"Phenomenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was the kind of phenomenon we ought to expect: engines blow off steam when standing in a station, and why should not a ship's boilers do the same when the ship is not moving? I never heard any one connect this noise with the danger of boiler explosion, ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... put his arm around her waist at the party of Miss Thorne's she would have been utterly incredulous. Had she been informed that he would be seen on the following Sunday walking down the High Street in a scarlet coat and top-boots, she would not have thought such a phenomenon ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of M. Daburon's presented him one evening to the Marchioness d'Arlange, having dragged him to her house in a mirthful mood, saying, "Come with me, and I will show you a phenomenon, a ghost of the past ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... deprave and distort than ennoble and purify the moral nature of man. But something like this transformation was seen when Octavian, the crafty and selfish intriguer, ripened into the wise and statesmanlike Augustus. Nor have our own days been quite ignorant of a similar phenomenon, when the stern soldier-politician of Germany, the man who once seemed to delight in war and whose favourite motto had till then been "blood and iron" having secured for his master the hegemony of Europe, strove (or seems to have striven), ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... a season of stress that is testing the fitness of political systems and the validity of political philosophies. Each stress stems in part from causes peculiar to itself. But every stress is a reflection of a universal phenomenon. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... new EU members, Austria will need to emphasize knowledge-based sectors of the economy, continue to deregulate the service sector, and encourage much greater participation in the labor market by its aging population. The aging phenomenon, together with already high health and pension costs, poses fundamental problems in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... knew that Bul, whom she loved best of her brothers, was going to be killed. She had never before seen his face so serenely happy as when he came to tell her that he had sworn in, nor had she ever before seen that unexplainable phenomenon, known variously as fate, doom, numbered, Nemesis, written upon a face. And there were others who ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... All the members of this society are considered as brethren, and as entitled to support from one another. If our streets and our roads are infested by miserable objects, imploring our pity, no Quaker will be found among them. A Quaker-beggar would be a phenomenon in the world. ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... if it were a walking-stick, who could overpower Emilia by other arts than a sign-of-the-Saracen's-Head grimness; who could be a boon companion without ipso facto warning all beholders off by the portentous phenomenon; who could sing a song and clink a can naturally enough, and stab men really in the dark,—not in a transparent notification of himself as going about seeking whom to stab. Mr. Fechter's Iago is no more in the conventional psychological mode than in the conventional ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... and Sir George Clerk of Penicuik, were of the number. When the company invited had arrived, he took them into a room where he had the allantois of a calf filled with hydrogen gas, and, upon setting it at liberty, it immediately ascended and adhered to the ceiling. The phenomenon was easily accounted for; it was taken for granted that a small black thread had been attached to the allantois, that the thread passed through the ceiling, and that some one in the apartment above, by pulling the thread, elevated it to ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... the patience to study the published results of psychic investigation during the last fifty years, the reality of clairvoyance as an occasional phenomenon of human intelligence must establish itself on an immovable foundation. For those who, without being occultists—students that is to say of Nature's loftier aspects, in a position to obtain better teaching than that which any written books can give—for ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... in repose, as he is himself, not in relation to his shapes. They must continue to hold fast to this primal Form of Proteus, or the archetype, through all his changes, till he resumes his first shape, "the one in which thou sawest him in repose." Then they possess the Essence as distinct from the Phenomenon; they know that their disguise has torn off all ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... pillar of a cloud to lead them on the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;" and xl. 38: "For a cloud was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night;" comp. Numb. ix. 15, 16. The same phenomenon is to be repeated in future, although in a different form. In a manner the most real, the Lord will manifest himself as the living energy of His Church, dwelling in the midst of her, and ruling over her as a protector, so that the world's power can no longer ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... if the Jews were at a loss to understand any phenomenon, or were ignorant of its cause, they referred it to God. (72) Thus a storm was termed the chiding of God, thunder and lightning the arrows of God, for it was thought that God kept the winds confined in caves, His treasuries; thus differing merely in name from the Greek wind-god Eolus. (73) In ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... hypotheses have been thrown out, which may perhaps be accepted as steps towards a true explanation; and while waiting the result of further inquiry, we shall endeavour to make our readers acquainted with the interesting phenomenon. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... he superintended the children's education, taught them foreign languages, and looked after the fortunes of M. and Mme. de Senonches with the most complete devotion. Noble Angouleme, administrative Angouleme, and bourgeois Angouleme alike had looked askance for a long while at this phenomenon of the perfect union of three persons; but finally the mysterious conjugal trinity appeared to them so rare and pleasing a spectacle, that if M. du Hautoy had shown any intention of marrying, he would have been thought monstrously ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... ideas about immortality. If immortality is a necessary phenomenon due to the intellectual nature of the soul and dependent upon the degree of intellectual knowledge it possesses, how much knowledge must a man have to be immortal? If any amount is sufficient, then every rational soul is immortal, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... This phenomenon puzzled her very considerably, for Scott was wholly lacking in the pomposity that characterizes many little men. She wondered what had been the subject of their discussion. It had been connected with ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... "immediately after the tribulation of those days;" or as Mark has it, "in those days, after that tribulation." On May 19, 1780, the sun was darkened, and the following night the moon did not give her light. Whatever explanation men may have to offer as to the cause of the phenomenon, the fact remains that when the time of the prophecy came, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... would perhaps never have existed were it not for my excellent friend Saint-Herem. Was it not he who gave our French Raphael the subject of one of his immortal pages? Truly, madame, in these days of vulgar luxuries and brutal magnificences, is it not a phenomenon to meet a Medicis, as in the brightest epoch of ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... spread until before the end of the war there were several thousand burghers under such well-known officers as Celliers, Villonel, and young Cronje, fighting against their own guerilla countrymen. Who, in 1899, could have prophesied such a phenomenon ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lonely wretch! One day, when he was thirteen years of age, there occurred a total eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon of which he had scarcely heard, and he had not the least idea what it could be. He was hoeing corn that day in a solitary place. When the darkness and the chill of the eclipse fell upon the earth, feeling sure the day of judgment had come, he was terrified beyond description. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... and is free, wild, tender, proud, domestic, strange, natural, artistic; and has at bottom the characteristics of the American woman, with the principles of the strong-minded sect; and Middleton shall be continually puzzled at meeting such a phenomenon in England. By and by, the internal influence [evidence?] of her sentiments (though there shall be nothing to confirm it in her manner) shall lead him to charge her with ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... been smouldering for centuries at the western extremity of the group, showed signs of breaking out again, caused a sensation throughout the Bermudas. But while some were terrified, the curiosity of others was aroused, mine included. The phenomenon was worth investigation, even if the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... attack, which was not merely personal, Lowth continues:—"Had I not your lordship's example to justify me, I should think it a piece of extreme impertinence to inquire where YOU were bred; though one might justly plead, in excuse for it, a natural curiosity to know where and how such a phenomenon was produced. It is commonly said that your lordship's education was of that particular kind, concerning which it is a remark of that great judge of men and manners, Lord Clarendon (on whom you have, therefore, with a wonderful happiness ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... an exceptional phenomenon in Rome during summer, and hail falling in opposition to the natural order, not only in the day, but even at night, interrupted the spectacles. People were growing alarmed. A failure of grapes was predicted, and when on a certain afternoon ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... earthly attainment? The Review of Burns in an early number of the "Edinburgh Review," said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon. Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical literary men, who ought, one would have thought, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... could have kissed them! But I did what they appreciated more than that! I had good hot mulled wine ready for them, and sent them to bed on it! Some days afterwards, in another gale, between two snow-showers, I saw that rare electric phenomenon called St. Elmo's fire—jets of electric fire appearing at the points of all the ship's masts and yards. A spontaneous, unexpected, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the crow's-nest on the evening of the 15th, watching for signs of land to the westward, and he reported an interesting phenomenon. The sun set amid a glow of prismatic colours on a line of clouds just above the horizon. A minute later Worsley saw a golden glow, which expanded as he watched it, and presently the sun appeared again and rose a semi-diameter ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... bubbles from the side of the basin, and then gently moved them back again until they were pretty near, and observed that they would immediately rush up against the side again. She did not understand this phenomenon, especially as the water was raised a little along the edge by the side of the basin, so that the bubbles and the needle actually appeared to rush ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... the son. Lloyd's work was chiefly concerned with optics and magnetism, and it was in connection with the former that he carried out what was probably the most important single piece of work of his life, namely, the experimental proof of the phenomenon of conical refraction which had been predicted by Sir William Hamilton. He was responsible for the erection of the Magnetic Observatory in Dublin, and the instruments used in it were constructed under his observation and sometimes from his designs or modifications. He ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... no greater interest—after the defeat of the socialist and revolutionary plans of Mr. Chamberlain—than to work vigorously at the formation of a numerous class of small landowners. Mutatis mutandis, we have here also the corresponding phenomenon of the transformation of parties. We are unquestionably entering on a period of lassitude. The Conservatives have gained one hundred and twenty seats at the last elections, for four principal reasons, all of which spring from the faults ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... as of the Spirit. Let it thrust scalpel and microscope into the most sacred penetralia of brain and nerve. It will only find everywhere beneath brain and beneath nerve, that substance and form which is not matter nor phenomenon, but the Divine cause thereof; and while it helps, with ruthless but wholesome severity, to purge our minds from idols of the cave and idols of the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearly defined, and therefore more sacred and important ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... prosecution of the campaign would mean ruin, and who have an actual vested interest in the indecisive continuance of hostilities. This is due entirely to the lack of grip and resolution which the Government have displayed in dealing with the ugly phenomenon of War Profits. We know, of course, what happens to those profits at present. Half is taken by the State: half passes to the firms who are getting "rich quick" out of its necessities. In theory, it is an anomalous arrangement, indefensible in logic, and opposed to every ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... herself, but I saw very well that her troubled spirit vainly strove to recover itself. By a singular phenomenon I could see into her brain, and her thoughts appeared to me one after the other. She was saying to herself, "Let me collect myself; our Father, give me grace to collect myself," but the more effort she made to restrain her imagination ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... loneliness came over him—a perfectly unreasonable feeling, because every day for months he had seen her disappear from the window, always viewing the phenomenon with ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... life-boat—or the life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated it—went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow. This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the supply of eagerly-moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles, renewed itself in the most liberal manner. On the other side of the grave-yard was a row of small red brick houses, showing a series ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... a Boston sailor, who had come in a trading vessel to California, and taken the fancy to return across the continent. The journey had already made him an expert "mountain man," and he presented the extraordinary phenomenon of a sailor who understood how to manage a horse. The third of our visitors named Ellis, was a Missourian, who had come out with a party of Oregon emigrants, but having got as far as Bridge's Fort, he had fallen home-sick, or as Jim averred, love-sick—and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... that recent writers do not seem to have questioned the genuineness of the objects described by them, but that at the same time no mention is made of the plating or washing. This latter circumstance leads to the inference that pieces now in my possession exhibiting this phenomenon may have been tampered with by the whites. In this connection attention should be called to the fact that history is not silent on the matter of plating. The Indians of New Granada are said to have been not only marvelously skillful in the manipulation of ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... most extraordinary!" she declared, scrutinising Ann much as though she suspected her of having somehow juggled matters in order to produce such a phenomenon. "Did you hear that, Brian? Miss Lovell has been living with our dear Lady Susan." She spoke as if she held proprietary rights in Lady Susan. "Isn't it extraordinary that now she and her brother should have come to live so ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of identically similar things, but these are things not of experience but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that mask by the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has