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More "Incompleteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divine way of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she told all about her unhappy ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... prosperity, when he was conscious of having dealt severely with her foibles. All was at an end—that double thread of brilliant good-nature and worldly selfishness, with the one strand of sound principle sometimes coming into sight. The life was gone from the earth in its incompleteness, without an unravelling of its complicated texture, and the wandering utterances that revealed how entirely the brother stood first with her, added poignancy to his regret for having been harsh with her. It could hardly be otherwise than that his censures, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... within thy hair, Were it not strange If he were glad Who cannot keep thy heart from care, Or shelter from the whip of pain The bosom where his head hath lain? Poor sentinel, that may not guard The door that love itself unbarred! Who in the sweetness Of his service knows its incompleteness, And while he sings Of life eternal, feels ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy
... primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an old, black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the beauty that surrounded him—the chill there was in the warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first signs of this longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... temple of Marduk with its huge pyramid-like foundation, was the site of this tower. On the west of the Euphrates, however, is a vast mound called Birs Nimrood, which used to be regarded as the ruins of the Tower of Babel. The fact that it early gave the impression of incompleteness favors this claim. Nebuchadnezzar says on a tablet that another king began it but left it unfinished. It fell into disrepair and was completed by Nebuchadnezzar and was used as one of the great temples. It was ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Rowland was dissatisfied with her success, while seeing that some resources of comfort remained to the Hopes and Margaret, a view of the interior of the corner-house would probably have affected her deeply, and set her moralising on the incompleteness of all human triumphs. There was peace there which even she could not invade—could only, if she had known it, envy. Her power was now exhausted, and her work was unfinished. For many weeks, she had made Margaret as miserable ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all who participate become rich. It is so in ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... turned, which formed the very core and center of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact, according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love with other women. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... my life and being, my desires and endeavours, were not discerned by my parents, so is it with me now with regard to certain German Governments.[11] And just as my outward life then was imperfect and incomplete, through which incompleteness my inner life was misunderstood, so also now the imperfection and incompleteness of my establishment prevent people from discerning the true nature, the basis, the source, the aim and purpose, of my desires and endeavours, and from promoting them, after recognising their value, in ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... very ill:—well, when they have full time, full scope, and a sympathetic listener:—ill, when they fear interruption and are annoyed by the impossibility of exhausting the topic during that particular talk. The partial genius is flashy—scrappy. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said. He is so filled with his theme that he is dumb, first from not knowing how to begin, where there seems eternally ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... room. They can scarcely be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was their orderly arrangement. The apprehension of dying suddenly, and leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day. The largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of life-blood that course ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... morphological knowledge of these organisms is that of their behavior, mental life, and social relations. But certainly no one who is conversant with the behavioristic, psychological and sociological literature could do otherwise than emphasize its incompleteness and inadequacy. For our knowledge of behavior has come mostly from naturalistic observation, scarcely at all from experimentation; our knowledge of social relations is obviously meager and of uncertain value; and finally, our knowledge of mind is barely more than a collection ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... the highest qualities of our nature might have an opportunity for development. The joy, which a true friendship gives, reveals the existence of the want of it, perhaps previously unfelt. It is a sin against ourselves to let our affections wither. This sense of incompleteness is an argument in favor of its possible satisfaction; our need is an argument for its fulfilment. Our hearts demand love, as truly as our bodies demand food. We cannot live among men, suspicious, and careful of our own ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... altar servants, broidered vestments of the priests and pallid torches of a hundred candles belonged to the Rome of Caesar Borgia and not to the Rome of Caesar Nero. Into that singular building, impressive in its incompleteness, crept no echo of the catacombs, and the sighing of the reed notes was voluptuous as a lover's whisper, and as far removed from the murmurs of the Christian martyrs. Here were pomp and majesty with all their emotional appeal. Mystery alone was lacking. The robes of Cardinal Pescara lent ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... against the abominable pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... arrived. Until that time comes, every teacher who finds himself under the necessity of beating a boy's body in order to attain certain moral or intellectual ends ought to understand that the reason is the incompleteness of his understanding and skill in dealing directly with his mind; though for this incompleteness he may not himself be ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... has been paid to making all statements correct and accurate as far as they go. Many of them are necessarily incomplete, on account of the elementary character of the work; but it is hoped that this incompleteness has never been allowed to become untruth, and that the pupil will not afterwards have to unlearn anything the ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... of the manumitted four million slaves of the Southern United States later on, bore glorious testimony to the humanizing effects which the religion of charity, clutched at and grasped in fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness, had produced ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Tchekoff, has said: "He is a tender crayon." It would be hard to find a more suitable expression. The delicacy of tone, the softness of touch in the outlines, the polish of some of the details, the capricious incompleteness of others are, in fact, the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... ground, to picture the passions and politics of the time, to bring the counter influence of the French Revolution as near as possible to reality, has been a three years' task. The autobiography of David Ritchie is as near as I can get to its solution, and I have a great sense of its incompleteness. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... habits, periods, belonging to an animal never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith, as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet, age-long labour of God preparing the world with all its humble, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... rapidly the inflammation is said to be acute, and chronic when they take place slowly. Chronic inflammation is more complex than is the acute, and there is more variation in the single conditions. The chronicity may be due to a number of conditions, as the persistence of a cause, or to incompleteness of repair which renders the part once affected more vulnerable, to such a degree even that the ordinary conditions to which it is subjected become injurious. A chronic inflammation may be little more than an almost continuous ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the reputation it once had, this work is now almost unknown. But few have ever heard of it, still fewer read it; a fact due, of course, to its incompleteness. The first and only volume ends with the departure of Louis from Versailles to Paris, when the Revolution was as yet in its earliest stages. This must ever be a matter of regret. That succeeding volumes, had she written them, would have been even better is very probable. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... unequal. The two longest, the fragmentary Quatre Facardins and the finished Le Belier, run each of them to 142 pages; the shortest, L'Enchanteur Faustus, has just five-and-twenty; while Fleur d'Epine, in its completeness, has 114, and Zeneyde, in its incompleteness, runs to 78, and might have run, for aught one can tell—in the mixed tangle of Roman and Merovingian history in which the author (possibly in ridicule of Madeleine de Scudery's classical chronicling) has chosen to plunge it—to 780 or 7800, which latter figure would, after ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... greater heights, it will always be cheering to hear those about me say, "Well done!" Of course in saying this they will inevitably hint that I have not yet reached an end, and their praises will displease unless I too am ready to acknowledge my incompleteness. But when this is acknowledged, praise is welcome and invigorating. I suspect we deal in it too little. If imagination were more active, and we were more willing to enter sympathetically the inner life of our ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... States new applications of electricity literally every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those few apprehended things, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... classes: les trompeurs, les trompes, les trompettes. According to her judgment, man is either fatiguing or, if brilliantly endowed, usually false or jealous; but she realized, also, her own shortcomings, the incompleteness of her faculties. "The force of her thought does not reach talent; her intelligence is active and responsive, but fails to respond. She often shows a sovereign disdain for herself, everybody, and everything. She arrives at a point in life when she no longer has ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... subjugated Saxons gradually became infected with all the vices and addicted to all the social disorders that prevailed among the Irish in the same age; only in Ireland the anarchy endured much longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and antagonistic. Perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading effects of conquest on the noble Saxon race to ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... contained but 5 pages of type; the second of 1898, 14 pages. Only by conciseness has it been possible to give even a summary of the principles of dietetics within the limit or this pamphlet. Should there appear in places an abruptness or incompleteness of treatment, these limitations must be ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... was in vain to attempt anything but submission. Tom had his terrible clutch on her conscience and her deepest dread; she writhed under the demonstrable truth of the character he had given to her conduct, and yet her whole soul rebelled against it as unfair from its incompleteness. He, meanwhile, felt the impetus of his indignation diverted toward Philip. He did not know how much of an old boyish repulsion and of mere personal pride and animosity was concerned in the bitter severity of the ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... contest. After that I will agree to strive not to give offence to you, and also to bear silently whatever conceit and insults may escape you. Perhaps we may become friends. But we cannot remain as we are. The blow you struck the other day must be answered for. I ask satisfaction, and the incompleteness and vulgarity of a pugilistic encounter will not suit me. I propose, therefore, as we cannot resort to the regular duel of pistols, (for reasons so good and evident that I need not name them), that after the example of the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... matters of sex, a distortion of all other interests and activities by a preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization. The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance which marked the reported signing of the armistice at the close ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... thought he had killed Harry, although he knew he had Pauline gagged and bound in the bottom of the runabout, Hicks was afraid. He was afraid of the incompleteness of the thing. He was eager to have done with the girl as well as with the man. And now this latest plan of Owen's was but another chapter ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... afterward?" I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and moral atmosphere in which sexual conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our lives, draw ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... feeling of suddenness and incompleteness and a natural pang of wonder and regret for a life so richly and so vitally endowed thus cut off in its prime. But for us it is not fitting to question or repine, but rather to rejoice in the rare possession that we hold. What is any life, even the most rounded and complete, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... father, always reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old, should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of his situation was referable to her father, through the painful anxiety to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he did not discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had its influence ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of the geological record the more because those who have not attended to these matters are apt to say, "It is all very well, but, when you get into a difficulty with your theory of evolution, you appeal to the incompleteness and the imperfection of the geological record;" and I want to make it perfectly clear to you that this imperfection is a great fact, which must be taken into account in all our speculations, or we shall constantly ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... we see that Nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... settled at a personal interview; in many cases the Prince prepared a memorandum of an important interview; but there are a considerable number of such correspondences, where no record is preserved of the eventual solution, and this incompleteness is regrettable, but, by the nature ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... said: "We do not know anything about God unless we first know that we cannot know Him perfectly." [1] How superb, as against all this impatience of spirit, are the reserve and patience of Christ. Accept doubts, he says. Bear with incompleteness. Give faith its chance to grow. First the blade, then the ear, and then the harvest. There are some things which youth can prove, and some which only the experience of maturity can teach, and then there are some mysteries which are perhaps to be made plain ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... they are at the same time among the smallest. Moreover, considering the general relation between the inclination of planetoid orbits and their eccentricities, it is probable that among the orbits of these undetected planetoids are many of the most eccentric. But while recognizing the incompleteness of the evidence, it seems to me that it goes far to justify the hypothesis of Olbers, and is quite incongruous with that of Laplace. And as having the same meanings let me not omit the remarkable fact concerning the planetoids discovered by D'Arrest, that ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... hands, winds her shawl about it, and at once the God-given maternal instinct leaps into life,—in an instant she has it in her arms. She kisses its cotton head and sings it to sleep in divine unconsciousness of any incompleteness, for love supplies many deficiencies. So let us cherish the child heart in ourselves and never look with scorn upon the rude suggestions of the forms the child has built, but rather enter into the play, enriching it with our own imaginative power. The children ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... then, if he were in sympathy with the ideals of which this building was the outward expression, he would wake from his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not the beauty, but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its proximity to the city beyond, but its air of aloofness from the community in which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... invitations to the most attractive places in England, Ireland, Scotland,—but "c'est admirable, mais ce n'est pas la paix." May I count on the "paix" where I so much enjoyed it? I hear with delight that Edith will be with you again,—that completes the otherwise incompleteness. Yes, the Rezzonico is what you Americans call a "big thing."... But the interest I take in its acquisition is different altogether from what accompanied the earlier attempt. At most, I look on approvingly, as by all ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... obscurities, incongruities, and chasms, as might naturally be anticipated, admitting them to be strictly what they would pass for. These faults may be accounted for in several ways. First, in a rude stage of philosophical culture, incompleteness of theory, inconsistent conceptions in different parts of a system, are not unusual, but are rather to be expected, and are slow to become troublesome to its adherents. Secondly, distinct contemporary thinkers or sects may give expression to their various views ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... object, then, is to bring the mind into such a condition of training and cultivation that it shall be a perfect mirror of past times, and of the present, so far as the incompleteness of the present will permit, 'in true outline and proportion.' Mommsen, Grote, Droysen, fall short of the ideal, because they drugged ancient history with modern politics. The Jesuit learning of the sixteenth century was sham learning, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should he? What have I ever done ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... professor derives, like many others, from the 'yearning for something that neither sense nor reason can supply'; and from the assumption that 'there was in the heart of man from the very first a feeling of incompleteness, of weakness, of dependency, &c.' All this, I take it, is due to the aspirations of a much later creature than the 'Pithecanthropus erectus,' to whom we ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... difference in the meaning of these. The rising interval is heard naturally at the end of a direct question; that is, one to which "yes" or "no" is an expected answer, as "Are you going home?" The suspensive tone which the voice assumes at the end of the interrogation is indicative of incompleteness of thought; and indication of incompleteness is the characteristic function ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... is certain that neither Miss Beadnell as a girl nor Mrs. Winter as a matron made any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been often mentioned in connection with his name were, for the most part, mere passing favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his best-known book. The companion to whom he clung in his later years was neither a light-minded creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an undeveloped, high-tempered woman like the one he married, nor a mere domestic, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... four Evangelical narratives were collected into a volume and dignified with the title of "The Gospel,"—S. Mark's narrative was furnished by some unknown individual with its actual termination in order to remedy its manifest incompleteness; and that this volume became the standard of the Alexandrine recension of the text: in other words, became the fontal source of a mighty family of MSS. by Griesbach designated as "Alexandrine." But there ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... series of sonnets is an artistic contradiction in terms. There may be magnificent individual sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. They do not explain themselves. They are chapters not books, parts of a composition and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to doubt that, fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest single sonnets, beginning ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the incompleteness of Eucken's philosophy. He does not introduce his philosophy with a systematic discussion of the great epistemological and ontological problems. Philosophers have often introduced their work in this way, and it has been customary ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Latin in, signifies "penetration," "motion towards," or simply "remaining in a place," or, again, "permanence." M, like the Latin ab or ex, indicates "motion from." R expresses "uncertainty" or "incompleteness," and is employed to convert a statement into a question, or a relative pronoun into one of inquiry. G, like the Greek a or anti, generally signifies "opposition" or "negation;" ca is, as aforesaid, intensitive, and is employed, for example, to ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... to fall in the second; while in the question and the condition, the pitch rises and falls in the first, and then rises again in the second. Doubt, expectation, tension, excitement—all the forward looking moods of incompleteness—tend to find expression in a rising melody; while assurance, repose, relaxation, fulfillment, are embodied in a falling melody. The high tones are dynamic and stimulating; the low tones, static and peaceful. Now in ordinary ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... us by all the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom alone we can find the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be brought to cease to say it. Death cannot kill love to God; and the only end of the religious life of earth is its perfecting in heaven. The experiences that we have here, in their loftiness and in their incompleteness, equally witness for us, of the rest and the perfectness that remain for the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... hundreds of other events of daily life are occasions which may arouse thinking on the part of a little child. It is not the type of situation, nor its dignity, that is the important thing in thinking, but the way in which it is dealt with. The incorrectness of a child's data, their incompleteness and lack of organization, often result in incorrect conclusions, and still his thinking may be absolutely sound. The difference between the child and the adult in this power is a difference in degree—both possess the power. As Dewey ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... mutual,—that want, that dependence, that sense of incompleteness which each felt without the other. It was a blessed thing to have, something to be cherished, and he knew how desperately he had reacted to everything that ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... larger and larger and larger draughts of the fulness of His life. We have only been like goldseekers, who have contented themselves as yet with washing the precious grains out of the gravel of the river. There are great reefs filled with the ore that we have not touched. Thank God for the necessary incompleteness of our 'apprehending.' It is the very salt of life. To have realised our aims, to have fulfilled our ideals, to have sucked dry the cluster of the grapes is the death of aspiration, of hope, of blessedness; and to have the distance beckoning, and all experience 'an arch, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... An exquisite incompleteness, The theme of a song unset; A waft in the shuttle of life; A bud with the dew still wet; The dawn of a day uncertain; The delicate bloom of fruit; The plant with some leaves unfolded, The rest asleep at ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west, Toll slowly! And I 'paused' to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness,— Round our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method superadded—a Coleridge capable of becoming ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... taken that opportunity which the moment of victory gave us, of effectuating a government essentially strong and beneficial to the governed. The time therefore, we may expect, will come, when a second interference will be demanded, both by the recollection of our present conquest and the incompleteness of its consequences; and we shall be doomed to find, that we have won two hard-fought battles merely to enforce the necessity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Life,"[2] are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours after a spurious consolation. All round ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of a beggar's sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labour imposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of a great scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection, from human incompleteness to the divine completion. This sense of being, not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force, gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity which kings ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... said in verse 17 is that when Sacrifices are done from a sense of duty, notwithstanding their incompleteness, they become efficacious. It is only when they are performed from desire of fruit that expiation becomes necessary if their completion be obstructed by any cause. Having thus applauded the Sacrifices (represented by acts) of the truly ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... be well, by the way, to print it in the meanwhile as a fragment confessed ... sowing asterisks at the end. Because as a poem of yours it stands there and wants unity, and people can't be expected to understand the difference between incompleteness and defect, unless you make a sign. For the new poems—they are full of beauty. You throw largesses out on all sides without counting the coins: how beautiful that 'Night and Morning' ... and the 'Earth's ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... enquiry had to be fashioned as the enquiry itself went on, and I suspect that the consequences of this will be apparent in some inequality and incompleteness in the earlier portions. For instance, I am afraid that the textual analysis of the quotations in Justin may seem somewhat less satisfactory than that of those in the Clementine Homilies, though Justin's quotations are the more important of the two. Still I hope that the treatment of ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... the action was accomplished, the curtain had fallen, and the lights had been put out, but the comedy had come to no conclusion. Comedy-tragedy; it does not matter much which words you use. The scenes had all died away in incompleteness, and there had been no end. To many a gentle life such as that of Chatty might be, this is all that ever happens beyond the level of the ordinary and common. It was with a touch of insight altogether beyond her usual intellectual capacity that she realised this ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... surely be the dominant poet in this century. I feel the ecstasy with which he exclaims, "Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth this autumn morning!" And how he sets my brain going when he says, because there is imperfection, there must be perfection; completeness must come of incompleteness; failure is an evidence of triumph for the fulness of the days. Yes, discord is, that harmony may be; pain destroys, that health may renew; perhaps I am deaf and blind that others likewise afflicted may see and hear with a more perfect sense! ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... taken in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other countries. But I am LIVING with this and also, through relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture, a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of something better or worse, in any case in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... facts that threatens my client with ruin, gentlemen of the jury," he began, "what is really damning for my client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you would have hesitated to ruin a man's life simply from the prejudice against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it's not an ordinary ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... indications are strong that rules of conduct are not inherent in the human mind, that men become moral to the extent that they are taught the principles of justice, and grow one-sided in their ideas of virtue through incompleteness in their moral education. What we call sinfulness is largely a matter of custom and convention. Men cannot properly be said to sin when their actions are checked by no conscientious scruples, and what one people ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... exclude. It therefore turns to experience, and directs its attention on those combinations which military history can furnish. In this manner, no doubt, nothing more than a limited theory can be obtained, which only suits circumstances such as are presented in history. But this incompleteness is unavoidable, because in any case theory must either have deduced from, or have compared with, history what it advances with respect to things. Besides, this incompleteness in every case ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... [a]p is a final sound. With initial sounds the case is different. Let the lips be closed, and let an attempt be made to form the syllable pa by suddenly opening them. The sound appears incomplete; but its incompleteness is at the beginning of the sound, and not at the end of it. In the natural course of things there would have been a current of breath preceding, and this current would have given a vibration, now wanting. All the sound that is formed here is formed, not by the arrest of breath, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of the whole—of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... high-tariff men then and which remain so still;" while, on the other hand, "his superficial research, his habit of satisfying himself with half-knowledge, and his disinclination to reason out propositions logically in all their consequences" gave incompleteness to his otherwise brilliant effort. It made a great impression in spite of its weak points, and called out in opposition the extraordinary abilities of Daniel Webster, through whose massive sentences appeared his "superiority in keenness of analysis, in logical reasoning, in extent and accuracy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... further length of works on the River Soar up to what is known as the old grass weir, including the Braunstone Gate Bridge, added to one of the then running contracts, at a total cost, excluding land and compensation, of L77,000. At this point a halt was made in consequence of the incompleteness of the negotiations with the land owners on the upper reach of the river, and this, together with various other circumstances, has contributed to greater delay in again resuming the works. In the interval, a question of whether there should be only one channel for both river ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... its own sake, but who do not care to arrive at a mutual understanding in order to produce in common a single work, since they do not know that it is the conception of a grand whole which constitutes greatness in art. Hence the incompleteness of the monuments; there is not a tomb to which the relations of the deceased have deemed it fitting to give the finishing touches; there is everywhere a certain egotism, like that which in later times prevented the Mussulman monuments from enduring. A passing pleasure in art does not induce ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... that of the hall. Some notice of the interior order of great houses has appeared in earlier chapters—e.g., that on "Children of the Chapel"—but such special reference, involving no more than the religious side of domestic arrangements, leaves a sense of incompleteness, and this void we ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... all of which his eyes and ears had cognizance; and the impression is the more strong, because the writer has told only that, and left the rest to our imagination. This illustrates one feature of the author's skill. He knows the effect producible by leaving circumstances in the incompleteness and obscurity in which they often present themselves to the senses of a single person; he tells just what that person could have perceived, and leaves the sketch to be finished by his reader. Thus, when Porteous is hurried away to execution, we attend his ruthless conductors, but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... a time the discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness, while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had any real ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... to the keeping of her rival; or perhaps the full orchestra at the last 'philharmonic,' supplying the missing notes, the beginning and the end of some noble idea, now vainly struggling with the difficulties and incongruities of its new position, its maimed members mourning their incompleteness, its tortured spirit longing for the body ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... came to the House of the Golden Pillars. Everything moved as smoothly, as delicately, as prosperously, as before. But inwardly there was a subtle, inexplicable transformation. A vague discontent—a final and inevitable sense of incompleteness, overshadowed existence from that night when Hermas realized that his joy could never go ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... very perfection, by the very completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its demand. Under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also tried certain other ideas. Very often this vague appeal had the quality of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... trains of thought, considering how they worked, and how they ought to be modified in order to maintain what was really sound and valuable in their content. Hence, Mill is the easiest person in the world to convict of inconsistency, incompleteness, and lack of rounded system. Hence, also, his work will survive the death of many consistent, complete, and ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... had been separated there had always awakened in him an uneasiness. In his nights alone he lay sleepless, oppressed, a nostalgia for her presence growing in him. With his eyes opened at the darkness of a strange room he experienced then an incompleteness as if he himself were not enough. The emptiness in which he was living became suddenly real. He would feel a despair. Words unlike the sophisticated patter of his usual thought would come to him.... "What is there ... I would like ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... in love with you," he said. "Because love hitherto has been one of the abominations. In the world I have destroyed love existed. It was the foul paradox of egoism. Man, feeling suddenly the torment of his incompleteness, embraced woman. He was inspired by the mania to transform his desires ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... Notwithstanding its incompleteness and insincerity, however, "the Edict of Forgiveness," as it was termed, is a significant landmark in the history of French Protestantism. It is the point where begins the transition from the period of persecution to the period of civil war. By this concession, reluctantly granted and faithlessly ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Second Scheme.—To remedy this incompleteness, resort may be had to the device of detaching a few vessels from the fleet and making each represent a force of the enemy; one destroyer, for instance, to represent a division, four destroyers four divisions, etc. This scheme has the advantage that all the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... out of its scrappiness and incompleteness he gathered this much! that somebody who was about to be dismissed from an aeroplane factory for the very usual reason that he could not stand the terrific noise, had succeeded in either making or procuring plans of Uncle Sam's new aeroplane ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... it all by ourselves? Will there be no sense of incompleteness if the many are outside, missing it all because they missed their End? Will the glory make us glad if they are somewhere far away from it and God? Will not heaven be almost an empty place to one who has never tried to fill it? Yet there ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... windows given by "Christian Seekers" at Martinez painfully accented the boarded spaces for the other three that "Unknown Friends" in Tasajara had promised but not yet supplied. In the clearing some trees that had been felled but not taken away added to the general incompleteness. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... we do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit. At the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see militarism felled within ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... not much change got out of Asquith. Answered sometimes by monosyllable; never exceeded a score of words. Yet none could complain of incompleteness of reply. Performance occupied full period allotted to Questions. When hand of clock pointed to quarter-to-three, the time-limit of intelligent curiosity, thronged House drew itself together, awaiting next move with breathless interest. How would the Government ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... dissolution of moral and social elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... as the darkness of the shadows deepened, and the light of water and sky took on a deeper lucence before being extinguished, for the first time the sense of pain and the incompleteness of beautiful things entered his heart. The thing was wonderful; but it hurt. The sight of it filled him to the lips with a passion of uplift; and yet something lacked. And the lack of that something ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... or incompleteness of authentic records, however, is not the only source of obscurity and confusion in the chronology of remote ages. There can be no exact computation of time or placing of events without a fixed point or epoch from which the reckoning takes its start. It was long before ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's character can be traced to the philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy. There is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That falsehood consists in the theory of the self-sufficiency ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... from that evidence. So, here we must pass, in the first place, to the consideration of a matter which may seem foreign to the question under discussion. We must dwell upon the nature of the records, and the credibility of the evidence they contain; we must look to the completeness or incompleteness of those records themselves, before we turn to that which they contain and reveal. The question of the credibility of the history, happily for us, will not require much consideration, for, in this history, unlike those of human origin, there can be no cavilling, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... which is ever going on, and is the capital test of progress. Scientific books become rapidly old-fashioned, because the science to which they refer is in constant growth, and a work on chemistry or biology is out of date by reason of incompleteness or the discovery of unsuspected errors. The scientific side of history, if we allow it to have a scientific side, conforms to this rule, and presents no singularity. Closer inspection of our materials, the employment of the comparative method, occasionally the bringing ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... "in my experience—and I speak only of my own—testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. The strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. The soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. Help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... African race, and because of his belief in its future. He would also interest readers of the JOURNAL in his native island, Jamaica, where, although the creation still bears marks of human imperfection and incompleteness, a community has been brought into being in which the racial elements, in such fierce and embittered antagonism elsewhere, are gradually, but surely, blending into a whole of common citizenship. T.H. MACDERMOT, Editor of the Jamaica ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... not be passed over even in such a sketch as this without a sense of incompleteness. He was, it is true, strongly possessed with the prevalent feeling of aversion to anything that was called enthusiasm. When, for example, his opinion was asked about John Hutchinson—a writer whose mystic fancies as to recondite meanings contained in the words of the Hebrew Bible[635] possessed ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... experience or in analogy. The general character of the works of nature is, on the one hand, goodness both in design and effect; and, on the other hand, a liability to difficulty and to objections, if such objections be allowed, by reason of seeming incompleteness or uncertainty in attaining their end. Christianity participates of this character. The true similitude between nature and revelation consists in this—that they each bear strong marks of their original, that they each also bear appearances ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens! brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sometimes brood for a moment over the troubled sense that, in some fashion, she spoke in another key from "other folks," who did not appear to know that joy is not altogether joy, but three-quarters pain, and who had never learned how it brings its own aching sense of incompleteness; but that only seemed to her a part of the general wonder of things. There had been one strange May morning in her life when she went with her husband into the woods, to hunt up a wild steer. She knew every foot ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... forethought of the individual, which operates in the division of society into classes, and the promotion of a wholesome division of labor. A partial consequence of this insecurity of resources is the instability of natural races. A nomadic strain runs through them all, rendering easier to them the utter incompleteness of their unstable political and economical institutions, even when an indolent agriculture seems to tie them to the soil. Thus it often comes about that, in spite of abundantly provided and well-tended means of culture, their life is desultory, wasteful of power, unfruitful. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's.'[29] This was apparently the task to which he applied himself in his vacations. The Analysis appeared in 1829, and, whatever its defects of incompleteness and one-sidedness from a philosophical point of view, shows in the highest degree Mill's powers of close, vigorous statement; and lays down with singular clearness the psychological doctrine, which from his point of view ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... what the whole of reality must be—at least in its large outlines. Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed. This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally in the world of thought and in the world of things. In the world of thought, if we take any idea which is abstract or incomplete, we find, on examination, that if we forget its incompleteness, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... she knew he liked to sit at the window and watch the panorama of the street below. The broad, sunny Springtown thoroughfare, with its low, irregular wooden structures, likely, at any moment, to give place to ambitious business "blocks"; with its general air of incompleteness and transitoriness brought into strong relief against the near background of the Rocky Mountains, was alive with human interest. Yet, singularly enough, it was not the cowboy, mounted on his half-broken bronco that interested Jim; not the ranch wagon, piled high ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax—a mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... framework some of the most valuable episodes of the Lord's life. If the fourth Evangelist had treated the triple narrative in the way that many of us have treated it, regarding it as a sin against the Holy Spirit to suggest that there was any incompleteness or any misleading abbreviations in it, we should have lost the wonderful accounts of the conversation with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well." [Footnote: Inspiration and the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... not a proof, yet a very strong presumption, if you believe in God, that a man who thus 'feels he was not made to die' because he has grasped the Eternal, is right in so feeling. If, too, we look at the experiences themselves, they all have the stamp of incompleteness, and suggest completeness by their own incompleteness. The new moon with its ragged edge not more surely prophesies its completed silver round, than do the experiences of the Christian life here, in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... I was in a certain mood; and when I was earthly-minded, passionate, or troubled, it would be nowhere. But in my best moods I feel that in nature lies the form and fashion of a peace and grandeur so much beyond anything in me, that they rouse the sense of poverty and incompleteness and blame in the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... this have the advocates of infidelity usually been: nay, (as if they would make up in the number of objections what they want in weight,) they have frequently availed themselves not only of apparent contrarieties, but of mere incompleteness in the statements of two different writers, on which to found a charge of contradiction. Thus, if one writer says that a certain person was present at a given time or place, when another says that he and two more were there; or that one man was cured of blindness, when another says that two were,— ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... grown long, came back. Her voice, her smile, the very gown and cap she wore, and the needlework she carried in her hand, came sensibly before her. Yet how long ago it seemed! Christie remembered how many times she had taken it with her to the fields, when the incompleteness of their fences during the first year of their stay on the farm had made the "herding" of the sheep and cows necessary that the grain might be safe. She had read it in the woods in spring-time, by the firelight ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... curtains. Without curtains windows of this kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of insecurity in having so many holes in the walls. The beautiful windows of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important parts of the decorative scheme. Windows and doors were more than mere openings in those days, but things have ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... desire to 'exhaust' myself. I need to work. I need to give out or I shall have such a mental indigestion that I shall no longer be able to form a single thought. As it is, so many things are fleeting through me in incompleteness, in mere suggestion and so simultaneously at that, that I am bewildered. O, for complete cessation of consciousness, since this consciousness is but that of an amalgamation quantity of incomprehensible ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... dived, and rocked, and tipped, and curtseyed, and tilted, as I knelt first on one side and then on the other fitting her, till I was almost in despair; however, I got a sort of pattern at last, and by dint of some pertinacious efforts—which, in their incompleteness, did not escape some sarcastic remarks from Mr. —— on the capabilities of 'women of genius' applied to common-place objects—the matter was accomplished, and the little Dolphin rejoiced in very tidy back and seat cushions, covered with brown holland, and ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... 6/4 cadence most completely expresses finality and rest, it would seem that the plagal and other cadences above enumerated as preferred by Mr. Paine have a certain sort of superiority by reason of the very incompleteness with which they express finality. There is no sense of finality whatever about the Phrygian cadence; it leaves the mind occupied with the feeling of a boundless region beyond, into which one would fain penetrate; and for this reason it has, in sacred music, a great value. Something of the same ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... except that Piaggia de Calami appears north of the isthmus. Dieppa and Livorno are not found upon it. But the legend affords indubitable evidence that the Maker had consulted the map. The name of Verrazana applied to the land is found no where else no applied, except on the map. But the incompleteness in which the date of the discovery is left, us if written 15—, proves that the maker was unable to ascertain it fully from his authority; the map, therefore, must have been ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew him admit? Then he has had that wide experience of men which ends by throwing the mind back on itself and God; there is nothing incomplete in him, except as all humanity is incompleteness. The only wonder is how such a man, whom any woman could have loved, should have loved me; but men of genius, you know, are apt to love with their imagination. Then there is something in the sympathy, the strange, straight ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... its fruits,—and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day an intention expressed in the first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr. Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a higher level ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... may be able to finish what he began; if not, it is the opinion of most that know him that the treatment which he here complains of, and some others that he would have spoken of, have been the apparent cause of his disaster." There is no sign of incompleteness in the Appeal; and the Conclusion by the Publisher, while the author lay "in a weak and languishing condition, neither able to go on nor likely to recover, at least in any short time," gives a most artistic finishing stroke to it. Defoe never interfered with the perfection of it ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, The Last Ride Together and Evelyn Hope. "How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Others "had always thought how it would be; it would take a good deal more yet to tame Livingstone." Sir Henry Fallowfield observed, "Nothing could be more natural and correct. The lady was a saint, and there is always a sort of incompleteness about saints if they are not made martyrs. Suffering ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Frank bit her lip, and stinging tears—an unusual phenomenon—blinded her eyes. But she was overstrung by a week of hard nursing; and some childless women never loss the tragic sense of incompleteness, the unacknowledged ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... sculptor. And over every grave I had placed a marble altar, and upon every altar the marble bust of the man or woman who lay beneath; each in the supreme beauty which all the defects of birth and of time and of incompleteness, could not hide from the eye of the prophetic sculptor. Each was like a half-risen glorified form of the being who had there descended into the realms of Hades. And through these glimmering rows of the dead I walked in the dream-light; and from one to another I went in the glory ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Dream The Present Changes Strive, Wait, and Pray A Lament for the Summer The Unknown Grave Give me thy Heart The Wayside Inn Voices of the Past The Dark Side A First Sorrow Murmurs Give My Journal A Chain The Pilgrims Incompleteness A Legend of Bregenz A Farewell Sowing and Reaping The Storm Words A Love Token A Tryst with Death Fidelis A Shadow The Sailor Boy A Crown of Sorrow The Lesson of the War The Two Spirits A Little Longer Grief The Triumph of Time A Parting The Golden Gate Phantoms ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land; it is the almost ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... dulled our sense of danger. The floe had become our home, and during the early months of the drift we had almost ceased to realize that it was but a sheet of ice floating on unfathomed seas. Now our home was being shattered under our feet, and we had a sense of loss and incompleteness hard ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... Congress the last returns of the militia of the United States. Their incompleteness is much to be regretted, and its remedy may at some future time be a subject worthy the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... may be a good critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Index numbers. The process of calculating general prices and changes in them has in it, inevitably, something of arbitrariness and incompleteness. For not all prices can be included, but only those of articles of somewhat standardized grades and those that are pretty regularly sold in markets where prices are publicly quoted. Any list of articles that can ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... hypothesis, the reviewer sought to find flaws in the author's mode of reasoning, and concluded that "we are called upon to accept a hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge." Defective information, vagueness, and incompleteness are charged upon the man whom we now delight to honour; "intellectual husks," we are told; are all that he offers. Professor Huxley, who lectured at the Royal Institution, on February 10, 1860, on "Species and Races and their Origin," and brought forward Darwin's investigations as exemplifying ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... for the incompleteness of his eclipse information in the following words:—"I have not cited one half of Ricciolus's list of portentous eclipses, and for the same reason that he declines giving any more of them than what that ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... emphatic dig of his stick. "I am quite serious in asking if you like me—for this good reason, that I like you. Yes, I do. You remember that day when I bled the old lady's dog—well, I have found out since then that there's a sort of incompleteness in my life which I never suspected before. It's you who have put that idea into my head. You didn't mean it, I dare say, but you have done it all the same. I sat alone here yesterday evening smoking my pipe—and I didn't enjoy it. I breakfasted ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... sought to avoid, and the vase lose its perfect symmetry. But, alas! called from his work never to return, it is completed by less skilful hands, a less delicate conception, and, while the result is pleasing, the perfect harmony of proportion is wanting, and those who see it feel conscious of its incompleteness, yet ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... of the very early pioneers, and giving special mention to Friar Bacon, Bishop Wilkins, and the Portuguese friar, De Guzman. But, although he seems to suggest that others should avail themselves of his theoretical knowledge, there is a curious incompleteness about the designs accompanying his work, and about the work itself, which seems to suggest that he had more knowledge to impart than he chose to make public—or else that he came very near to complete solution of the problem of flight, and stayed on the threshold ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I cannot take such hopes on the word of another, however gallant and noble he may be. I do not want hopes which are only within the reach of the vivid and high-hearted; the crippled, drudging slave cannot rejoice because he sees his warrior-lord ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... its inability definitely to dispose of the important subject committed to its charge, and presents this report for its own justification, and for the additional purpose of notifying the succeeding Congress of the incompleteness of its labors, and ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... produced the exquisite courtesy and noble cast of literature under Louis XIV. and Bossuet, and the grandiose metaphysics and broad critical sympathy under Hegel and Goethe. It is this secret contrariety of creative forces which produced the literary incompleteness, the licentious plays, the abortive drama of Dryden and Wycherly, the poor Greek importations, the gropings, the minute beauties and fragments of Ronsard and the Pleiad. We may confidently affirm that the unknown creations toward which the current of coming ages is bearing up ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel that materialism is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought he was Christ that he was labouring under an error. I merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness. You can explain a man's detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy. The explanation does explain. Similarly you may ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... of improvement, and have all the impatience of children about the trying of a new thing, often greatly retarding their own progress by hurrying unduly the completion of their works, or using them in a perilous state of incompleteness. Our road lay for a considerable length of time through flat, low meadows that skirt the Delaware, which at this season of the year, covered with snow and bare of vegetation, presented a most dreary aspect. We passed through Wilmington (Delaware), and crossed a small stream ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... intentionally concluded without a blessing, which it is wrong to insert. The suggestion of the woman's receiving the Holy Communion is aided by the incompleteness of the Service ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown
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