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Inverse   /ɪnvˈərs/   Listen
Inverse

noun
1.
Something inverted in sequence or character or effect.  Synonym: opposite.



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"Inverse" Quotes from Famous Books



... all fall to sleep at once, but drop off successively: first the sight, then the smell, the taste, the hearing and lastly the touch. The sleep ended, they awake in an inverse order, touch, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... the fact that, as M. Henri Martin says, by an apparent contradiction, the fall of the Communes declared itself in inverse ratio to the progress of the Tiers Etat. By degrees, as the government became more settled from the great fiefs being absorbed by the Crown, and as parliament and other courts of appeal which emanated from the middle class extended their high judiciary ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... paysage, such as Ingres would have loved, from the sage-brush, and cactus? "Well," she told herself, "Moore wrote 'Lalla Rookh' in a back room in London, among the chimney-pots and soot. Maybe the proportion is inverse. But, Mr. Harold Vickers of Ash Fork, Arizona, your little book is, to say the least, well ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... Spaniards of Somers Town looked mainly, in their helplessness, for every species of help. Torrijos, it was hoped, would yet lead them into Spain and glorious victory there; meanwhile here in England, under defeat, he was their captain and sovereign in another painfully inverse sense. To whom, in extremity, everybody might apply. When all present resources failed, and the exchequer was quite out, there still remained Torrijos. Torrijos has to find new resources for his destitute ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... or faculty. As when the sense rises to the imagination, the imagination to the reason, the reason to the intellect, the intellect to the mind, then the whole soul is converted into God, and inhabits the intelligible world; whence, on the other hand, she descends in an inverse manner to the world of feeling, through the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... deserve the greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... Bellas' is better adapted for their ears than quiet sense in simpler sounds, and the principle 'omne ignotum pro magnifico,' can scarcely find a happier illustration than amongst a congregation whose admiration is probably in an inverse ratio to their comprehension. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... saw a tower builded on a lake, Mock'd by its inverse shadow, dark and deep— That seem'd a still intenser night to make, Wherein the quiet waters sank to sleep,— And, whatso'er was prison'd in that keep, A monstrous Snake was warden:—round and round In sable ringlets I beheld him creep Blackest amid black shadows to the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... dose him with old-school remedies, with new-school remedies, or she can let him die without remedies because she doesn't believe in the reality of disease. She is quite willing to legislate for his stomach, his mind, his soul, her teachableness, it goes without saying, being generally in inverse proportion to her knowledge; for the arrogance of science is humility compared with the ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... hand, facile attention shows the reign of habit. The solid acquisitions are those with which attention is at home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other hand, it is equally true that attention is in inverse ratio to habit. We need to attend least to these functions which are most habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, indeed, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... and the comparative simplicity of the instincts in the higher animals are remarkable in contrast with those of the lower animals. Cuvier maintained that instinct and intelligence stand in an inverse ratio to each other; and some have thought that the intellectual faculties of the higher animals have been gradually developed from their instincts. But Pouchet, in an interesting essay (2. 'L'Instinct chez les Insectes,' 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' Feb. 1870, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... match? These thoughts weren't his. Self-pity hadn't made him a Winner—why was he feeling it now? Anvhar was his universe—how could he even imagine it as a tag-end planet at the outer limb of creation? What had come over him and induced this inverse thinking? ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... where he felt himself, as he would have expressed it, "en rapport" with his surroundings; under other circumstances, as at the present time, it very nearly approached the ludicrous. He was small in stature, but his bump of self-esteem was developed in an inverse ratio to his size. He seemed to be making a constant effort to maintain his dignity at the proper level, in which direction he was greatly assisted by a pair of eye-glasses, perched on a very large ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... rule, all parts of the musket are assembled in the inverse order in which they are dismounted. Before replacing screws, oil them slightly with good sperm oil, as inferior oil is converted into a gum, which clogs the operation of the parts. Screws should not be turned in so hard as to make the parts bind. When a lock has, from any cause, become gummed ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... social wit and professional wisdom, who prescribed "a rush of blood to the boots" to all professional patients and head-workers—men who, happening to possess brains, are prone to forget that they have bodies. In no way can this inverse apoplexy be more healthfully or pleasantly induced than by a jolly game of cricket. That the sport is adapted to American tastes and needs we are convinced, and that it may find a habitat throughout the length and breadth of our land is an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... not one of Schubart's virtues; the nearest approximation he could make to it was now and then a little touch of cunning. His wife still loved him; loved him with that perverseness of affection, which increases in the inverse ratio of its requital: she had long patiently endured his follies and neglect, happy if she could obtain a transient hour of kindness from him. But his endless course of riot, and the straits to which it had reduced their hapless family, at length overcame her spirits: she ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... unmade at will, which, thrown over matter, divides it as the needs of our action demand. Thus, the space of our geometry and the spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the reciprocal action and reaction of two terms which are essentially the same, but which move each in the direction inverse of the other. Neither is space so foreign to our nature as we imagine, nor is matter as completely extended in space as our ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... or this idea is unmeaning, and void of sense; it were better for man that the idea was banished from his mind, struck out of his language: this principle is only the converse of the axiom of ARISTOTLE,—"if the direct be evident, the inverse must be so likewise." How has it happened, that the profound LOCKE, who, to the great mortification of the metaphysicians, has placed this principle of ARISTOTLE in the clearest point of view? how is it, that all those ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... dearly bought. This is, in part, a matter of wholesome instinct, in part of wise training. We now know that the absence of clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked are usually more modest than those which wear clothes. The saying quoted by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty with her shift" was a favorite text ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Swastika is drawn on the piece of tile, the performer in placing it on the ground to be trodden upon, puts his thumb on the drawing, and thereby gets an inverse print of it on the ball of his thumb. The tile is powdered and the hand held palm upwards over it. When turning the assistant's hand palm downwards, the conjuror does so with his fingers at the back of the assistant's ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... act, both powers operate publicly in an inverse sense on the same individual, one with the guillotine and the other with a pardon. As these authorities may clash with each other, let us prevent conflicts and leave no undefined frontier; let us trace this out beforehand; let ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... regiments that spent most of their time in garrison duty, at the bottom of the list of all three years' regiments sent from the State. It would appear that the 103d Ohio had become pretty well imbued with the spirit characteristic of the headquarters with which it was associated, to claim credit in an inverse ratio to ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger

... tucked into tall wrinkled boots, dart about to bakery and dairy shop, preparing for their masters' morning "tea." Venders of newspapers congregate at certain spots, and charge for their wares in inverse ratio to the experience of their customers; for regular subscribers receive their papers through the post-office, and, if we are in such unseemly haste as to care for the news before the ten o'clock delivery—or the eleven o'clock, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... was young "the morning stars sang together for joy," and the planets were guided in their courses by celestial hands. Now, the harmony of the stars has resolved itself into gravitation according to the inverse squares of the distances, and the orbits of the planets are deducible from the laws of the forces which allow a schoolboy's stone to break a window. The lightning was the angel of the Lord; but it has pleased Providence, in these modern times, that science ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley

... happiness, on the largest scale, depends"—an abstract proposition which cannot be too carefully studied in connection with the present state of public morality in China, and the general welfare of the people. Dr Legge, however, whose logical are apparently in an inverse ratio to his linguistic powers, rushes wildly into the concrete, and declares that every falsehood told in China may be traced to the example of Confucius himself. He acknowledges that "many sayings might ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles

... Word,—a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by a word to which they give an inverse power. The smallest atom of their subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that to them ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... stage of a given language, the smaller the amount of them. 2. As languages become modern they substitute prepositions and auxiliary verbs for cases and tenses. 3. The amount of inflection is in the inverse proportion to the amount of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. 4. In the course of time languages drop their inflections, and substitute in its stead circumlocutions by means of prepositions, &c. The reverse never takes place. 5. Given two modes of expression, the one inflectional ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... known that when the speed is great the work of the weight varies in almost inverse ratio to the square of the speed, and therefore becomes ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... spontaneously went on to the rods used in the teaching of length, then to placing the plane geometric insets, and so gradually worked through all the earlier sensory stimuli which the teacher had passed over." Thus we see that the older child chooses the objects in inverse order, proceeding almost methodically from the most difficult ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... at the stripling, and thought to bribe him with a fete in his honor and a promise, and in the meantime a clerkship where there was no work to speak of and pay in inverse ratio. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... fourth column show how rapidly the proportion of copper lost increases as the percentage of copper in the ore falls below 30 per cent. For material with more than 30 per cent. the proportion lost is in inverse proportion ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... place in which to make answer to the suggestion that the domesticability of the animal species is in inverse proportion to their native courage and independence of mind. The reader will see how fallacious is this common notion if he will consider the quality of the supremely domesticated creature, the dog. There ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is supposed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... special cases, it is advisable to emphasise a character by the ironical expedient of inverse proportion. Tartufe is so emphasised throughout the first two acts of the play that bears his name. Although he is withheld from the stage until the second scene of the third act, so much is said about him that we are made to feel fully his sinister ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... discountenanced people in their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the siphon recorder is exactly the inverse of the mirror galvanometer. In the latter we have a small magnet suspended in the centre of a large coil of wire—the wire enclosing the magnet, which is free to rotate round its own axis. In the former we have a small coil suspended between the poles of a ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... the method by which a body can act where it is not, how explain in detail the way by which it can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated body, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? The law of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in which the results are accomplished, for our Creator is a God of order. But there is no materialistic theory of the why of gravitation that is worth employing the time of sensible, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... each reigns forty-two years, from 668 or 667 to 626 or 625 B.C. The order of succession of the last Assyrian kings was for a long time doubtful, and Sin-shar- ishkun was placed before Assur-etililani; the inverse order seems to be now conclusively proved. The documents which seemed at one time to prove the existence of a last king of Assyria named Esarhaddon, identical with the Saracos of classical writers, really belong to Esarhaddon, the father of Assur-bani-pal. [Another king, Sin-sum-lisir, is mentioned ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... this thing. For my part, I don't credit half of it. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing Colombe's Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... home, resumed his calculation with the new value, and having proceeded some way in it, was so overpowered by nervous agitation at its anticipated result, that he was unable to go on, and requested a friend to finish it for him, when it came out, exactly establishing the inverse square as the true measure of the moon's gravitation, and thus furnishing the key to the whole system." Hence proceeded Newton's immortal work, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... commandant flew into a rage such I have seldom seen. Each land has a temper of its own, an the white man's anger varies in inverse ratio with his nearness to the equator. But furor teutonicus transplanted is the least controllable least dignified, least admirable that there is. And that man's passion was the apex of ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the litter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... permission to go over to Severac, so that my Camille may see how the silk is spun. My Camille is so intelligent, she will grasp anything that you tell her in a moment. Did she not understand one day the inverse ratio of the squares ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... the further attraction of virgin coyness and reserve; the civilizing dinner-table would lose all its dignity in losing its delays; and so everywhere, delicate denial, withholding reserve have an inverse force, and add a charm of emphasis to gift, assent, attraction, and sympathy. How is the word Immortality emphasized to our hearts by the perpetual spectacle of death! The joy and suggestion of it could, indeed, never visit us, had not this momentary loud denial been uttered in our ears. Such, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... indeed when measured by any human standard, and, as all action implies time, so are we compelled to regard these mineral masses as a measure of the time which has elapsed during their accumulation. The amount of the time which they represent is, of course, in the inverse proportion of the intensity of the forces which have been in operation. If, in the ancient world, mud and sand accumulated on sea-bottoms at tenfold their present rate, it is clear that a bed of mud or sand ten feet thick would have been formed then in the same time as a stratum of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... his own circle is a narrow one. Whereas, in aristocratic classes, having more leisure and wealth, the intercourse is inconceivably more rapid; so that the publication of any book which interests them is secured at once; and this publishing influence passes downwards; but rare, indeed, is the inverse process of publication through ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... elected to vote not in the light of his own mind, but in obedience to the dictates of those who send him; the newspaper circulates not because it is filled with words of truth and wisdom, but because it panders to the pruriency and prejudice of its patrons; and a book is popular in inverse ratio to its individuality and worth. Our National Library is filled with books which have copyright, but no other right, human or divine, to exist at all; and when one of us does succeed in asserting his personality, he usually only makes himself odd and ridiculous. He rushes ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure. Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception. Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and the fact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsing all the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that in the time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well as sequence—time ceases to be linear and becomes plane. More remarkable illustrations of the sublimation of the time-sense are to be found in the phenomena of ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... Abbotsford pulling him one way, on the other his desire to accumulate a library round him in his Tusculum. Writing to his familiar Terry, he says, "The worst of all is, that while my trees grow and my fountain fills, my purse, in an inverse ratio, sinks to zero. This last circumstance will, I fear, make me a very poor guest at the literary entertainment your researches hold out for me. I should, however, like much to have the treatise on Dreams by the author ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... the rear, that they were gaining rapidly upon us. I could understand the reason for this, as with the narrowing expanse of Omean as the waters rose toward the apex of its dome, the rapidity of its rise would increase in inverse ratio to the ever-lessening space ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... impossible to equalise, and which has its intrinsic foundation in the difference in the amount of effort and inconvenience involved in engaging in the different branches of labour. Certainly it is not the same in Freeland as in other parts of the world, where only too often the burden of labour is in inverse ratio to its profitableness; with us difficult, burdensome, unpleasant kinds of labour must without exception obtain larger gains than the easier and more agreeable—so far as the latter do not demand special skill—otherwise everyone would at once forsake the former and apply themselves to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... saluting, there are certain other customs that govern conduct around official vehicles. Since the place of honor is on the right, the junior not only walks on the left, but rides there as well. In entering a car, the junior enters first, followed by other members of the party in inverse order of rank, each seating himself so that the senior may take position on the right side. In leaving the car, the senior debarks first. However, if following this general procedure would necessitate any member of the party climbing over ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... is reported at $8.00—about the same as New York; at Wilmington, North Carolina, $10.25. Not impossibly, river transportation had in these last some cheapening effect, not readily ascertainable now. In sugar, the scale is seen to ascend in an inverse direction. At Boston, unblockaded, it is quoted at $18.75 the hundredweight, itself not a low rate; at New York, blockaded, $21.50; at Philadelphia, with a longer journey, $22.50; at Baltimore, $26.50; at Savannah, $20. In the last named place, nearness to the Florida line, with the inland navigation, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... addition to our apprehensions or our measures of precaution. I will go beyond this, and say that religions have very frequently exercised a decidedly demoralizing influence. One may say generally that duties towards God and duties towards humanity are in inverse ratio. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... own letters, while Louis laughed at the enunciation of this inverse ratio; and then took up the note again, to wonder at the tone of anxiety and distress, so unlike James. He went to call on Lady Conway, and was better satisfied to find that James had written in a lively strain to her, as if proud of his little daughters, and ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Betty Martin," did issue from the neckcloth of Sir Bingo, but they were not much attended to; for it had not escaped the observation of the quicksighted gentry at the Well, that the Baronet's feelings towards the noble Earl were in the inverse ratio of those displayed by Lady Binks, and that, though ashamed to testify, or perhaps incapable of feeling, any anxious degree of jealousy, his temper had been for some time considerably upon the fret; a circumstance concerning which his fair ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... of my improved system is as follows: While the apparatus is at rest a constant current from the battery, E', traverses the line, L, and the branch conductors, l, and ll, dividing itself between them, in inverse proportion to their respective resistances, in accordance with the well-known law of Ohm. When the transmitting pattern strip, P, is caused to pass between the roller, T, and the stylus, t, electric impulses will be transmitted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... imparts almost 3 gramme-calories of energy per minute per square centimetre at the distance of the earth, which is about 1.3X106 ergs per sec. per cm.2 The energy in sunlight per cubic cm. just outside the earth's atmosphere is therefore about 4X10-5 ergs; applying the law of inverse squares the value near the sun's surface would be 1.8 ergs. Let E be the effective elasticity of the aether; then Erc2, where r is its density, and c the velocity of light which is 3X1010 cm./sec. If xA cosn ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... dealings are friendly, but it may be said in general that dealings of any kind are not numerous and that their frequency is in inverse ratio to the distance between the two clans. It is seldom that a given individual has no feudal enemy in one district or another so that in his visits to other clans he usually has either to pass through the territory of an enemy or ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... The fact is curiously inverse of this, for not only are insects captured for purposes of study, but they are never impaled alive but by a very ignorant or careless person. The lepidoptera (butterflies especially) are very easy to kill, the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... ours. Matter is a flux rather than a thing, but its flow is in the opposite direction to that of Spirit. The flow of Spirit shows itself in the creativeness of the evolutionary process; Matter is the inverse movement towards stability. Bergson adheres to the view of Spirit as fundamental, while Matter, he says, is due to a lessening of the tension of the spiritual force which is the initial elan. Now, of course, Matter and Spirit have come to be two opposing forces, for one is determined ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... immense superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seems to follow a law of comparative anatomy, that its bulk shall be in an inverse proportion of that of the lungs. The latter are necessarily capacious; for they need a large supply of arterial blood, in order to answer to their rapid expenditure when the utmost exertion of strength and speed is required. The liver is, therefore, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... odious circumstantialities,) she were to reply,—'No matter, children, for my precise years, which are disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a certain age,'—here, in the inverse order, given the valuation of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the absolute years numerically: would a 'certain age,' mean that 'mamma' was a million, be the same more or less, or perhaps not much above ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... the Melbury family was of that kind which evinces some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other: a trait frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt than was enacted appeared ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... remain the inverse permutation: to obtain only females and no males, or very few. The first permutation makes the second seem very probable, although I cannot as yet conceive a means of realizing it. The only condition which I can regulate is the dimensions of the home. When the rooms ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... all come in with spirits attuned, ready to wait patiently and observe silently. The law of these materializations seems to be this: the forces of the psychic are proportional to the harmoniousness of the circle and in inverse proportion to the light. Accepting this law as proved by our illustrious fellow-experimenters abroad, are you ready to try again along the ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... most impassioned; later, boys, because her wanting sexual warmth leaves him the most vigorous. Mere sexual excitement, a wild, fierce, furious rush of passion, is not only not sexual vigor, but in its inverse ratio; and a genuine insane fervor caused by weakness; just as a like nervous excitability indicates weak nerves instead of strong. Sexual power is deliberate, not wild; cool, not impetuous; while all ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... bended be, that we might step With goodly strides ahead; or forearms joined Unto the sturdy uppers, or serving hands On either side were given, that we might do Life's own demands. All such interpretation Is aft-for-fore with inverse reasoning, Since naught is born in body so that we May use the same, but birth engenders use: No seeing ere the lights of eyes were born, No speaking ere the tongue created was; But origin of tongue came long before Discourse of words, and ears created were Much earlier than any sound was heard; ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... the world under the garb of a ploughman. Others may suppose that some excellent jack-pudding may lie hidden under red velvet and ermine. I cannot say that by the experiment of last night the latter hypothesis has been demonstrated, any more than the inverse proposition in France, where, though there seem to be many as bloody-minded rascals as Cromwell, I can discover none of his abilities.(699) They have settled nothing like a constitution; on the contrary, they seem to protract every thing but violence, as much as they can, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... young nobles approached the presumably fair peripatetic, and, with courtesy commonly in inverse ratio to the amount of wine he was carrying home, proffered his escort to his gondola. Whenever this happened the figure removed her mask and unclasped her robe, and revealed a sight which for one moment rooted the young man to the earth and in the next sent him scampering ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that stops a beer-barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,—a diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... with supremest grace to the ladies, ventured to kiss the fair, smooth hand of his hostess, undeterred by the frosty stare of O'Moy's blue eyes whose approval of all men was in inverse proportion to their approval of his wife—and finally proffered her the armful of early roses that ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... only bar before which the proprietor of slaves is likely to be arraigned, is the bar of public opinion; and the influence which that knowledge will have upon his conduct is exactly in the inverse ratio to its need; for the hardened brute, upon whom its influence is most wanted, is the very person who, if he can escape lynching, is indifferent to public opinion. No Southerner can be affronted, if I say that he is not more Christian, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... of her chimney-cleaner tail. She had been making most elaborate preparations all the while, stretching and retracting her claws, squirming her whalebone body flatter and flatter, her tail assuming majestic proportions, while her ears disappeared in inverse ratio. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... security even upon so little, the conflict of speculative reason regarding the important questions of God, immortality, and freedom, would have been either decided long ago, or would very soon be brought to a conclusion. But, in general, the uprightness of the defence stands in an inverse ratio to the goodness of the cause; and perhaps more honesty and fairness are shown by those who deny than by those ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... foundation," think Lord Hervey and men of sarcastic insight in the higher circles, That it was his Britannic Majesty who "sent or would have sent a challenge of single combat to his Prussian Majesty," the latter being the passive party! Report flung into an INVERSE posture, as is liable to happen; "going" now with its feet uppermost; "not without foundation," thinks Lord Hervey. "But whether it [the cartel] was carried and rejected, or whether the prayers and remonstrances of Lord Townshend prevented the gauntlet ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs. And the commissioners took good care not to speak on this subject of impossibility. Their thesis ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... reason of this is, because the act of knowledge extends to things outside the knower: for we know things even that are external to us. Now by matter the form of a thing is determined to some one thing. Wherefore it is clear that knowledge is in inverse ratio of materiality. And consequently things that are not receptive of forms save materially, have no power of knowledge whatever—such as plants, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 12). But the more immaterially a thing receives the form of the thing known, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... in the inverse order of nature—that is to say, from man downwards—we certainly perceive a sustained but irregular degradation of organism, with an increasing simplicity both ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... an amiable one, he was much resembled by that eminent man the late Sir George Jessel, whose civility to a barrister was always in inverse ratio to the barrister's practice; and whose friendly zeal in helping young and nervous practitioners over the stiles of legal difficulty was only equalled by the fiery enthusiasm with which he thrust back the Attorney and Solicitor General ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... extremely small, and causes their fame to be more remarkable for its length than for its breadth. And, in general, it may be said that the possibility of a man's fame lasting a long time, stands in almost inverse ratio with the chance that it will be early in making its appearance; so that, as regards length of fame, the above order of precedence may be reversed. But, then, the poet and the composer will come in the end to stand on the same level as the philosopher; since, when once a work is committed ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... the details of his lesson, until "Patience on a monument" seems to the sufferer, who knows what he wants and what he does not want, the nearest emblem of himself he can think of. Amidst all the imposing recollections of the ancient edifice, one impressed me in the inverse ratio of its importance. The Archdeacon pointed out the little holes in the stones, in one place, where the boys of the choir used to play marbles, before America was discovered, probably,— centuries before, it may be. It is a strangely impressive glimpse of a living past, like ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Truth has nothing to do with ballads; all that constitutes the charm, the irresistible grace of a ballad, would strip Truth of its authority and power. Cold, calm, impassive, the demonstrative temperament rejects the diamonds and flowers of the muse; it is, therefore, the absolute inverse of the poetic temperament. Pure Intellect aims at Truth, Taste shows us Beauty, and the Moral Sense teaches us Duty. It is true that the middle term has intimate connection with the two extremes, and only separates ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... scales A and B are identical and are used in problems involving square root. Scales C and D are also identical and are used for multiplication and division. Scale K is for finding cube root. Scale CI, or C-inverse, is like scale C except that it is laid off from right to left instead of from left to right. It is useful in ...
— Instruction for Using a Slide Rule • W. Stanley

... But the inverse problem—given the perturbations, to find the planet that causes them—such a problem had never yet been attacked, and by only a few had its possibility been conceived. Friedrich Bessel made preparations ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... man of very high character, ended the question so far as he was concerned, by committing dutiful suicide; the three sons by Tartar mothers succeeded to the throne one after the other, but in the inverse order of their respective ages. The story of the wanderings of the eldest brother, who did not come to the throne until he was sixty-two years of age, is one of the most interesting and romantic episodes in the whole history of China; and, even ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... he mused, "does it pay Society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?" He took out his pocket notebook and wrote: "Society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents." He closed his ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... defined as "a warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all that exists," as "the sport of sensibility and, as it were, the playful, teasing fondness of a mother for a child" ... as "a sort of inverse sublimity exalting into our affections what is below us,... warm and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... unfortunately we do not as yet possess sufficiently accurate accounts of the conditions of culture in the various regions of the earth, to enable us to follow out this ingenious view in all its details. His theory is, that the time required by a plant to arrive at maturity is as the inverse ratio of the temperature; therefore, knowing the mean temperature of any place, and the number of days which a plant takes to ripen, the time required at any other point more or less elevated, can easily be ascertained. Peter Purry, a native of Switzerland, who settled in Charleston ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... type of family, but the most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... virtuoso? You are not even a composer or learned contrapuntist. A teacher of music wins much greater consideration, if he himself plays concertos and composes pretty things, and if he can calculate and give vent to his genius in double and triple fugues, and in inverse and retrograde canons. You cannot even accompany your pupils with the violin or flute, which is certainly very ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck

... ater).—More grey, and very graceful. All these four will gladly come to a window in winter for a little fat hung to a string, and will put themselves into wonderful inverse positions. ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... their creation, and little intelligence employed in their management. Their number was, therefore, not a thing to be boasted of but rather to be sorrowed over, since the quality diminished in an inverse ratio to the quantity. Nor was there anything in the methods employed by the press that justified any exultation in its prosperity. It tyrannized over public men, over letters, over the stage, over even private life. Under the pretence of preserving public morals, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... himself, an arrangement which met with Laurence Stanninghame's unfeigned approval. He did not want to talk—especially in a clattering, dusty railway carriage. At intervals the passengers foregathered for meals at some wayside buffet or accommodation house,—meals whose quality was in inverse ratio to the exuberance of the prices charged therefor,—then each would return to his own box and smoke and read and sleep away the little matter ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... the internal stresses are theoretically most advantageous, the layer situated next to the bore must be in a state of compression, and the amount of compression relative to the tension in the external layer is measured by the inverse ratio of the radii of these layers. It is further evident that the internal stresses will obey a definite but very simple law, namely, there will be in the hollow cylinder a layer whose radius is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... darkness of a heap of mould would decide to work in broad daylight? I did not reckon upon it all. Nevertheless, to salve my conscience, I tried bringing the Scolia into contact with her prey under the bell-glass. I was well-advised to do so, for my success was in inverse ratio to my hopes. Next to the Philanthus, none of the Hunting Wasps displayed such ardour in attacking under artificial conditions. All the insects experimented upon, some sooner, some later, rewarded me for my patience. Let us ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in order inverse; again is the island—Litany of the Saints repeated for us, but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to receive us;—each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... that is a democracy. The last government is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for large ones—on the principle that the number of the supreme magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens. But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons for exceptions to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... "The number of lepers in any country bears an inverse ratio to the laws executed for the care and isolation of infected persons. The disease appears to spread more rapidly in damp and cold, or warm and moist, climates than in temperate countries. It is not now regarded as contagious. The leprosy of the book of Leviticus not only includes lepra, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... party. Newton, in the course of a scientific correspondence with Leibnitz, published in 1712, by the Royal Society, under the title, "Commercium Epistolicum de Analysi promota," not only communicated very many remarkable discoveries, but added, that he was in possession of the inverse problem of the tangents, and that he employed two methods which he did not choose to make public, for which reason he concealed them by anagrammatical transposition, so effectual as completely to extinguish the faint glimmer of light which shone through his scanty explanation.