consuming ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... been sending fire and sword into the heart of Spain, had very recently made the observation that she and Philip were not formally at war with each other. It seemed, therefore, desirable to the States-General that this very practical warfare should be, as it were, reduced to a theorem. In this case the position of the republic to both powers and to Spain itself might perhaps ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... If he were here I'd ask him a few pointed questions. I'd ask him to tell me just how the fact that seven times nine is sixty-three is connected up with complete living. I'd want him to explain, too, what the binomial theorem has to do with complete living, and also the dative of reference. I got the notion, when I was struggling with that binomial theorem, that it would ultimately lead on to fame or fortune; but it hasn't done either, so far as ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... Foreign commodities are always paid for by British commodities, therefore, the purchase of Foreign commodities encourages British industry as much as the purchase of British commodities" (Principles of Political Economy, p. 152). The important exception to this theorem arising from the nature of the commodities exported and imported has been already dealt with. Let us examine the vital principle of the theorem. "The capital," says Adam Smith, "which is employed in purchasing in one part of the country in order to sell in another, the produce of the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... away from taw that we can't even see what-all we're aiming at. I've been grinding theology till I'm fairly sick of the word, and I've learned just one thing, Ardea, and that is that you can't prove a single theorem in it." ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... was founded upon hypothetic properties of the attractive force which were wholly inadmissible; that of Newton upon a theorem which he ought to have demonstrated; the theory of the latter was characterized by a defect of a still more serious nature: it supposed the density of the earth during the original state of fluidity, to be homogeneous.[29] When in attempting the solution of great problems we ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the boy; "and after agreeing that Miss Theorem the mathematician was charming; Miss Quartz the geologist lovely; that Miss Affectation was very piquante, and Mrs. Youngwidow exceedingly fine-looking in her mourning; after having amicably interchanged our ideas on these topics, we came ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... she said, and called her mate, "Sweet Theorem, be with me at this hour. How oft together in a dear debate We two bore witness to our Sovereign's power. But he is dead and henceforth all our days Are wrapped in gloom, And we who never ceased to sing ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann |
