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More "Negative" Quotes from Famous Books



... (a rather questionable moral, perhaps, but still a moral), so put his soul into it that the timbre of his voice was altogether too moving for our hostesses. Here are the ideal people: perhaps their ideal may be said not to exist and to be purely negative, but months of suffering have taught ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... broken down into while still retaining its identity, and an anion is a positively charged ion, or in other words, an instance of an atom in which there are more electrons than protons, resulting in a charge of negative electricity. An atomic anionizer is just what its name would imply: a device that morphs normal atoms into atoms with an extreme negative charge by emitting massive amounts, to the tune of many millions of moles, of solitary electrons into the ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... question came up for discussion, the Brethren frequently consulted the Lot. The method was to place three papers in a box, and then appoint someone to draw one out. If the paper was positive, the resolution was carried; if the paper was negative, the resolution was lost; if the paper was blank, the resolution was laid on the table. The weightiest matters were settled in this way. At one Synod the Lot decided that George Waiblinger should be entrusted with the task of preparing an "Exposition ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... each other. Miss Gale made a negative signal, and Fanny said, "By-and-by. This will do instead, for it is as like as two peas. Now ask yourself how this comes to be in the house, and set in pearls. Why, they are worth three hundred pounds. I assure you that the master of this house is fanatico per la musica; heard you sing Siebel ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... prizes. In the following term he won three. To recapitulate his outrages from that time to the present were a harrowing and unnecessary task. Suffice it that he is now a Regius Professor, and I saw in the papers a short time ago that a lecture of his on 'The Probable Origin of the Greek Negative', created quite a furore. If this is not Tragedy with a big T, I should like to ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... this, of course, is old stuff; even the photon-neutrino interchange has been known since the mid-'50s, when the Gamow neutrino-counter was developed. But now we come to what you have been so good as to christen the Sugihara Effect—the neutrino picking up a negative charge and, in effect, turning into an electron, and then losing its charge, turning back into a neutrino, and then, as in the case of metal heated to incandescence, being emitted again as ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper

... face was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." In this grasp of the element of things, this keen, clean, frank pleasure at color and odor and warmth, this candid admission of the negative of beauty, which is co-existent with and inseparable from it, lie much of his power and promise. Here is a man catholic enough to include the extremes of physical and moral life, strong enough to handle ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... knowledge of those classes of animals in which natural selection could act is even now very incomplete; and our knowledge of their past history is still more limited, so that we are not in a condition to prove a negative. But in such a case as this the onus of proof should surely lie on the other side. It is for those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... rate as regarded the protection of the Suez Canal. To this extent, de Freycinet and his colleagues were prepared to lend their assistance; but, despite Gambetta's urgent appeal for common action with England at that point, the Chamber of Deputies still remained in a cautiously negative mood, and to that frame of mind M. Clemenceau added strength by a speech ending with a glorification of prudence. "Europe," he said, "is covered with soldiers; every one is in a state of expectation; all the Power are reserving their future liberty ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... countenance of Miss Ogilvy's dying counsel, welcome and unexpected as light of the moon to a lost traveller on a cloud-clothed night. What had she told him to do? To resist Madame Riennes. He had tried that with lamentable results. To invoke the help of religion. He had tried that with strictly negative results; the Powers above did not seem inclined to intervene in this private affair. To appeal to the Pasteur. That he had not tried but, unpromising as the venture seemed to be, by Jove! he would. In his imminent peril there was nothing to which ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... Monroe County and there the trial was to take place. Miss Anthony then proceeded to stump Monroe County and every town and village thereof, asking her bucolic hearers the solemn conundrum, "Is it a crime for a United States citizen to vote?" The answer is supposed generally to be in the negative, and so convincing is Sister Anthony's rhetoric regarded that it is supposed no jury can be found to convict her. Her case has gone to the jurymen of Monroe in her own persuasive pleadings before ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe. Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative constituency. The larger portion of my limited circle of readers must be quite indifferent to, if not ignorant of, the adverse opinions which have been expressed or recorded concerning any of these Addresses or Essays now submitted to their own judgment. It is proper, however, to inform them, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Pulaski on the 27th, and on the same day cut the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad near Tullahoma and Dechard. On the morning of the 30th, one column of Forrest's command, under Buford, appeared before Huntsville, and summoned the surrender of the garrison. Receiving an answer in the negative, he remained in the vicinity of the place until next morning, when he again summoned its surrender, and received the same reply as on the night before. He withdrew in the direction of Athens which place had been regarrisoned, and attacked ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... commanded by an officer of the Confederate navy, in any of these cases there will be a sufficient setting forth as a vessel of war to justify her being held to be a ship of war; if all of these points be decided in the negative, she must be held to be only a prize, and ordered to ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... lacks push,—he'll never get there." Such are the trite summaries of man among men. Of all the inner territory of the man's soul, which had resolved him in its history to what he was, had left him this negative unit of life, his fellows were ignorant, as man must be of man. They saw the Result, and in the rough arithmetic of life results are all that ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... and then for a page or more is a discussion of the condition of British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which was merely a negative advantage;"—all to show that "it seems scarcely possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true, pertinent, reflective, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... declining to vote. A motion that three members of the Opposition should enter the government was not so generally supported, eleven members, including Alexander Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat, voting in the negative. The Lower Canadian Reformers held aloof, and in the subsequent debate in the legislature, ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... cried. "Hold on a moment! This isn't what you want! You don't want a fight!" He paused for an instant; but he knew that no mere negative would hold them at that moment. They must be told what they did want. Just now he had learned the particular words that would carry, and he proclaimed them at the top of his voice: "What you want is ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... popular belief: "Il se frotta les mains et s'en alla bien content." When it came to ancient history, Sir George was undeniably fond of "the everlasting No." In the present case his skepticism seems on the whole well-judged, but some of his arguments savour of undue haste toward a negative conclusion. He thus strangely forgets that what we call autumn is springtime in the southern hemisphere (Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 511). His argument that the time alleged was insufficient for the voyage is fully met by Major Rennell, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... no longer heard in the kitchen; even the heavy-footed seemed to tread on air, and all around me appeared to be afraid of disturbing the slumbers of the dead. Never before, nor since, have I had occasion to feel how completely a negative may assume an affirmative character, and become as positive as if it had a real existence. I thought I could see as well as feel my sister's absence from the scene in which she had once been ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper

... development of the dynamo and its work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... Of [Greek: chraismein], Buttmann, Lexil. p. 546, observes that "it is never found in a positive sense, but remained in ancient usage in negative sentences only; as, 'it is of no use to thee,' or, 'it helps ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... know, is composed of atoms. These atoms are as far from one another, compared to their size, as the stars and planets of the universe. Each atom in turn is composed of electrons, negative particles of electrical energy, held in position about a fixed central nucleus of positive electricity known as a proton. I speak now of the simplest element. Most of them have many protons and electrons in their make-up. The space between these particles compared with ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... caparisoned, and most splendidly dressed. On their entering the tent, the princesses, who were seated in a recess concealed from view by blinds of gold wire, gazed eagerly at them; and she who had lost her bird inquired of the other two if either of them was their husband. They replied in the negative, remarking that he was of personal beauty, and dignified appearance, far superior to these princes. The three sultans, also, questioned their daughters on the subject, and received ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... ideas—she thought of them in the light of his striking energy; they were an idle exercise of a force intrinsically fine, and she wanted to protest, to let him know how truly it was a sad misuse of his free bold spirit to count on her. She was not to be counted on; she was a vague soft negative being who had never decided anything and never would, who had not even the merit of knowing how to flirt and who only asked to be let alone. She made him stop at last, telling him, while she leaned against the parapet, ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James

