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More "Gravitation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... organisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. We may modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneously to evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subvert gravitation: "Je m'en suis apercu etant par terre," is the only result, as in Moliere's lesson ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... without it. It is useless to give it notice to quit, and pretend that it is gone when you have only put a new name upon the door. We must not call it 'attraction,' lest there should seem to be a power within; we are to speak of it only as 'gravitation,' because that is only 'weight,' which is nothing but a 'fact,' as if it were not a fact that holds a power, a true dynamic affair, which no imagination can chop into incoherent successions.[255] Nor is the evasion more ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature—water, snow, wind, gravitation—become ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... trembling towards contact, when once brought into neighborhood? Say rather, heart swelling in presence of the Queen of Hearts; like the Sea swelling when once near its Moon! With the Wanderer it was even so: as in heavenward gravitation, suddenly as at the touch of a Seraph's wand, his whole soul is roused from its deepest recesses; and all that was painful and that was blissful there, dim images, vague feelings of a whole Past and a whole Future, are heaving ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Lancashire and the chief Midland manufacturing counties the attraction of their own industrial centres acts more powerfully in their immediate neighbourhood than the magic of London itself. Thus, if we were to take the map of England and mark it so as to represent the gravitation towards cities, we should find that every remotest village was subject to a number of weaker or stronger, nearer or more distant, forces, which were helping to draw off its rising population into the eddy of city life. If we ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... with the wind that inconveniences and humiliates you by blowing off your hat in a street full of people. He had no quarrel with me. Neither would a boulder, falling on my head, have had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law by which he was moved—not of gravitation, like a detached stone, but of self-preservation. Of course this is giving it a rather wide interpretation. Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have existed without being married. Yet he told me that he had found ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... a blank, an emptiness. Her heart when it cried out to him produced the queer, creepy effect of a man talking to himself—there was no one to hear or to answer. There was a needle but no pole; there was a law of gravitation, but nothing to justify the ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... for the mote in his eye, while from the eye of the speaker himself extends, at an impossible angle, a huge wedge of wood, longer than his head, from which he appears to suffer no inconvenience, and which seems to have defied the laws of gravitation! ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... perfectly good order," said the malicious husband, who descried a most abominable bit of road ready for his purpose; and, suiting the action to the word, he put his spicy nags into a hand-canter. Bang went the springs together; and, despite of all the laws of gravitation, madame and I kept bobbing up and down, and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... take with us when we leave this world and enter the next. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." "Whatsoever a man soweth the same shall he reap," is a law as immutable as the law of gravitation. Our Lord has mercifully opened up a way, a highway, out of a life of sin into a life of holiness. The first step in this way, nay, the first step towards it, is repentance. This involves a very great change in the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... circles circulating and the luminaries shining in vacuo. We want to know how they were brilliant, and what they illuminated. If you wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of gravitation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan them in vain ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... acceleration. The more the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less will be the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less the inducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attack upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born to speak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going on in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even in the case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as the Italian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... going through a wood, should be struck by a falling tree and pinned down beneath it. Suppose that another man, coming that way and finding him there, should, instead of hastening to give or to bring aid, begin to lecture on the law of gravitation, taking the tree ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp the full conception of a spherical earth and its relations with the heavenly bodies as presented by him. So it was also with the final acceptance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case. That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel—and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. We quarrel on ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... in the eighteenth century ran in general an even and logical course. The age succeeding Newton's had for its special task to demonstrate the universal validity, and trace the complex results, of the law of gravitation. The accomplishment of that task occupied just one hundred years. It was virtually brought to a close when Laplace explained to the French Academy, November 19, 1787, the cause of the moon's accelerated motion. As a mere machine, the solar system, so far as it was then ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Indies naturally gravitate to, and may be expected ultimately to be absorbed by, the continental States, including our own. I agree with them also that it is wise to leave the question of such absorption to this process of natural political gravitation. The islands of St. Thomas and St. John, which constitute a part of the group called the Virgin Islands, seemed to offer us advantages immediately desirable, while their acquisition could be secured in harmony with the principles to which I have alluded. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... interpreted as the oracles of God, is to justify the suspicion that it is groundless and arbitrary, at best a matter of loyalty or good form. I shall present morality as a set of principles as inherent in conduct, as unmistakably valid there, as is gravitation in the heavens. I shall hope to make it appear that the saving grace of morality is directly operative in life; needing no proof from any adventitious source, because it proves itself ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... monotony to the rows of villas, however picturesque they may be in themselves, which face the sea at other places. So artistic is the appearance of the houses that the term 'Style Duinbergen' is used by architects to describe it. Electric lighting, a copious supply of water rising by gravitation to the highest houses, and a complete system of drainage, add to the luxuries and comforts of this plage, which is one of the best illustrations of the wonders which have been wrought among the dunes by that spirit of enterprise which has done so much for modern ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... belief. They raced and chased to and fro, up, down and across, in circles, triangles, parabolas and rectangles, until it was fairly bewildering. Really, they seemed to move just as freely and certainly on the tree-trunk as if they were on the ground, with no such thing in sight as the law of gravitation. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the New Model, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it does in Newton's investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering of landscape, or Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absent altogether if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy, energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industrious administrators ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... said, which is initiated anywhere on the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar system—every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period are only ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no chance of hit or miss—it is inevitable as life—it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the rest, but in the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... larger scenes are topped with charming figures of angels in primitive skies of the "twisted ribbon" style of cloud, angels whose duty and whose joy is to trump eternally and float in defiance of natural laws of gravitation. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... hold more than an actual thimbleful, though they need not hold a pint, and should bear some relation to the laws of gravitation in their poise upon the saucer. They should have a smooth rim. A fluted edge is a most uncomfortable finish for a drinking vessel. The wafer-basket may be silver, china or ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... rightly understood and applied will do for medical science what the law of gravitation has done for physics and astronomy, and what the laws of chemical affinity have done for chemistry, they will place medical science in the ranks of exact sciences. The understanding and proper application of these truths will explain every fact and phenomenon in the processes of health, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... occurrence of 'spontaneous' and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men, Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and produce ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big c, which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a working man standing alone, and without ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... force save of that which emanates from human volition. All our knowledge of force presents it as an effort of intelligent will. "We are driven," says Winchell, "by the necessary laws of thought, to pronounce those energies styled gravitation, heat, chemical affinity and their correlates, nothing less than intelligent will. But as it is not human will which energizes in whirlwind and the comet, it must be divine will." "In all cases, the creative power of God is an act of power, and ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... only to go out of your way to do a kind and perfectly disinterested action and experience the glow of sheer happiness that it brings, in order to realize that you are dealing with a law of life that is as sure and unalterable as the law of gravitation. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... dare not tell. Even Scheff, who knows some things, dares not tell. If Illowski's discovery—which is based on the great natural laws of heat, light, gravitation, electricity—if this discovery were placed in the hands of fools, the world would perish. Music has been so long the plaything of sensuality, the theatre for idle men and women, that its real greatness is forgotten. In Illowski's hands it is a moral force. He comes to ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... column of basalt quivers to its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man out of dust,—once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... by cows is attended by such severe muscular exertion, jars, jolts, mental excitement, and gravitation of the womb and abdominal organs backward that it may easily cause abortion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... was in this very plague year that Newton formulated his theory of gravitation. Incredible as it may seem, at this same date even such men as Dryden held ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... rolling, whose Cause-of-Liberty verses let no man inquire after]: Stair prints Memoirs, Van Haren makes Odes; and with so much prose and so much verse, perhaps their High and Slow Mightinesses [Excellency Fenelon sleeplessly busy persuading them, and native Gravitation SLEEPILY ditto] will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had taught him, and whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word for explaining one's failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars, wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction, and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where the blue and green and yellow flames from the smelters and the belching black smoke from the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... within an architectural niche. His head rests on a pillow, the tassels of which fall downwards towards his feet. When placed against a wall the need for a pillow may vanish, but the meaning and use of the niche becomes apparent, while the tassels no longer defy the laws of gravitation. He becomes a standing figure at once, and the flying putti above his head assume a rational pose. It has been suggested that this and similar tomb-plates were always intended to be placed upright, and that the delicate ornamentation, of which ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, and the circumstances surrounding our habitation, as the stone projected from the hand, or the shot from the mouth of the cannon can escape the bounds of gravitation. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... from action to action, from progress to progress, with a rapidity dangerous while it dazzles; resembling in this the career of individuals impelled onward, first to obtain, and thence to preserve, power, and who cannot struggle against the fate which necessitates them to soar, until, by the moral gravitation of human things, the point which has no beyond is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the prelude of their fall. In such states Time indeed moves with gigantic strides; years concentrate what would be the epochs of centuries in the march of less popular institutions. The planet ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... itself quickly, unceremoniously, and easily. Ethelberta had let him go a second time; yet on foregoing mornings and evenings, when contemplating the necessity of some such explanation, it had seemed that nothing less than Atlantean force could overpower their mutual gravitation towards ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... are for ever regulated by a moral law of gravitation, which, like the physical one, holds them down to earth. The bright glory of day, and the silent wonders of a starlit night, appeal to their minds in vain. There are no signs in the sun, or in the moon, or in the stars, for their reading. They are like some wise men, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... save the situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready money from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported the old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase, sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready money, and spent that capital as though it had ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... not," said he; "but such as they are, they show me the inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is ubiquitous and eternal—as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him—he takes half a minute to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. "I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the "Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation? Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr. Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot understand ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... boulder that he was, no sooner did he perceive a truth than he rolled after it with all the massive gravitation of his being, inconsiderate as to what might lie in his way;—from which it is to be inferred, that, with all his intellect and goodness, he would have been a very clumsy and troublesome inmate of the modern American Church. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... if they were the only agents known in this world. But every man knows that he himself possesses the power to control the laws of nature, by bringing a higher law to arrest a lower; as when the power of vegetation arrests the law of gravitation, and sends the drop of rain which had trickled down the outside of the bark of the pine, climbing up again a hundred feet; or as when the power of animal life converts a hundred weight of grass into a leg of mutton; ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the child of all her gravity. If you ask me how this was effected, I answer: In the easiest way in the world. She had only to destroy gravitation. And the princess was a philosopher, and knew all the ins and outs of the laws of gravitation as well as the ins and outs of her boot-lace. And being a witch as well, she could abrogate those laws in a moment; or at least so clog their wheels and rust their ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the place of gravitation as the centre, thus naively declaring mind and not matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this, feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... in preference to Newton's explanation; for, excepting the law of parsimony, there is certainly no other logical objection to the statement that the movements of the planets afford as good evidence of the influence of guiding angels as they do of the influence of gravitation. ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that "the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation," and affirms that "much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... and began to wonder why they fall. 3. He studied the cause of their falling, wishing to discover whatever laws of nature he could. 4. He watched various falling objects, and tried to calculate their velocity ("rapideco"). 5. Finally he recognized that force which is called gravitation. 6. Of course ("kompreneble") gravitation had always existed, but its laws were not noticed or clearly defined until Newton studied the matter. 7. If gravitation should not exist any more, no rain would fall, but instead ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... gravitation of the 'common-sense' philosophy to pure empiricism. He was the last in the genuine line of Scottish common-sense philosophers. When after what may be called the unphilosophical interregnum which followed Brown's death, Hamilton became professor, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... sun and the moon and the stars, to the animal creation, and the trees, and every living thing. So Chesterton pictures God, giving His name to what others, including Christians, call natural law, or the laws of God, or the laws of gravitation, conservation of energy, and so on, but always laws. For which reason, one is compelled to assume that in his opinion God is now [1915] saying to Himself, "There's another bloody war, do it again, sun," and gurgling with delight. It is dangerous to wander in ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, i.e., that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its leaps, yea, the grasshopper springing from the earth, sets this law at defiance. Almost every common law of matter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... break me. I sprang into the saddle, but before I could seat myself or put my foot in the stirrup, she jerked her head away from Bernard, and commenced a series of exciting manoeuvres, rearing, plunging, and kicking. For about five minutes I defied all the laws of gravitation. But when the coachman tried to seize her bridle, she shied so suddenly that I was surprised to find myself on terra firma. I jumped up directly and assured every one that I had not hurt myself in ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... "The gravitation-screen generators, sir," he said. "Number one went to the bad about an hour and a half ago. We have been working upon it steadily since; but I have to report, sir, that it ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... written with more force if he had been acquainted with various small details relating to the position and surroundings of many of the caves. The heavy cold air of winter sinks down into the glacieres, and the lighter warm air of summer cannot on ordinary principles of gravitation dislodge it, so that heat is very slowly spread in the caves; and even when some amount of heat does reach the ice, the latter melts but slowly, for ice absorbs 60 deg. C. of heat in melting; and thus, when ice is once formed, it becomes a material guarantee for the permanence ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... view of showing that if the Nebular Hypothesis be true, the genesis of the solar system supplies one illustration of this law, let us assume that the matter of which the sun and planets consist was once in a diffused form; and that from the gravitation of its atoms there resulted a gradual concentration. By the hypothesis, the solar system in its nascent state existed as an indefinitely extended and nearly homogeneous medium—a medium almost homogeneous in density, in temperature, and in other physical attributes. The first ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... against the Grand-Duke? Kur-Sachsen, the Polish Majesty again? Belleisle himself must have paused uncertain over such a welter,—and probably have done, like the others, little or nothing in it, but left it to collapse by natural gravitation. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... later embodied in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-time cooperators denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed memories well stored with ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... another example, the greatest law of physics—Newton's law of gravitation. Huge balls of lead, as used by Cavendish, produce by their gravitational effect a minute rotation of a delicately suspended bar, carrying smaller balls at its extremities. But no such feeble means sufficed for ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different forces which act as invisible agents upon the subtle and imperceptible forms of matter. These invisible agents or ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... it is stated, that Newton's proving, that, if a body revolved in an elliptical orbit with the sun as a focus, the force of gravitation toward the sun would always be in the inverse ratio of the square of its distance, "was equivalent to proving, that, if a body in space, free to move, received a single impulse, and at the same moment was attracted to a fixed centre by a force which diminished as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... that subject. One Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of St. Andrews, was the only sensible, or at ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation—this wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... which a year ago was one foot high, has now become two feet high, while it is unchanged in proportions and structure—what are the necessary concomitant changes that have taken place in it? It is eight times as heavy; that is to say, it has to resist eight times the strain which gravitation puts on its structure; and in producing, as well as in arresting, every one of its movements, it has to overcome eight times the inertia. Meanwhile, the muscles and bones have severally increased their contractile ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... explain, how men could be poets, or orators, before they were aided by the learning of the scholar and the critic? we may inquire, in our turn, how bodies could fall by their weight, before the laws of gravitation were recorded in books? Mind, as well as body, has laws, which are exemplified in the course of nature, and which the critic collects only after the example has shown what ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... on the head by a lump of coal, and the judges of the First Division of the Court of Session were considering whether his case raised a question of law or of fact. "The only law I can see in the matter," said Lord Maclaren, "is the law of gravitation." ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... vein in the soil of intellect will sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe" of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies." Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of Xenocrates, and was so struck with the energy ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... constantly prancing by, with private prickings of spurs, for the benefit of the perambulating flower-bed. Some of these gentlemen affected painfully tight uniforms, and little caps, kept on by some new law of gravitation, as they covered only the bridge of the nose, yet never fell off; the men looked like stuffed fowls, and rode as if the safety of the nation depended on their speed alone. The fattest, greyest officers dressed most, and ambled statelily along, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... he, "do you know, I'm a bit puzzled in some ways, about—well, about night and day, and temperature, and gravitation, and a number of little things like that. Puzzled. We're facing problems here that we don't realize ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... morning I observed a camel crawl, Laws of gravitation scorning, On the ceiling and the wall; Then I watched a fender walking, And I heard grey leeches sing, And a red-hot monkey talking Did not seem the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... dream of creation absolutely without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative basis of differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are apt to lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is perhaps all that Plato ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making "matter" less and less material. Their world consists of "events," from which "matter" is derived by a logical construction. Whoever reads, for example, Professor Eddington's "Space, Time and Gravitation" (Cambridge University Press, 1920), will see that an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern physics. I think that what has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... are mountains, no difference would be noticed between this and any other part of the earth's surface; but if there is water, why, we ought to expect some such state of things as More describes. The gravitation test has also been tried, with very nearly the same result. The surface of the earth at the equator, being farthest from the centre of gravity, indicates the least weight in bodies; but at the poles, where the surface is nearest the centre ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he laid before the Royal Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666; but the erroneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth's diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and it was not till 1687, on the eve of the Revolution, that the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... the contending classes."[20] Here is a summary of that conflict which Professor Small declares "is to the social process what friction is to mechanics."[21] It may well be that "the fact of class struggle is as axiomatic to-day as the fact of gravitation,"[22] yet, when Marx first elaborated his theory, it was not only a revolutionary doctrine among the socialist sects, but like Darwin's theory of evolution it was assailed from every angle by every school of economists. The important practical question that arises out of this scientific ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. That there is a great deal more assent than ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... its elements of deer and Injun. We were conscious of curious illusions, such as a deer with a dozen heads growing out of all parts of a body as spherical as this, our earth, and an Injun with legs that vetoed all laws of gravitation ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... earth is continually giving out female particles, and the male parts of rocks and living bodies are equally continually trying to reach them. That's gravitation." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Ludgate Hill, was then carried off by the prince, and bore him three sons, who in time became generals. The story is perhaps traceable to Dr. Wilmot, whose daughter married the Duke of Cumberland. Phillips found time to attack the Newtonian theory of gravitation, to advocate a memorial to Shakespeare, to compile a book containing a million of facts, to write on Divine philosophy, and to suggest (as he asserted) to Mr. Brougham, in 1825, the first idea of the Society for Useful Knowledge. Almost ruined by the failures during the panic in 1826, he retired ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... any form for which the weakness and the need of the dependent creature call. Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation, the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is protean. Here it flames as light, there burns as heat, there flashes as electricity; here as gravitation holds the atoms together, there as chemical energy separated ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... United States' territory: each Province enforcing its separate, and differing, tariffs, the one against the other, and others, through its separate Custom House; it was not matter of surprise to find a growing gravitation towards the United States, based, alike, on augmenting ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... was fair. She felt as the freed Psyche must feel when she drops the clay, and lo! the whole chrysalid world, which had hitherto hung as a clog at her foot, fast by the inexorable chain our blindness calls gravitation, has dropped from her with the clay, and ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... like the original work on gravitation or relativity. No possible computer would be of any use. That ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... and those of a chemical, origin. By the name mechanical are designated beds of mud, sand, or pebbles produced by the action of running water, also accumulations of stones and scoriae thrown out by a volcano, which have fallen into their present place by the force of gravitation. But the matter which forms a chemical deposit has not been mechanically suspended in water, but in a state of solution until separated by chemical action. In this manner carbonate of lime is occasionally precipitated ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Russian soil, in Russian hearts, is the purpose of these lectures to show. For while the laws of the spirit are ever the same in essence, the character of their manifestation varies with time and place, just as in Nature the same force appears in the firmament as gravitation when it binds star unto star, as attraction when it binds in the molecule atom unto atom, and in man as love when it binds heart unto heart. The phenomena therefore, natural to all literature, we shall also find here, but modified by the ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material—being what it is—behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is the law of being of that which obeys ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... has recently shown, by a very able analysis, that there are strong grounds for believing that not only the molecular forces which unite the particles of material bodies depend on the electric fluid, but that even gravitation itself, which binds world to world, and sun to sun, can no longer be regarded as an ultimate principle, but the residual portion of a far more powerful force, generated by that energetic agent which ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... moment that the laws of magnetism, insofar as concerns the relation between distance and power of attraction, are exactly matched by the laws of gravitation." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... anything save his fixed thought of being with her. As to any harm, there could be none. He had so long regarded Grace as the best woman in the world, that even after the day of kisses, his mind continued in its inertia of faith,—even the gravitation of material facts were unable to check ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the mammalian vertebrates; and his lower jaw, his ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... other science, we must admit facts even when we cannot explain them. The facts of what we call gravitation are obvious, and any attempt to disregard them would result in disaster, yet no satisfactory explanation of gravitation has yet been discovered: many theories have been suggested, but no theory has yet been proved to be true. In the same way it may be necessary to admit that two ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid. To seclude these persons from the rest of the world so that the dreaded spiritual danger shall neither reach them nor spread from them, is the object of the taboos which they have ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... all very foolish and romantic and impossible, and no one recognized this more readily than he. No American ever married a princess of a reigning house, and no American ever will. This law is as immovable as the law of gravitation. Still, man is master of his dreams, and he may do as he pleases in the confines of this small circle. Outside these temporary lapses, Carmichael was a keen, shrewd, far-sighted young man, close-lipped and observant, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... too generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... can rescue from the house on fire! Look at the fisheries all over the world—the herrings of Scotland and the cod of the Baltic might defy us but for thee. What were wells and windlasses without thee? useless as corkscrews to empty bottles. Thou art the strong arm of the pulley and the crane. Gravitation itself, that universal tyrant, had bound all things to the earth but for thy opposition. The scaffolds were thine from which grew the Colosseum, and the Pyramids have arisen in thine arms. The kite of science, which went cruising ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... with that of much smaller bodies. One method is to compare, by balancing the weight of two balls, one above a globe of lead, as large as practicable, and the other below it, so as to have the attraction of the leaden globe pulling up and counteracting the gravitation to the earth. The effect is very slight and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... connecting up a single phenomenon of a body falling a distance of a few feet on the earth with all similar phenomena, through the law of gravitation discovered the unity of the universe. Though Newton carried on important investigations in astronomy, studied the refraction of light through optic glasses, was president of the Royal Society, his chief ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... streams of fire. To the accuracy of this observation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were "possessed," as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched toward truth like an invincible troop. Truth seemed the missing half of their own sphere, toward which, by a subtle and lordly gravitation, they swung. When Tennyson's instincts speak, he is democrat; when his reason and his prejudice (for he was surcharged with both) speak, he is hot aristocrat. When he is biographer for royal Arthur, his instinct speaks, and his conviction holds that character and deeds do and shall count ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and other good division commanders. On the Southern side may be instanced N.B. Forrest and J.B. Gordon; but these men rarely attained to more than secondary positions, the highest places falling, as if by gravitation, into the hands of West Pointers. An influence there was in the little academy on the Hudson which somehow brought to pass a superior warlike efficiency. The training at West Point, supplemented as it usually was by campaigning on the plains, although duty was done only by men in squads, and the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... outside us and we are not conscious of them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of nature. In this case also he was quite unprovided with any reason for expecting from physical principles that such a law as he discovered must be obeyed. It is quite true that Kepler had some slight knowledge of the existence of what we now know as gravitation. He had even enunciated the remarkable doctrine that the ebb and flow of the tide must be attributed to the attraction of the moon on the waters of the earth. He does not, however, appear to have had any anticipation of those wonderful discoveries which ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of the Alps, there are seasons of the year when no traveler passes but at the expense of life, on account of the terrible "thunderbolts of snow" that hang suspended on the sides or summits of the mountains. None can know their hour; but descend they must, by all the laws of gravitation, with resistless energy, sweeping all before them. At such times, all who pass creep along with trembling caution. They move in single file, at a distance from each other, hurrying fast as possible, with velvet step, avoiding all noise, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in their geographical distribution tend to follow a social and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... that it recurs the dreamer reasons in this way: "I have had before now in a dream the illusion of flying or floating, but this time it is the real thing. It has certainly proved to me that we may free ourselves from the law of gravitation." Now, if you wake abruptly from this dream, you can analyze it without difficulty, if you undertake it immediately. You will see that you feel very clearly that your feet are not touching the earth. And, nevertheless, not believing yourself asleep, you have lost sight of the fact ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... dinner, as comforters of your sad heart. Perhaps, too, he was a little glad to feel Esther leaning gently upon him once more. Their love was too sure and lasting and ever-present to have many opportunities of being dramatic. Nature does not make a fuss about gravitation. One of the most wonderful and powerful of laws, it is yet of all laws the most retiring. Gravitation never decks itself in rainbows, nor does it vaunt its undoubted strength in thunder. It is content to make little show, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... glossy. A little lower down it assumed a fleecy form; and then shot forth in millions of tubular shapes, which chased each other more like sky-rockets than anything else to which I can compare them. The changes were as singularly beautiful as they were varied, in consequence of the difference in gravitation, and rapid evaporation, which was taking place before the waters reached the bottom. Dense clouds of vapour rose for a considerable height, mingling with the atmosphere, and presenting in their descent the most brilliant rainbows. From the rocky sides of the immense basin hung shrubs and bushes, ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... II., "Henry VIII.," with a grand spectacle of a coronation, had been presented at the theatres, the armour of one of the kings of England having been brought from the Tower for the due accoutrement of the champion. And here we may note a curious gravitation of royal finery towards the theatre. Downes, in his "Roscius Anglicanus," describes Sir William Davenant's play of "Love and Honour," produced in 1662, as "richly cloathed, the king giving Mr. Betterton his coronation suit, in which he acted ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course of gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... larger thrust exerted by the screw in pressing forward the shaft and with it the vessel, but by the gravitation against the stern of the wave of water which the screw raises by its rapid rotation. This wave will only be raised very high when the progress of the vessel through the water is nearly arrested, at which time the centrifugal action of the screw is very great; and the vessel ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... is the story of Newton, who felt an apple fall upon him as he lay under a tree, and thought to himself: "Why did that apple fall?" Such was the simple origin of the theory of the gravity of bodies, and that of universal gravitation. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... mere good feeling of neighbors, the companionable sentiment of cities and clans, proves a valuable succedaneum for that deeper principle which is good for all places and times. But this sentiment, like gravitation, diminishes in the ratio of the square of the distance, and at any considerable remove can no longer be reckoned upon as a counter-balance to the lawlessness of egotism. Athenians could be passably just, or at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... plants, (3) AKASH or ether, inert and structureless, as a basis for transmitting subtle forces, (4) the solar fire as the cause of all other forms of heat, (5) heat as the cause of molecular change, (6) the law of gravitation as caused by the quality that inheres in earth-atoms to give them their attractive power or downward pull, (7) the kinetic nature of all energy; causation as always rooted in an expenditure of energy or a redistribution of motion, (8) universal dissolution through the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the behaviour of gases under varying temperature and pressure assumes the form pv RT; so stated, this law is independent of chemical composition and may be regarded as a true physical law, just as much as the law of universal gravitation is a true law of physics. But this relation is not rigorously true; in fact, it does not accurately express the behaviour of any gas. A more accurate expression (see CONDENSATION OF GASES and MOLECULE) is (p a/v^2)(v - b) RT, in which a and b are quantities which depend ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... it is to go back in imagination to the days before men grasped the meaning of natural law! We take gravitation for granted but, when Newton first proclaimed its law, the artillery of orthodox pulpits was leveled against him in angry consternation. Said one preacher, Newton "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism" ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Strassburg, or Notre Dame—has a thousandfold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is simply a building; these are poems. I never look at one of them without feeling that gravitation of soul toward its artist which poetry always excites. Often the artist is unknown; here we know him; Erwin von Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest, in architecture. We visited his house—a house old and quaint, and to me full of suggestions ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I 'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation;' And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall or with ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... With an extraordinary width of comprehension, an extraordinary pliability of intelligence, Voltaire touches upon a hundred subjects of the most varied interest and importance—from the theory of gravitation to the satires of Lord Rochester, from the effects of inoculation to the immortality of the soul—and every touch tells. It is the spirit of Humanism carried to its furthest, its quintessential point; indeed, at first sight, one is tempted to think that this quality of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... will sit, Aunt Pen; for that is preferable to staggering about the room with a partner who has no idea of the laws of gravitation." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... tie they recognized was a partnership in gain. What civilization or true citizenship could there be in a society in which the family circle and its kindred outgrowth—the school and the church—were unknown! The denizens of that mountain camp slid, by an irresistible law of gravitation, away from civil order, from social beneficence, and from humanity. They gorged themselves, and swore, and wrangled, and fought, and like the "dragons of the prime," they tore each other in their selfish greed for that which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she had floated into Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she heard the popular doom of them both in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... wasted a single moment in defending God's Word in my pulpit. I have always held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; God will take care of His Word if we ministers only take care to preach it. We are no more called upon to defend the Bible than we are to defend the law of gravitation. My beloved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, has well said that if ministers, "instead of trying to prop the Cross of Christ, would simply point men to that Cross, more souls would be saved." ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Kaiser Karl's in particular, is not to be called an intentionally unjust one; the contrary, I rather find; but it is, beyond others, ponderous; based broad on such multiplex formalities, old habitudes; and GRAVITATION has a great power over it. In brief, Official human nature, with the best of Kaisers atop, flagitated continually by Jesuit Confessors, does throw its weight on a certain side: the sad fact is, in a few years ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... as a missile against the royals; but he was soon instructed in a method of employing it, which always grievously annoyed the enemy. Theoretically, I presume poor Jacko knew no more of the laws of gravitation, than his friends, the seamen, did of centrifugal action, when swinging round the hand-lead to gain soundings, by pitching it far forward into the water; but both the monkey and his wicked associates knew very well, that if a handspike ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... a perplexing character may often be found in the idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeared difficile and contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... purposely admitted through a small opening, distinctly saw the aphides ejecting the fluid from their bodies with considerable force, and this accounts for its being frequently found in situations where it could not have arrived by the mere influence of gravitation. The drops that are thus spurted out, unless interrupted by the surrounding foliage, or some other interposing body, fall upon the ground; and the spots may often be observed, for some time, beneath and around the trees affected with honey-dew, till washed ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... such circumstances. It has peopled the world with fools and knaves. It delays the coming of Christ's kingdom. There are a few wise men, but they are held down as gravitation holds the rock. There are laws of attraction in the world of mind as in that of matter. Good and evil are its poles. Every atom between them is held in place by the operation of opposing forces. The general mass of mind lies within narrow ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... into the novel. It involves some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces—sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers. These were not original ideas; they ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... slowly, even through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,—except the way in which I licked the boy who ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... marvelled greatly at the severe curvature of the extremities of the cycle-track, which were shaped like the interior of a huge bowl, and while I was demonstrating to them how, from scientific considerations and owing to the centrifugal forces of gravitation, it was not possible for any rider to become a loser of his equilibrium—lo and behold! two of the competitors made the facilis descensus, and were intermingled in the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... legislature, if it so pleased, might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute, without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if the legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure, in a few years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily formularized for working ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... large pores and rare bodies; and also that its density increases in receding from gross matter; so for instance as to be greater at the 1/100 of an inch from the surface of any body, than at its surface; and so on. To the action of this aether he ascribes the attractions of gravitation and cohoesion, the attraction and repulsion of electrical bodies, the mutual influences of bodies and light upon each other, the effects and communication of heat, and the performance of animal sensation and motion. David Hartley, from whom ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... forming their conclusions will think, perhaps, that the woman was working above some shaft in the mine, that the crust had suddenly broken, and that it would equally have fallen in when gravitation required it to fall, if Dorothy Mately had been a saint. They will remember the words about the Tower of Siloam. But ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... Familiar Science, a work arranged in the form of questions and answers. He asked: "What is the shape of the world?" "Round," she replied. "Then why don't we fall off?" he asked, and she answered: "Because of the attraction of gravitation." "This is awful," he said, in horror ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies—the law of gravitation. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the picture when one remembers Dr. Einstein's unified field theory, concerning the relationship between electro-magnetism and gravitation. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... houses and stables which will make it easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society on chosen guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come together for social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society will stratify itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It will take a generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by precipitation and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle to govern the arrangement of the layers. People interested in the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to them? Finally, how could the planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... time acquire considerable moss in his own private, insignificant, Simple-Simon sort of way. But the laws of nature have willed otherwise, and the strongest of us know that it is needless to go into litigation with the laws of gravitation, ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... case, the fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case. That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel—and everything to do with fuel as a bore. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... weakness and the need of the dependent creature call. Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation, the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is protean. Here it flames as light, there burns as heat, there flashes as electricity; here as gravitation holds the atoms together, there as chemical energy separated and decomposes them; here results in motion, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... is kept populated from many sources. Widows with their children are promptly kicked into it, others descend into it by a slow process of social and industrial gravitation. Some descend by the downward path of moral delinquency, and some leap into it as if to commit ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."[20] Here is a summary of that conflict which Professor Small declares "is to the social process what friction is to mechanics."[21] It may well be that "the fact of class struggle is as axiomatic to-day as the fact of gravitation,"[22] yet, when Marx first elaborated his theory, it was not only a revolutionary doctrine among the socialist sects, but like Darwin's theory of evolution it was assailed from every angle by every school of economists. The important practical question that arises ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... some forthcoming building, are these seemingly adult worlds. The astronomer has no means of recognizing their relative adolescence, except perhaps by making a distinction between the star clusters with the usual orbital motion and mutual gravitation, and those termed, we believe, irregular star-clusters of very capricious and changeful appearances. Thrown together as though at random, and seemingly in utter violation of the law of symmetry, they defy observation: such, for instance, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,—which happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,—the old-fashioned saucer affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, those of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it. We mean a tail! If afternoon teas had been started in the ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... to say, moved by a figure not much remembered, yet notable, Marshal Belleisle; perhaps, after Frederick and Voltaire, the most notable of that time. A man of large schemes, altogether accordant with French interests, but not, unfortunately, with facts and law of gravitation. For whom the first thing needful is that Grand Duke Franz, husband of Maria Theresa, shall not be elected kaiser; who shall be is another matter—why not Karl Albert of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... more vividly recounted adventures than those which charmed so many boy readers in 'Pirate Island' and 'Congo Rovers.'... There is a thrilling adventure on the precipices of Mount Everest, when the ship floats off and providentially returns by force of gravitation."—Academy. ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... faintest existence without it. It is useless to give it notice to quit, and pretend that it is gone when you have only put a new name upon the door. We must not call it 'attraction,' lest there should seem to be a power within; we are to speak of it only as 'gravitation,' because that is only 'weight,' which is nothing but a 'fact,' as if it were not a fact that holds a power, a true dynamic affair, which no imagination can chop into incoherent successions.[255] Nor is the evasion more successful ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had been lifted from her, and that to her the world again was fair. She felt as the freed Psyche must feel when she drops the clay, and lo! the whole chrysalid world, which had hitherto hung as a clog at her foot, fast by the inexorable chain our blindness calls gravitation, has dropped from her with the clay, and the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... ages. It is the alpha and omega of man's relation to man, the beginning and the end. There is and can be no more doubt of the triumph of democracy in human affairs, than there is of the triumph of gravitation in the physical world; the only question is how and when. Its foundation lays ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... to the top, and settled down to normal progress on a practicable gradient, and all the exhilaration of the wide, wind-swept downland. But what had been to the unconscious merpussy nothing but a mutual accommodation imposed by a common lot—common subjection to the forces of gravitation and the extinction of friction by the reaction of short grass on leather—had been to her companion a phase of stimulus to the storm that was devastating the region of his soul; a new and prolonged peal of thunder swift ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... prime actors in it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... of thought and Christianization of daily life, in contrast with the results of the ghastly farce 272:21 of material existence; it is chastity and purity, in contrast with the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism and impurity, 272:24 which really attest the divine origin and operation of Chris- tian Science. The triumphs of Christian Science are re- corded in the destruction of error and evil, from which are 272:27 propagated ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... in railway fares (At which no patriot cavils) Has chained us elders to our chairs And circumscribed our travels, I love to play the festive game Of astral gravitation To any neighbourhood whose name ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... change? And before her dizzying brain and heart arose that awful vision of Lucretius, of the homeless Universe falling, falling, falling, for ever from nowhence toward nowhither through the unending ages, by causeless and unceasing gravitation, while the changes and efforts of all mortal things were but the jostling of the dust-atoms amid the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... to the first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... be quite sure that it will reappear; and every time that it recurs the dreamer reasons in this way: "I have had before now in a dream the illusion of flying or floating, but this time it is the real thing. It has certainly proved to me that we may free ourselves from the law of gravitation." Now, if you wake abruptly from this dream, you can analyze it without difficulty, if you undertake it immediately. You will see that you feel very clearly that your feet are not touching the earth. And, nevertheless, not believing yourself asleep, you have lost sight ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... show that the claim of the United States to control the future of Porto Rico as well as of Cuba was ever waived. As to Cuba, Mr. Adams predicted that within half a century its annexation would be indispensable. "There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation," he said; and "Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom." ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... true enough," answered Jason, drily; "News and a Dutchman have no affinity, or attraction, as we would say in philosophy; though there is gravitation enough on one ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... new truth;' and I led thee to an east window and pointed upward to the great Sun, that shone in such a Divine effulgence—then I told thee how the angels were held by the attraction of love in this centre of being—even as the children of the world are held by the attraction of gravitation to the earth—and as we talked, the light shone around thee, dear Gotleib! with so heavenly a glory, that my heart was filled with a new love for thee. For I saw, truly, that thou wert a child of God, and in loving thee I loved Him ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... human nature divine by writing it on paper that it is so, pile water into a pyramid upside down, and repeal the law of gravitation by the vote of a mob. I don't like the law of gravitation myself, but I ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... had been partially successful, but he knew from experiments made that the gas he had so far been able to manufacture would not answer. What he wanted was some element that could be mixed with the gas, to neutralize the attraction of gravitation, or downward pull ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... no "malice prepense" in me, for I solemnly believe that I was the best-natured boy in the world; but something was the matter with the attraction of cohesion, or the attraction of gravitation—with the general dispensation of matter around me—that, let me do what I would, things would fall down, and break, or be torn and damaged, if I only came near them; and my unluckiness in any matter seemed in ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was not universal. And, after all, how should it be otherwise? Where were the people to go? What could they do? There is no Park. There are no suburbs accessible without a severe struggle with the attraction of gravitation. There are no theatres fit to attend. There is no "Museum," no menagerie, no gallery of art, no public gardens, no Fifth Avenue to stroll in, no steamboat excursion, no Hoboken. There ought to be in Cincinnati a most exceptionally good and high social life to atone for this singular absence of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... when we enunciate the law according to which the efficiency of a tide-producing agent is to be estimated. This law is somewhat different from the familiar form in which the law of gravitation is expressed. The gravitation between two distant masses is to be measured by multiplying these masses together, and dividing the product by the square of the distance. The law for expressing the efficiency of ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... the enactments made at different times in the different States of Flatland, in order to minimize this peril; and in the Southern and less temperate climates where the force of gravitation is greater, and human beings more liable to casual and involuntary motions, the Laws concerning Women are naturally much more stringent. But a general view of the Code may be ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... a distance on Earth would have meant instant death. Here, where gravitation's pull was but one-sixth that of Earth, he still struck on a rocky floor with a thud that made him sick ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... THE DEAD.—Prof. Barrett of the English Psychical Research Society, states that: "It has been demonstrated almost as certainly as has been the law of gravitation, that scores of cases have occurred where some persons in one town, have, at a certain hour or minute, seen the figure of a friend flit across the room, and have afterwards discovered that at that very hour and minute the friend breathed his last in a distant town, or, may be, in a foreign ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... absent an hour, his light hair frilling out from under the edge of his velvet skull-cap as it was always wont to do. No question of marriage seemed to be disturbing the mind of this juvenile husband of hers. The primum mobile of his gravitation was apparently the equatorial telescope which she had given him, and which he was carefully adjusting by means of screws and clamps. Hearing her movements he ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... 1642, and died at Kensington in 1727. He held a professorship at Cambridge, represented the University in Parliament, as master of the mint reformed the English coinage, and for twenty five years was president of the Royal Society. His theory of the law of universal gravitation, the most important of his many discoveries, is expounded in his "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematical," usually known merely as the "Principia," from ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the taunt, and stepping to where the English officer had thrown his discharged weapon, he threw it high in the air, and at the exact moment when the power of gravitation turned the piece towards the earth, he quickly raised his arm and fired, sending the bullet in his own pistol completely through the wooden stock of the other. Then turning coolly to Captain Bramble, ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces. Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!—" There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... wall bulged outward. There the ledges had crumbled away, leaving sheer, smooth rock. It did not seem possible that anything could go down that smooth face. But half a dozen sheep in succession made the descent safely, as I watched, breathless, from above. They seemed to defy the laws of gravitation in walking over the rim rock; for, instead of tumbling headlong as I feared, they went skidding downward, bouncing, side-stepping, twisting and angling across the wall like coasters on snow; they could not stop their downward ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... Introduction to Kepler's "Commentaries on the Motion of Mars," always regarded as his most valuable work, must have been known to Newton, so that no such incident as the fall of an apple was required to provide a necessary and sufficient explanation of the genesis of his Theory of Universal Gravitation. Kepler's glimpse at such a theory could have been no more than a glimpse, for he went no further with it. This seems a pity, as it is far less fanciful than many of his ideas, though not free from the "virtues" and "animal faculties," that correspond to Gilbert's ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... and seriousness in the meaning of things, and the laws that traverse nature and our own being are as fixed and inexorable, though, maybe, less instantaneous and immediate in their operation, as the principle of gravitation, and are as little disposed to pardon the violator or ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... distributed by a watering-cart, or according to the method recently introduced in Ayrshire, and since adopted in other places, by pipes laid under-ground in the fields, and through which the manure is either pumped by steam-power, or, where the necessary inclination can be obtained, is distributed by gravitation. That liquid manure must necessarily be valuable, is an inference which maybe at once drawn from the analyses of the urine of different animals already given, and of which it chiefly consists. In addition to the urine, however, it contains also the soluble organic and mineral ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... phenomena of the universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different forces which act as invisible agents upon the subtle and imperceptible forms of matter. ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... designated beds of mud, sand, or pebbles produced by the action of running water, also accumulations of stones and scoriae thrown out by a volcano, which have fallen into their present place by the force of gravitation. But the matter which forms a chemical deposit has not been mechanically suspended in water, but in a state of solution until separated by chemical action. In this manner carbonate of lime is occasionally precipitated upon the bottom of lakes in a solid form, as may be well seen in many parts of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... miracles; the metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul, faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one another, links he will content ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... summer use; and many other examples of it will be found upon the grounds. The Mohammedan arch is suited better to materials, like wood and iron, which sustain themselves in part by cohesion, than to stone, which depends upon gravitation alone. Although it stands in stone in a long cordon of colonnades from the Ganges to the Guadalquivir, the eye never quite reconciles itself to the suggestion of untruth and feebleness in the recurved base of the arch. This defect, however, is obtrusive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... to remind his hearers that the war is yet far from ended, but he added that the Government, from the first, had soberly looked the danger in the face and frankly warned the country of the forthcoming sacrifices for the common cause and also for the strengthening of the mutual gravitation of the Slavonic races. He briefly referred to the Turkish defeat in the Caucasus as opening before the Russians a bright historical future on the shores ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... But gravitation's law, of course, As Isaac Newton showed it, Exerted on the cheese its force, And elsewhere soon bestowed it. In fact, there is no need to tell What happened when to earth ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... our organisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. We may modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneously to evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subvert gravitation: "Je m'en suis apercu etant par terre," is the only result, as ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the novel. It involves some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces—sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers. These were not original ideas; they were ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and the success which is sure to follow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Species" should shock the religious feelings of any one. Touching the likelihood of such a result, he reassured himself by recalling the fact that the greatest discovery ever made by man—namely, the law of the attraction of gravitation—was attacked by Leibnitz "as subversive of natural, and inferentially, of revealed, religion." Darwin was confident that, if any such impressions were made by his theory, they would prove but transient, and that ultimately ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... of Nature in the presence of Him who, when He created the Universe, invented those very laws, and impressed them on His irrational creatures.—Does it never humble her to reflect that it was but yesterday she detected the fundamental Law of Gravitation? Does she never blush with shame to consider that for well nigh six thousand years men have been inquisitively walking this Earth's surface; and yet, that, one hundred years ago, the provident notions concerning fossil ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... and billions of 'em flying around loose," said Phil Towns, who liked to read of astronomy at times. "Lots of 'em happen to get caught in the envelope of air that surrounds the earth. Then they fall victims to the force of gravitation, and come plunging down at such speed that they do really burn the air, just like Jack said. You see, they're made up for the most part of metals, and our old earth draws 'em like a ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... product of a force generated by the Word and by Resistance, which is Matter. But for Resistance, Motion would have had no results; its action would have been infinite. Newton's gravitation is not a law, but an effect of the general ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... trap, Nissr rocked and swayed, showing how great a weight had been let drop. Down sped the little, netted cube, whirling in the sunlight. Its speed was almost that of a rifle-ball—so far in excess of anything that could have been produced by gravitation as to suggest that some strange, magnetic force was hurling it earthward, like a metal-filing toward an electro-magnet. It dwindled to nothing, in a second, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... knowledge only of the past?' asked the Baronet, pointedly. 'Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for instance, knowledge of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... one-sided statement of facts? Did not all the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only it had valour and worth wherewith to grow? Did not the rains feed it, the very mortar in the wall give lime to its roots? Were not electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busy about the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready to help it, if it would only help itself? Surely this is true; ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... you know, is held to the earth's surface by gravitation, but, being gaseous, it is not held as closely as if it were in a solid state. Also, there is centrifugal force to be considered. Also the fact that the earth is not round, but flattened at the poles. Also the important fact that air at the equator is more heated than ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... great law of gravitation lifting up, by the warm sunbeams, the mighty iceberg which a million men could not raise a single inch, but melts away before the rays and the warmth of the sunshine, and rises in clouds of evaporation to meet its embrace until that cold and heavy mass ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... For that only is thought so which is uncommon, or a thing by itself, and out of the ordinary course of our observation. That bodies should tend towards the centre of the earth is not thought strange, because it is what we perceive every moment of our lives. But, that they should have a like gravitation towards the centre of the moon may seem odd and unaccountable to most men, because it is discerned only in the tides. But a philosopher, whose thoughts take in a larger compass of nature, having observed a certain similitude of appearances, as well in the heavens as ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... craft imperceptibly approached, as by gravitation. The men of the ketch saw we had changed our minds, and made ready to receive us. On one noisy uplift of a wave we got the lady inboard. Waiting another opportunity, floundering about below the black wall ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... sea" was a myth. Ships had crossed the equator, and their crews came back to tell of southward-stretching shadows. Ships were able, it was seen, to sail up the southern slope of the world as well as down it. Why they did not fall off into space, none knew, but that they did not was proved. Gravitation was a force whose laws and character were yet unformulated. The diurnal motion of the earth was hardly suspected until a hundred years later. But the facts on which these two fundamental truths are based were being gathered for Newton and Copernicus. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... for the Earthmen to get used to it, then it snapped off, and they went flying up toward the ceiling as it continued upward under its own momentum. It slowed under the influence of the planet's gravitation and came to a stop exactly opposite the doorway of ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,—except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... slanting direction, your highness, describing the hypotenuse between the base and perpendicular, created by the force of the wind, and the attraction of gravitation." ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... not merely explains but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... system introduced in working the hammer. A method of self-acting was afterwards added. In 1843, I admitted steam above the piston, to aid gravitation. This was an important improvement. The self-acting arrangement was eventually done away with, and hand-gear again became all but universal. Sir John Anderson, in his admirable Report on the Vienna Exhibition ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... their notes on seeing the mistress of the castle in the dance, that a perfumed southern atmosphere had begun to pervade the marquee, and that human beings were shaking themselves free of all inconvenient gravitation. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... could be seen working madly to keep from overturning, but apparently his hour had struck, for the last Jack saw of the beaten Gotha it was turning topsy-turvy, falling like a shooting star attracted to the earth by the law of gravitation. ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the Earth turned round In a most natural whirl, called "gravitation;" And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,[jt] Since Adam—with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... in a servant, as honest as the daylight, dull enough at her books, but a good, plodding worker, if you marked out every step of the way for her beforehand. I do not think she would ever have discovered the laws of gravitation; but she might have jumped off a precipice to prove them, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... a fact as the law of gravitation, and it would be as suicidal to ignore the operation of the one as that of the other. Mournful complaint is as impotent as an infant crying against the fury of the wild wind. History has taught you that the path of moral progress has never taken a straight line, but has ever been a zig-zag ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... laws or formulas. This, however, does not make political economy less practical than physics, for, after a principle is ascertained, its operation is to be observed in the same way that we study the force of gravitation in a falling stone, even when retarded by opposing forces. An economic force, or tendency, can be likewise distinctly observed, although other influences, working at the same time, prevent the expected effect from following its cause. It is, in short, the aim of political economy to investigate ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... that is, to me, one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows, what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing be possible, more so." The remark displays exactly what in all his important characters was the very ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in the wheel chair in so collapsed a pose that he seemed subjected to some exceptional pull of gravitation. His bronzed hands, on the chair arms, appeared to be welded to the brown wood; his head, resting against the chair back, never turned. But his troubled eyes, stealing round in their sockets, surprised on Lilla's countenance a look as if all her compassions had been united ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the condition of all, itself unlimited, namely, in the will fulfilling its original design. The "law of limitation," according to which not only the subordinate powers of man, but even the forces of Nature, from those concerned in the highest animal organization down to that of gravitation, are made to take their places in the chain of dependence which hangs from the human will, is the most important part, scientifically, of the whole work. It is in accordance with this law that the science of Morals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... enough that all living beings are machines in this respect—they are kept going by the reactions between their interior and their exterior; these reactions are either mechanical, as in flying, swimming, walking, and involve gravitation, or they are chemical and assimilative, as in breathing and eating. To that extent all living things are machines—some force exterior to themselves must aid in keeping them going; there is no spontaneous or uncaused movement in them; ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... adventure and the experience itself are both plausible. There are a few minor discrepancies, but when the chief assumption is granted the deductions will all stand examination. The invention of cavorite, the substance that is impervious to the force—whatever it may be—of gravitation, as other substances are impervious to light, heat, sound or electricity, is not a priori impossible, nor is the theory that the moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... "The machinery in your head is in fine working order, Tik-Tok. You know, Betsy, that there is such a thing as the Attraction of Gravitation, which draws everything toward the center of the earth. That is why we fall out of bed, and why everything clings to the ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... far more than he could use as a missile against the royals; but he was soon instructed in a method of employing it, which always grievously annoyed the enemy. Theoretically, I presume poor Jacko knew no more of the laws of gravitation, than his friends, the seamen, did of centrifugal action, when swinging round the hand-lead to gain soundings, by pitching it far forward into the water; but both the monkey and his wicked associates knew very well, that if a handspike were held across the top of the forecastle ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... to Experience Origin of the Notion of the Attraction of Gravitation Notion of Polarity, how generated Atomic Polarity Structural Arrangements due to Polarity Architecture of Crystals considered as an Introduction to their Action upon Light Notion of Atomic Polarity ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... truths and rights of things exist, fortunately, independent of our thoughts or wishes, fixed as mathematics, inherent in the nature of man and the world. They are no more to be trifled with than gravitation.—FROUDE, Inaugural Lecture at St. Andrews, 1869, 41. What have men to do with interests? There is a right way and a wrong way. That is all we need think about.—CARLYLE to FROUDE, Longman's Magazine, Dec. 1892, 151. As to History, it is full of indirect but very effective ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... of the world is driven by detonite—and we have evolved a super-detonite. We have proved that it will work. It will carry us beyond the pull of gravitation; it will give us the freedom of outer space. It ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... from its incidents and its counterfeits, there is bred a redundancy of verbal moralising. That was not a foible of Lincoln. The sense of moral obligation underlies his weightier utterances, as the law of gravitation underlies scientific demonstrations,—not talked of, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... are equally unhappy. In contrast to this, you have only to go out of your way to do a kind and perfectly disinterested action and experience the glow of sheer happiness that it brings, in order to realize that you are dealing with a law of life that is as sure and unalterable as the law of gravitation. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... the formation of any other arch in the world—I mean, the attraction of the moon and planets: Because the arch was of so great a height, and in some parts so elongated from the earth, as in a great measure to diminish in its gravitation to the centre of our globe; or rather, seemed more easily operated upon by the attraction of the planets: So that the stones of the arch, one would think, at certain times, were ready to fall up to the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... God's relation to the world goes to the opposite extreme. Instead of God doing nothing, He does everything. Second causes have no efficiency. The laws of nature are said to be the uniform modes of divine operation. Gravitation does not flow from the nature of matter, but is a mode of God's uniform efficiency. What are called chemical affinities are not due to anything in different kinds of matter, but God always acts in ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... of moral distinctions, all modifying—many reversing—the old ones. What would have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual conscience of man. Metanoeite (was the cry from ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... is stated, that Newton's proving, that, if a body revolved in an elliptical orbit with the sun as a focus, the force of gravitation toward the sun would always be in the inverse ratio of the square of its distance, "was equivalent to proving, that, if a body in space, free to move, received a single impulse, and at the same moment was attracted to a fixed centre by a force which diminished ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of a larger thrust exerted by the screw in pressing forward the shaft and with it the vessel, but by the gravitation against the stern of the wave of water which the screw raises by its rapid rotation. This wave will only be raised very high when the progress of the vessel through the water is nearly arrested, at which time the centrifugal action ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... the present day' as an 'idle waste of labour and ingenuity on questions to which the human mind is altogether incompetent.'[182] The principles found by inductive observation are as independent of these speculations as Newton's theory of gravitation of an ultimate mechanical ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... pippin falling upon the head of Sir ISAAC NEWTON (a clear case of hard cider on the brain) suggested the laws of gravitation. An elderly countryman passing my window this clear bright day, attended by his faithful umbrella, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... another by cows is attended by such severe muscular exertion, jars, jolts, mental excitement, and gravitation of the womb and abdominal organs backward that it may easily cause abortion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... schemes, it had humble beginnings," said Sypher, in comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of his subordinate. "Newton saw an apple drop to the ground: hence the theory of gravitation. The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings of a little dog's mouth who had been eating shell fish. The great Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson's family kettle. A soldier happened to tell me that his mother had applied Sypher's Cure ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... because it is always changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in physical rebirths. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the gravitation of material life. Few have attained this, but it is ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... because it will maintain its equilibrium without being held in position by shafts or other similar means. So far as contact with the road is concerned it is two-wheeled; and yet, in its relation to the force of gravitation upon which its statical stability depends, it is a four or six-wheeler according to the number of the small truck-wheels with ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... importance and to pay sufficient attention to its development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without it Newton would never have found the law of gravitation, nor Columbus have discovered America. The world of make-believe is filled with delight for the small child. He loves stories of imaginary adventure that he can act ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... vicarious service in influencing more youthful planets within its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at once from its gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has not yet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system to which it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages of stellar life and died out ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... own Auntie Jennie could not have foreborne to say that there is no island so deserted that I would not find a nice young man in it. I consider this statement as merely displaying the most ordinary and even superficial acquaintance with the laws of gravitation. ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... respectful; but he wisely abstained from pressing for an immediate decision, and trusted to reflection and to Aunt Becky's good offices; and knew that his gold would operate by its own slow, but sure, gravitation. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... seemed to answer to every movement of her companion. Whence comes this flame that radiates from a woman in love and distinguishes her above all others? Whence that sylph-like lightness which seems to negative the laws of gravitation? Is the soul become ambient? Has happiness a ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... the emphatic nod the doctor frowned. "We are forced to conclude that Capellette is not as round as our earth. No other way to account for such a difference in gravitation as the two clocks indicate. Roughly, I should say that the planet's diameter, at the place where I saw the clock, is fifty per cent greater than at the point where Van's agent is located; maybe ten thousand miles in its greatest ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... of astronomy in the eighteenth century ran in general an even and logical course. The age succeeding Newton's had for its special task to demonstrate the universal validity, and trace the complex results, of the law of gravitation. The accomplishment of that task occupied just one hundred years. It was virtually brought to a close when Laplace explained to the French Academy, November 19, 1787, the cause of the moon's accelerated ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... soil of intellect will sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe" of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies." Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of Xenocrates, and was so struck with the energy displayed by the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... course, German, and may be translated "boisterous ghost." A poltergeist is seldom or never seen, but contents itself by moving furniture and other objects about in an extraordinary manner, often contrary to the laws of gravitation; sometimes footsteps are heard, but nothing is visible, while at other times vigorous rappings will be heard either on the walls or floor of a room, and in the manner in which the raps are given a poltergeist has often showed itself as having a close connection ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... in man has its own inevitable urgency, as well as what is lowest. It can never be left out of the account. Gravitation is powerful and perpetual; but the pine pushes up in opposition to it nevertheless. The forces of the inorganic realm strive with might to keep their own; but organic life will exist on the planet in their despite, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... which charmed so many boy readers in 'Pirate Island' and 'Congo Rovers.' ... There is a thrilling adventure on the precipices of Mount Everest, when the ship floats off and providentially returns by force of 'gravitation.'"—Academy. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... were obtained. The scheme was, however, abandoned from practical difficulties. It need hardly be said that ether vapor is very difficult to deal with, and although ether is light, the vapor is extremely heavy, and if there is any leakage, it goes down into the bilges by gravitation, and being mixed with air, unless due care is taken to prevent access to the flues, there would be a constant risk of a violent explosion. In fact, it was necessary to treat the engine room in the way in which a fiery colliery would be treated. The lighting, for instance, was by lamps ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar system—every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period are only the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... despotism which poets have celebrated in the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," whose music drew like the power of gravitation,—drew soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pallbearers dance around the bier. This is a power of many degrees, and requiring in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... her career of revolution round the earth, we may well suppose that her orbit was much smaller than at present. She was influenced by counteracting forces, those of gravitation drawing her towards the centre of gravity of the earth,[1] and the centrifugal force, which in the first instance was the stronger, so that her orbit for a lengthened period gradually increased until the two forces, those of attraction and repulsion, came into a condition ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... this is not infallible; and it cannot be claimed that the Canon of the Christian Sacred Books is infallible. But experience has shown that the mistakes, so far as there have been mistakes, are unimportant; and in practice even these are rectified by the natural gravitation of the mind of man to that which it finds most nourishing ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... for any man to behold these things, and yet imagine that certain solid and individual bodies move by their natural force and gravitation, and that a world so beautifully adorned was made by their fortuitous concourse? He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... treatise on Karma and its practical working in detail, whereby the place and time of the next birth, its content and duration. are determined; and to do this the present commentator is in no wise fitted. But this much is clearly understood: that, through a kind of spiritual gravitation, the incarnating self is drawn to a home and life-circle which will give it scope and discipline; and its need of discipline is clearly conditioned by its character, its ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Copernicus recognized expressly that his theory was suggested to him by an hypothesis of Pythagoras—that of a revolution of the earth about a central fire, assumed to be in a fixed position. Newton imagined his hypothesis of gravitation from the year 1666 on, then abandoned it, the result of his calculations disagreeing with observation; finally he took it up again after a lapse of a few years, having obtained from Paris the new measure of the terrestrial meridian that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... feel any attraction for the prosaic practice of law, his father's profession, to which Austria's despotism drove many a nobleman in those wretched days for Hungary. It was Petofi, the poet, who was his dearest friend during the student-life at Papa; idealism ever attracted him, and, by natural gravitation toward the finest minds, he chose the friendship of young men who quickly rose into eminence during the days of revolution and ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... here!" cried Mark. "But what's happened to me?" "Whatever it is, it has happened to us all," returned his chum. "I seem to have overcome a good bit of the law of gravitation. Never felt so light in my heels in ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... distinctly saw the aphides ejecting the fluid from their bodies with considerable force, and this accounts for its being frequently found in situations where it could not have arrived by the mere influence of gravitation. The drops that are thus spurted out, unless interrupted by the surrounding foliage, or some other interposing body, fall upon the ground; and the spots may often be observed, for some time, beneath and ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... reign, in other respects so inglorious. In 1666 Newton discovered the law of gravitation and created a new theory of the Universe. In 1667 Milton published "Paradise Lost," and in 1672 Bunyan gave to the world his allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress." There was no inspiration to genius in the cause of King and Cavaliers. But the stern ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... very seldom hurt at this game, though how he escapes without a broken neck is one of the wonders of gravitation to me. One second you see the poor beggar in mid air, going like a circular saw through soft pine. Just when you are beginning to wonder if he has converted himself into a catherine-wheel or a corkscrew, he straightens himself out horizontally, remains poised ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which effected it into ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... paid so poor a compliment to her own denomination as to suppose that the natural gravitation of piety was towards Dissent. But Molly's volatile nature passed to a different subject ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... garden in Florence where certain workmen asked him a question about a pump, he would not, according to Helvetius, have discovered the weight of the atmosphere. It was the fall of the apple which gave Newton his theory of gravitation. Such puerilities as these disgust us in the book; yet the theory that greatness is but the result of an inconsiderable accident, was not unnatural in one who had probably hit on an idea which struck him as telling, and believed that he had ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... says that Sir Isaac Newton was one of the six best educated men the world has seen. He was the first man to resolve light into its constituent elements. Voltaire says that when Newton discovered the Law of Gravitation he excited the envy of ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Such mishaps never drew tears, however, from his large blue eyes. After struggling violently to get over the rail of his crib, and falling heavily on the floor, he was wont to rise with a gasp, and gaze in bewilderment straight before him, as if he were rediscovering the law of gravitation. No phrenologist ever conceived half the number of bumps that were developed on his ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule being superseded; and Science advanced a great step at once. So in our own day was the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain facts which could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless the Law of Gravitation was to be corrected. The result in this case was not the discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a great confirmation of the old Law. But in each case and in every similar case the investigation ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... man had been incredibly thin and frail. Under normal gravitation, his life would have gone out like a blown match. Even at one-sixth G, it had cost him effort to rise and greet the guest. There had been a younger man, a mere stripling of seventy-odd; he had been worried, and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... of the operation of the law of gravitation that the uppermost layer shall be the youngest and the lowest the oldest, and that the different beds shall be older at any particular point or spot in exactly the ratio of their depth from the surface. So that if they were upheaved afterwards, and you ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... it as serious history. And yet, as I have said a good many times, they go on as though nothing had happened, although the foundation of their house has been removed. Only theories which stand in the air can thus defy the law of gravitation. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain— the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... escape of so much as would be requisite to prevent explosion), but, being what it was, would, at all events, continue specifically lighter than any compound whatever of mere nitrogen and oxygen. In the meantime, the force of gravitation would be constantly diminishing, in proportion to the squares of the distances, and thus, with a velocity prodigiously accelerating, I should at length arrive in those distant regions where the force of the earth's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... any cause which is variable in time or place, we do not in everyday life speculate as to the cause of gravity, and therefore do not become conscious of its character as action at a distance. It was Newton's theory of gravitation that first assigned a cause for gravity by interpreting it as action at a distance, proceeding from masses. Newton's theory is probably the greatest stride ever made in the effort towards the causal nexus of ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the square of their distances. This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space; and our world builders ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and supposed cases the so-called "law" of vulgar political economy is absolutely set at defiance. But I cannot set the law of gravitation at defiance, nor determine that in my house I will not allow ice to melt, when the temperature is above thirty-two degrees. A true law outside of my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It is not, therefore, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... figures, each seated on a Gothic throne reading and meditating. The larger scenes are topped with charming figures of angels in primitive skies of the "twisted ribbon" style of cloud, angels whose duty and whose joy is to trump eternally and float in defiance of natural laws of gravitation. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... subject-matter of that science? When Astronomy 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... trumpets; the twenty-four prancing steeds with manes, tails, and feathered heads tossing in the breeze; the clowns, the tumblers, the strong men, and the riders flying about in the air as if the laws of gravitation no longer existed. But, best of all, was the grand conglomeration of animals where the giraffe appears to stand on the elephant's back, the zebra to be jumping over the seal, the hippopotamus to be lunching off a couple of crocodiles, and lions and tigers to be raining down in all ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... in the political sense is meant a command imposed by a superior upon an inferior and sanctioned by a penalty for disobedience. But by the 'laws of nature' are meant merely certain uniformities among natural phenomena; for instance, the 'law of gravitation' means that every particle of matter does invariably attract every other particle of ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... experienced in these aquatic scrambles. It takes a long time to get used to pulling oneself downward, or propping your knees against the under crevices of rocks. To all intents and purposes, the law of gravitation is partly suspended, and when stone and wooden wedge accidentally slip from one's hand and disappear in opposite directions, it is confusing, to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... retrograde direction; and so on, through a long list of interesting and striking details. Not only, therefore, are we driven to the inference that our solar system was once a vaporous nebula, but we find that the mere contraction of such a nebula, under the influence of the enormous mutual gravitation of its particles, carries with it the explanation of both the more general and the more particular features of the present system. So that we may fairly regard this stupendous process as veritable matter of history, while we proceed ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... possible—the whole wretched truth would be revealed. Each day he had been tormented with the feeling that something must be done, and yet nothing had been done. He had only sunk deeper and deeper, as with the resistless force of gravitation. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Civil War (1642). In the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and from the time he left College his life became a series of wonderful physical discoveries. As early as 1666, he discovered the law of gravitation, but it was not till the eve of the Revolution that his "Principia" revealed to the world his new ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... been there was a blank, an emptiness. Her heart when it cried out to him produced the queer, creepy effect of a man talking to himself—there was no one to hear or to answer. There was a needle but no pole; there was a law of gravitation, but nothing to justify the power ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... against in a former age." By this, I understand him to express his belief that my theory has been rejected heretofore. Well. It may, nevertheless, be the true theory. The Copernican astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who should deny it. Steam, in all its applications, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
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