its unique quality, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he carried them "off their feet" in the contagion of his enthusiasm and emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... reason against the duplication of pipes of similar tone in an organ is that curious acoustical phenomenon, the bete noir of the organ-builder, known as sympathy, or interference of sound waves. When two pipes of exactly the same pitch and scale are so placed that the pulsations of air from the one pass into the ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... certainly see Patty Baxter as far as he could a sunrise, although he was not intimately acquainted with that natural phenomenon. He took a circuitous route from his watch-tower, and, knowing well the point from which there could be no espionage from Deacon Baxter's store windows, joined Patty in the road, took the pail from her hand, and walked up the hill beside her. Of course, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... toward the higher condition of the Village Indians. Numerous tribes were thus raised out of savagery into barbarism by appropriating the arts of life of tribes above them. This process has been a constant phenomenon in the history of the human race. It is well illustrated in America, where the Red Race, one in origin and possessed of homogeneous institutions, were in three different ethnical conditions or ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... as the start of surprise with which a London journal upon rare occasion finds itself face to face with a something that also appears every morning at a price varying from a penny to threepence. Nothing will induce it to give the phenomenon a name, and it distantly alludes to it as "a contemporary." This is quite peculiar to Great Britain, and is in its way akin to the etiquette of the House of Commons, which makes it a breach of order to refer to a member by his proper name. It does not exist in France or the United States, and there ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the other thing. Well! I shall know another time how to value a rural neighbourhood report of the existence of a local poet. Usually there is some hardheaded cynic in the community with native perception enough to enlighten the rest as to the true value of the phenomenon; but there seems to have been none here. I ought to have come sooner to see him, and then I could have had a chance to go again and talk soberly and kindly with him, and show him gently how much he had mistaken himself. Oh, get ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... side of the opening. At its birth, the kangaroo (notwithstanding it weighs when full grown 200 pounds) is not so large as a half-grown mouse. I brought some with me to England even less, which I took from the pouches of the old ones. This phenomenon is so striking and so contrary to the general laws of nature, that an opinion has been started that the animal is brought forth not by the pudenda, but descends from the belly into the pouch by one of the teats, which are there deposited. On this difficulty ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... to the Solar Guard officer, "if this is a natural phenomenon—some new element in Titan's atmosphere breaking down the force screens—the problem is bad enough. But if this is caused by man—if it really is sabotage—we'll have a doubly hard time. We can find the reason eventually, if it ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... again on the 3d of July; on the 4th we were off the Lizard, and made the best of our way with a fine breeze, but had the mortification to find the Tamar a very heavy sailer. In the night of Friday the 6th, the officer of the first watch saw either a ship on fire, or an extraordinary phenomenon which greatly resembled it, at some distance: It continued to blaze for about half an hour, and then disappeared. In the evening of July the 12th, we saw the rocks near the island of Madeira, which our people call the Deserters, from Desertes, a name which has been given ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... psychological analysis of the experience of art and the motives underlying its production. We shall have to distinguish the elements of mind that enter into it, show their interrelations, and differentiate the total experience from other types of experience. Since, moreover, art is a social phenomenon, we shall have to draw upon our knowledge of social psychology to illumine our analysis of the individual's experience. Art is a historical, even a technical, development; hence the personal enjoyment of beauty itself is conditioned ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... class of young men who like Tennyson at your age." It went like a dart to my friend's heart. Class of young men, indeed! Was it for this that I outstripped all competitors at school, that I have been fancying myself a unique phenomenon in Nature, different at least from every other being that lives, that I should be spoken of as one of a class of young men? Now in my friend's half-playful reminiscence I see the exemplification of a great fact ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... phenomenon I never saw anything just like it. Had I before doubted the existence of a "separable soul," it would have ended all doubt. From the magnetic border of the "Great Divide" with a sufficient motive, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Pamel. ii. 31.)—But it is not the Gallican. (ed. Mabillon, p. 155.) ... It strikes me as just possible that a clue may be in this way supplied to the singular phenomenon noted above at ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... live without occupation. Lack of sufficiently worthy work is one of the crying evils of our day, among both boys and girls. Every thing is done to make labor less, or to turn it completely into pleasure,—to shirk it, or to scorn it. The sewing-machine has made the good sewer a phenomenon. Our grandmothers used to rip their dresses and linings with sharp scissors: a good jump from a carriage will send us right out of a modern costume. Teachers learn the lessons now, and the pupils ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon—the eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation. "The growth of the human spirit ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... for depth of remark nor felicity of illustration; that his views and opinions on the most important topics of practical interest were hopelessly perverted by his blind enthusiasm for the dreams of bygone ages; and that, but for the grotesque phenomenon presented by a great writer of the nineteenth century gravely uttering sentiments worthy of his own Dundees and Invernahyles, the main texture of his discourse would be pronounced, by any enlightened member of modern society, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... instruct the people not only in the celestial ceremonies, but also in (the manner of performing) funeral solemnities, and of appeasing the manes of the dead; and what prodigies sent by lightning or any other phenomenon were to be attended to and expiated. To elicit such knowledge from the divine mind, he dedicated an altar on the Aventine to Jupiter [28]Elicius, and consulted the god by auguries as to what (prodigies) should ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... to some distance. I turned myself a little more round, and, as I did so, I caught sight of the sane magnificent phenomenon which I had met with on the second day of my wanderings. The colossal live oak rose in all its silvery splendour, at the distance of a couple of miles. Whilst I was gazing at it, and reflecting on the strange ill luck that had made me pass within so short ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and, if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain. You may take my dinner from me if I give it you, my flowers, my friendship, my,—my,—my everything, but my money! Explain to me the cause of the phenomenon. If I give to you a thousand pounds, now this moment, and you take it, you are base;—but if I leave it you in my will,—and die,—you take it, and are not base. Explain to me the ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... is not a novel phenomenon, is not the present time characterized by an exceptional revolt against the authority of law? The statistics of our criminal courts show in recent years an unprecedented growth in crimes. Thus, in the federal courts, pending criminal indictments ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... a pistol at odd hours in the back-yard of the Institute was a phenomenon more than sufficiently remarkable to be talked about in Rockland. The viscous intelligence of a country-village is not easily stirred by the winds which ripple the fluent thought of great cities, but it holds every straw and entangles every insect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... frankness of the eyes; the soft wave of her hair. There was a marked sadness in her face in repose; to wonder why, was to transgress the code of loyal humility that Will set himself; he had not even considered it due chivalry to speculate, much less ask, as to the reason of so amazing a phenomenon as her presence in California at all, and the incongruity of her school-teaching. Her pose was perfect, and yet nothing could be more unconscious. Was that marvellous spontaneity, that simple dignity, the regular thing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... again, and drive them home, which he readily consented to do: that night seemed unusually light to the inhabitants of the hemisphere, and many learned heads were puzzled to discover the cause of the phenomenon, but though many explanations were given, the real reason remained undiscovered to this day—in which I have the pleasure of laying it before ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... scientific faith—the kinetic theory of gases. He, so far as I know, thought only of Boyle's and Mariotte's law of the "spring of air," as Boyle called it, without reference to change of temperature or the augmentation of its pressure if not allowed to expand for elevation of temperature, a phenomenon which perhaps he scarcely knew, still less the elevation of temperature produced by compression, and the lowering of temperature by dilatation, and the consequent necessity of waiting for a fraction of a second or a few seconds of time (with apparatus of ordinary experimental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in medieval Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to solipsism as to a complete abnegation of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... appreciated either Sulla himself or his work of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla is one of the most marvellous characters—we may even say a unique phenomenon—in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but blushing with every passionate emotion—though otherwise a handsome man with piercing eyes—he seemed hardly destined to be of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... returned. In those high latitudes they met with a phenomenon, common in alpine regions, as well as at the Pole, red snow; the red colour being caused by the abundance of a minute plant, of low development, the last dweller on the borders of the vegetable kingdom. More interesting to the sailors was a fat ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... wizards by the sacred chant, except those of the inner circle. In dread sat the warriors of the terrible magic of their doctors which they had once doubted. But the minds of Bakahenzie, Yabolo, and the other two master craftsmen were stunned. The phenomenon of the glowing hand had they never seen before, but they recollected the stones of Mungongo. Even was Sakamata, sophisticated to the wonders of Eyes-in-the-hands, impressed and bewildered. Dormant ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... as a patient witness of the overwhelming reality of the divine: a witness whose authority is confessed, even against his inclination, by the student of nature, who turns again and again to the phenomenon which he ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... July to October); tropical cyclones (hurricanes) may form south of Mexico and strike Central America and Mexico from June to October (most common in August and September); southern shipping lanes subject to icebergs from Antarctica; cyclical El Nino phenomenon occurs off the coast of Peru, when the trade winds slacken and the warm Equatorial Countercurrent moves south, killing the plankton that is the primary food source for anchovies; consequently, the anchovies move to better feeding grounds, causing resident marine birds ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... sailing-ships were regarded as the best school for seamen, all of whom in French commerce, up to the age of forty-five, are subject at any time to draft into the national navy. It did this and more. There resulted the "strange phenomenon," as Professor Viallates puts it, "of a steady increase in the sailing-fleet, while the ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... could not raise water to a greater height than about 32 ft. he considered that the "abhorrence" was limited to 32 ft., and commended the matter to the attention of his pupil Evangelista Torricelli. Torricelli perceived a ready explanation of the observed phenomenon if only it could be proved that the atmosphere had weight, and the pressure which it exerted was equal to that of a 32-ft. column of water. He proved this to be the correct explanation by reasoning as follows:—If the atmosphere supports 32 feet of water, then it should also support a column ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... a position where her emotions and her feelings are too strong for her judgment and inhibitions. Everyone who acts must act from similar causes or inducements. There is no special providence in the realm of mind. There is no room for chance in any natural phenomenon. Possibly the public will understand sometime, and law-makers and law-enforcers will place crime and ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... vision had a rest, for we were sailing on the high seas. Late in the evening, however, the sailors descried the mountains of Cyprus looming in the far distance like a misty cloud. With my less practised eyes I could see nothing but the sunset at sea—a phenomenon of which I had had a more exalted conception. The rising and setting of the sun at sea is not nearly so striking a spectacle as the same phenomenon in a rocky landscape. At sea the sky is generally cloudless in the evening, and the sun gradually sinks, without refraction of rays or prismatic play ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... border. The district, always French in feeling, had lately suffered much from Burgundian raids; and this young damsel, brooding over the treatment of her village and her country, and filled with that strange vision-power which is no rare phenomenon in itself with young girls, came at last to believe with warm and active faith in heavenly appearances and messages, all urging her to deliver France and her King. From faith to action the bridge is short; and ere ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... phenomenon that a descendant of the ancient Phoenicians can not understand the meaning and purport of the Cash Register in America? Is it not strange that this son of Superstition and Trade can not find solace in the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... coast, a little to the north of Cabo do Norte, and for 100 m. along its Guiana margin up the Amazon, is a belt of half-submerged islands and shallow sandbanks. Here the tidal phenomenon called the bore, or Pororoca, occurs, where the soundings are not over 4 fathoms. It commences with a roar, constantly increasing, and advances at the rate of from 10 to 15 m. an hour, with a breaking wall of water from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was not surprised to see the professor run away. He said, "I cannot understand it all. I must and will cross the Channel immediately to investigate this strange phenomenon. I have always considered the English a people of superior mental force, men who could not be easily deceived. That they should pin their faith to a man who has proved to demonstration that Home Rule is impossible, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... that each individual thing is a genuine part of the total Idea. Hegel also grants to individual things a certain "self-reference," which constitutes them real existences. The nature-mystic, therefore, may be of good cheer in asserting that even the most transient phenomenon not only "participates" in an immanent Idea, but embodies it, gives it a concrete form and place. He thus substantiates his claim that communion with nature is communion with the Ground ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... suggested reasons for looking upon physical life as a mode of frequency, akin to Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Action, the Vibration of a Tuning Fork, or the Swing of a Pendulum, and therefore a transient phenomenon having to do only with the Race; Life can under these conditions only be looked upon as a reality in the same sense in which all other forms of energy or matter appear real to our finite senses—namely, as the shadows or manifestations ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... have been based upon physiology, physics, and phonetics. To a certain extent scientific explanations are absolutely necessary for the singer—as long as they are confined to the sensations in singing, foster understanding of the phenomenon, and summon up an intelligible picture. This is what uninterpreted sensations in singing cannot do; of which fact the clearest demonstration is given by the expressions, "bright," "dark," "nasal," "singing forward," etc., that I began ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... however, rode on in an unbroken silence. Long after the brawl of the river had become deafening, the road continued to dip and descend. It is a peculiar phenomenon incidental to the descent of the sheer canons of the Sierra Nevada that the last few hundred feet down seem longer than the thousands already passed. This is probably because, having gained close to the level of the tree-tops, the mind, strung taut to the long descent, allows itself ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the "race instinct" which is back of most Southern opinion in regard to the Negro. This scientific interpretation is represented by Boas, "The Mind of Primitive Man." "Ultimately," according to Professor Boas, "this phenomenon (race instinct) is a repetition of the old instinct and fear of the connubium of the patricians and the plebeians, of the European nobility and the common people, or of the castes of India. The emotions and reasoning are ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... before her. She has celebrated the funeral of kings and kingdoms that plotted her destruction; and, with the inscriptions of their pride, has transmitted to posterity the record of their shame. How shall this phenomenon be explained? We are, at the present moment, witnesses of the fact; but who can unfold the mystery? This blest book, the book of truth and life, has made our wonder to cease. The Lord her God in the midst of her is mighty. His presence is a fountain of ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... turned the pages an expression of grave surprise would pass over his rugged features. He was reading "Pelham." The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the simple minds of the big children who people those dark and wandering places of the earth? What meaning can their rough, inexperienced souls find in the elegant verbiage ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... itself Liberty, Rights of Man; and singing boundless Io-Paeans to itself, as is common in such cases; an Anarchy which has been challenging the Universe to show the like ever since. And which has, at last, flamed up as an independent Phenomenon, unexampled in the hideously SUICIDAL way;—and does need much to get burnt out, that matters may begin anew on truer conditions. But neither the PARTITION OF POLAND nor the AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE have much general importance, or, except as precursors of 1789, are worth dwelling ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought in his South Sea idyl (clever as tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon to idea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, "were t'other dear charmer away". How bravely he tries to free himself from the cling of earth, at the close of the "Great Lover"! How little he succeeds! His muse knew only earthly tongues, — ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... dream, where the volition that produces motion is unfelt, she seemed to me to dream herself across the floor to my couch, on which she laid herself down as gracefully, as simply, as in the old beautiful time. Her appearance did not startle me, for my whole condition was in harmony with the phenomenon. I rose noiselessly, covered her lightly from head to foot, and sat down, as of old to watch. How beautiful she was! I thought she had grown taller; but, perhaps, it was only that she had gained in form without losing anything in ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... also is against sense, that there is not in the nature of bodies anything either supreme or first or last, in which the magnitude of the body may terminate; but that there is always some phenomenon beyond the body, still going on which carries the subject to infinity and undeterminateness. For one body cannot be imagined greater or less than another, if both of them may by their parts proceed IN INFINITUM; but ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanity as humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted—let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches—a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... poets, with whom 'silly' is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, 'this harmless silly babe,' But 'silly' has travelled on the same lines as 'simple,' 'innocent,' and so many other words. The same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus 'sheepish' in the Ormulum is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... permanently. No matter how speedy may be the movements of a passenger by the boat-train, either at Dover or Calais, the best seats on the upper deck invariably reveal the presence of earlier arrivals by deposits of wraps and packages. This phenomenon was not strange to Helen. A more baffling circumstance was the altered shape of the ship. The familiar lines of the paddle steamer were gone, and Helen was wondering where she might best bestow herself and her tiny valise, when ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... in the yard before he could hear more. Standing for a minute in the windy sunshine, he wondered at the curious phenomenon presented by men in evident possession of their faculties who relied for the dispersion of human care on means invisible and mystic. The fact that in this case he himself had appealed to the illusion ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... hundred years old, was in circumstances to enjoy the otium cum dignitate. He had a villa out at Heraclea; and he left his patrimony to his school, in whose hands it remained, not only safe, but fructifying, a marvellous phenomenon in tumultuous Greece, for the long space of eight hundred years. Epicurus too had the property of the Gardens where he lectured; and these too became the property of his sect. But in Roman times the chairs of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the four philosophies, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Scott! what is that?" cried a surveyor's chainman, shading his eyes and gazing at the fading line of agriculturist which bisected his visible horizon. "That," said the surveyor, carelessly glancing at the phenomenon and again centering his attention upon his instrument, "is the Meridian ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... come!' You know perfectly well that I'm a frank, outspoken golfer. When my ball goes off nor'-nor'-east when I want it to go due west I can't help expressing an opinion about it. It is a curious phenomenon which calls for comment, and I give it. Similarly, when I top my drive, I have to go on record as saying that I did not do it intentionally. And it's just these trifles, as far as I can make out, that are going to ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... which, humanity has a sure instinct. When there is a crisis we say, Look for the Man. Rome thought (for the most part) that she had found him when Caesar, having conquered Pompey, came home master of the world. If this phoenix and phenomenon in time, now with no competitor above the horizons, could not settle affairs, only Omnipotence could. Every thinking (or sane) Roman knew that what Rome needed was a head; and now at last she had got one. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... tendencies; given the cause, it appears; the cause withdrawn, it disappears; the weakness or intensity of the cause is the measure of its own weakness or intensity. It is bound to that like any physical phenomenon to its condition, like dew to the chilliness of a surrounding atmosphere, like dilatation to heat. Couples exist in the moral world as they exist in the physical world, as rigorously linked together and as universally ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... cloak about her, and sat down flat on the bottom of her rustic vehicle too grateful for the rest to care if there had been a dozen people to laugh at her but the doctor was only delighted, and Philetus regarded every social phenomenon as coolly, and in the same business light, as he would the butter to his bread, or any ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Philip publicly issued to all the murderers of Europe, he was meriting well of God and his King. There is no doubt that he was an exalted enthusiast, but not purely an enthusiast. The man's character offers more than one point of interest, as a psychological phenomenon. He had convinced himself that the work which he had in hand was eminently meritorious, and he was utterly without fear of consequences. He was, however, by no means so disinterested as he chose to represent himself in letters which, as he instinctively felt, were to be of perennial ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ere now it should have been rehearsed, 'Twas in the garden that I found him first. Even there I found him—there the full-grown cat, His head, with velvet paw, did gently pat; As curious as the kittens each had been To learn what this phenomenon might mean. Fill'd with heroic ardour at the sight, And fearing every moment he would bite, And rob our household of our only cat That was of age to combat with a rat, With outstretch'd hoe I slew him at the door, And taught him never to ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that very common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of decaying wood, until, in the latter years of his life, it caught his attention in a bivouac in the forests of Maine. He seems to have been more excited by this phenomenon than by any other described in his works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all the visible facts in the history of the most familiar natural object.—The Maine Woods, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... importation of Negroes from Africa to the United States to become slaves; and (3) when people are subjected to banishment from a country as a form of punishment for crime. The internal or intra-state movement is that which is going on all the time in most civilized countries, and which is usually a phenomenon of non-importance; but when it involves large masses of people, moving in certain well-defined directions, with a community of motives and purposes, it becomes of great interest and significance and deserves to be classed with the other great movements of peoples. One ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various |