... by a quick and unequivocal answer in the negative; then, relaxing a little, she said more lightly, but with intent, 'I have always triumphed over difficulties all my life—I have ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... I replied in the negative, and then narrated the whole history of the spy-glass, the erasure of the name by Mrs. St, Felix, and the recognition ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... is what made up the essence of the movement of the epoch in the sixties. Turgenev with the instinct of genius saw through this fundamental movement in life and imaged it in living bright pictures with all its positive and negative, pathetic and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... explained later in the evening that writing is best produced in the dark, because dark is negative, light positive, and negative conditions are most ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... unexplained. To the very last, there are the various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to the other. The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—"call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will"—is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... New slang seems vulgar. It makes its way into use. In India the lingam symbol is so common that no one pays any heed to its sense.[39] This power of familiarity to reduce the suggestion to zero furnishes a negative proof of the power of the suggestion. Conventionalization also reduces suggestion, perhaps to zero. It is a mischievous thing to read descriptions of crime, vice, horrors, excessive adventures, etc., because familiarity lessens the abhorrent suggestions which those things ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... civil and polite person, and do hate giving pain when it can be avoided, I sent them up to Douglas Kinnaird,—who is a man of business, and sufficiently ready with a negative,—and left them to settle with him; and as the beginning of next year I went abroad, I have since been little aware of the progress of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... the Patriarchal Family.—It is well, however, to consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain, intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what did he ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... of the Constitution. The President's power of removal must be limited. In earlier times, these would have sufficed; but at that day the nature of the disease was such that nothing could reach it short of an organic change, which should give the weaker section a negative on the action of the government. Mr. Calhoun was of opinion that this could best be done by our having two Presidents,—one elected by the North and the other by the South,—the assent of both to be necessary to every act of Congress. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... Berry told the porter that he need not uncover, as he was travelling incognito, and asked if Mrs. Pleydel had arrived. Receiving a negative answer, he gave the man five marks and asked him to be very careful as to the way he lifted the cat's basket out of his wife's cab. Then he suffered himself to be conducted to the sitting-room which I had ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... or historical, or documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated—it is positive or negative or superlative—it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the colours ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... the evening before the party in question. Col. Baker, despite the persistent and patient efforts on Flossy's part to show him the folly of his course, had insisted on obliging her to speak a decided negative to his earnestly pressed question. The result was, an unusually unpleasant domestic scene, and a general air ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden

... question doubtingly; indeed, from the expression of Santander's face, almost sure of receiving a negative ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... Sometimes she used a word in its wrong sense; she had one or two charming little phrases of her own: "What a purpose to?" instead of: "Why?" and sometimes a double negative. She rolled her r's ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... count. Church union is in many places an accomplished fact. This alone is a convincing proof of the want of grasp, of definiteness that exists in religious matters. We would refer our reader to the Chapter "Ploughing the Sands." To what extent this rather negative disposition will hasten the spreading of the true Faith, is difficult to state. Will it, as is evident in England, promote a movement of return to the Church or accentuate, as in the United States, indifference and unbelief, the future alone can tell. But, is it not ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... it[419]. However, this was circulated as wit for a whole winter, and I believe part of a summer too; a proof that he was no very witty man. He was an instance of the truth of the observation, that a man will please more upon the whole by negative qualities than by positive; by never offending, than by giving a great deal of delight. In the first place, men hate more steadily than they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... the panel of the door with the hilt of his sword, and Denis heard him breathing heavily as if after some great exertion; but there was no reply, and he tapped again, with the same negative result. Then with an angry snort ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn

... complexion and a long drooping nose—the nose of Semitic ancestors. A small mouth, and the chin running almost to a point. A face full of interest, devoid of distinct vice—heartless. Here was a man with a future before him—a man whose vices were all negative, whose virtues depended entirely upon expediency. Here was a man who could be almost anything he liked; as some men can. If expediency prompted he could be a very depot of virtues; for his body, with all the warmer failings of that ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman

... negative point, however; and what should be carefully borne in mind is that the evidence as a whole leads to the conclusion that the Christians of the second and third centuries made use of the sign and venerated the figure of the cross without, as Dean Farrar ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... 'Nobody can teach me anything about complications!Push him off, sir. Just give him a negative and do not ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... forth. Rosalie did not attempt to analyse why not. Her repression, each time, of the suggestion that the letter should now be taken out and read again was not a deliberate repression. She merely had a negative impulse towards the action and accepted it; and so negligible was the transaction in her record of her thoughts, so mere a cypher in the petty cash of the day's ledger, that in the evening when, gone up to bed, the letter was at last drawn out and kissed ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... no doubt that animals communicate their impressions by an inarticulate voice. Common sense and the most superficial observations are opposed to the negative of this proposition. But when a canary bird warbles till it stuns us, or a nightingale sings in the shadows on the fine nights of June, can we follow and discover the significance of those modulations—now sharply cadenced, now slowly drawn out, and ending with a trill long and accurate enough ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... he said as he carefully removed the negative to a dark place, 'I have developed a considerable sense of quiet humour. You will find a large Gainsborough hat in that corner—might I trouble you to put it on for ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... quieted the House, and for a moment there was a dead silence. Then through the tense air there came a strange sound, and the President demanded silence from the galleries, whereupon the reporters rose and made a negative movement of the hand with two fingers upraised, pointing at the same time to the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... Robinson?" answered the keeper with great emotion. To which Booth replying in the negative, the keeper, after some tokens of amazement, cried out, "Well, captain, I must say you are the best at it of all the gentlemen I ever saw. However, I will tell you this: the lawyer and Mr. Robinson have been laying their heads together about you above ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... unprovided for, or the foolish fellow who groans in spirit over a protested bill returned upon the hand which he 'set' to it, merely for the convenience of acquaintance, and who has never thought of stamped paper since—such are two of the negative monetary associations which checker life; of course, their number is legion. The man who found his fairy gold transmuted into oak leaves, experienced a decided monetary sensation; but not more so than fell to the lot of many a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various