[B] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... have thus left on record their dislike and disapproval of the English system of education, are to be added, the distinguished names of Cowley, Addison, and Cowper; while, among the cases which, like those of Milton and Dryden, practically demonstrate the sort of inverse ratio that may exist between college honours and genius, must not be forgotten those of Swift, Goldsmith, and Churchill, to every one of whom some mark of incompetency was affixed by the respective universities, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... have they written their names. I have been to Porlezza; There they have not been seen, and therefore not at Lugano. What shall I do? Go on through the Tyrol, Switzerland, Deutschland, Seeking, an inverse Saul, a kingdom to find only asses? There is a tide, at least, in the LOVE affairs of mortals, Which, when taken at flood, leads on to the happiest fortune,— Leads to the marriage-morn and the orange-flowers and the altar, And the long lawful line ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough

... unemployment crime were found and in every case of crime, unemployment, the coefficient of correlation would be 1. If crime were never found in unemployment, and unemployment never in crime, the coefficient of correlation would be -1, indicating a perfect inverse relationship. A coefficient of 0 would indicate that there is no relationship. The coefficient of .47 would accordingly indicate a significant but not a "high" ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... acts in a certain inverse ratio to the distance of the object. Other considerations being equal, the nearer, the dearer. Nay, nearness and likeness to ourselves goes further than goodness in winning our love. This is natural, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... it is quite the rule for them to deposit their eggs by hundreds of thousands, by millions even. Everybody knows, since Darwin taught us, that the average number of offspring of any given species of animal or plant bears an inverse proportion to the liability of that species to juvenile fatalities. When, therefore, we find a fish or a lobster or other pelagic creature depositing innumerable eggs, we may feel perfectly sure that the vast majority of the eggs themselves, or the callow creatures that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... though so vile a one as Innocent "Magis amat papa Olympiam quam Olympum" said Pasquin; and the pun still clings to the memory of him whom his authorized biographer calls "religiosissimo nelle cose divine e prudentissimo nelle umane." But superlatives often have a value in inverse ratio to their intention. There is a curious story told by the Catholic historian, Novaes, that, after the death of Innocent, which took place in 1655, no one could be found willing to assume the charge of burying him. Word was sent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... may not be true that the power to love is to be found in the human being in inverse ratio to the power to think. Probably it is not; these generalisations seldom are. Anyhow, Clare, like many others, could not ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay

... in the universe. This is by no means a merely fanciful notion. We find it as the law by which our own conscious individuality is constituted; and we find the analogous principle working universally on the physical plane. It is known to physical science as the "law of inverse squares," by which the forces of reciprocal attraction or repulsion, as the case may be, are not merely equivalent to the sum of the forces emitted by the two bodies concerned, but are equivalent to these two forces multiplied together and divided ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... in speaking of one of our greatest literary reputations, whose popularity is almost in an inverse ratio to his celebrity. Every one knows the names of Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa Harlowe. They are amongst the established types which serve to point a paragraph; but the volumes in which they are described remain for the most part in undisturbed repose, sleeping ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... of children has conspicuously decreased, the care and attention given them has increased in inverse proportion. The woman with six children or more turned over the younger children to the older ones, so that her burden, though heavy, was much less than it may seem. Further, though she loved and cared for them, she knew far less of hygiene than her descendant; she did ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson



Words linked to "Inverse" :   maths, math, backward, reciprocal, opposition, direct, oppositeness, multiplicative inverse, mathematics



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