... mighty fine in the doctor's new runabout, driving the high-stepping bay, natty in a "brand-new" tan harness—the first Hattie had ever seen. He asked her to come with him for a drive, and again her mother's nipping negative influenced her decision against the pleadings of a ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... was not a suitable place for her. But she had no friends nearer than New Orleans. I asked myself whether I ought not to abandon the raft, and take passage in a steamboat; but I had not money enough to pay the passages of the party, and I was obliged to answer the question in the negative. But I could pay Emily's fare, and place her in charge of the officers of some boat. I concluded to adopt this course at the first large town we reached, where a steamer would be likely ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic

... should it? If it did we should doubt whether the love were true. Our own private belief is that the course of true love is always uncommonly rough, but collective human wisdom has seen fit to put the idea in the negative form. So ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... condition; true, the affections of the husband were divided—but they jointly catered for one man instead of two! It is said that they courted with flowers: an authenticated fact, proves that the female occasionally possessed a negative. Roomata (Bet) rejected the addresses of Trigoonipoonata (Jack); but she learned the worth of his affection. She was crossing a river, and became ill: he sprung to her relief, and carried her safely to ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... Indoors Gunther seemed negative, outdoors he became godlike. The Elliots possessed a little Norwegian sleigh they had brought from Europe. It was swan-shaped, stood on low wooden runners, and was brightly painted in the Norse manner. This Gunther found ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... his System of Moral Philosophy, page 211, says "He who detains another by force in slavery, is always bound to prove his title. The slave sold, or carried into a distant country, must not be obliged to prove a negative, that he never forfeited his liberty. The violent possessor must, in all cases, shew his title, especially where the old proprietor is well known. In this case, each man is the original proprietor ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet

... I have classed these two means of architectural effect together, because the one is in most cases the negative of the other, and is used to relieve it exactly as shadow relieves light; recess alternating with roll, not only in lateral, but in successive order; not merely side by side with each other, but interrupted the one by the other in their ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... all who knew her, would clear her of censoriousness: that it gave her some opinion, she must needs say, of the people, that he had continued there so long with me; that I had rather negative than positive reasons of dislike to them; and that so shrewd a man as she heard Captain Tomlinson was had not ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... top to bottom of Roman society negative forces replaced positive forces. Self directed labor gave place to slavery; participation in productive activity yielded to parasitism; productivity was subordinated to destructivity; the spirit of independence was ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... of this negative criticism and asked his evangelists to give him more substantial food, they put him on some exoteric doctrine calculated to appeal to a young imagination by its poetic or philosophical colouring. The catechumen ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... fallacy boldly, and ask ourselves whether Amelia is or is not as good as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, we shall I think be inclined to answer rather in the affirmative than in the negative. It is perhaps a little more easy to find fault with its characters than with theirs; or rather, though no one of these characters has the defects of Blifil or of Allworthy, it is easy to say that no one of them ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... answer the question in the negative, by sticking out his jaw and throwing his head a little backward. To his surprise the mate returned his gaze a ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... genius—thou shalt see me again at Philippi."[9] "Well, then," replied Brutus, without being discomposed, "we shall meet again." Upon this the phantom vanished; when Brutus, calling to his servants, asked if they had seen anything; to which they answering in the negative, he resumed his studies. 24. Struck with so strange an occurrence, he mentioned it to Cassius, who rightly considered it as the effect of an imagination disordered by vigilance and anxiety. 25. Brutus appeared satisfied with ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... seems to have become a positive magnet in the fall; the forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to all intellectual conditions, and drains one ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... these new views of the origin of species. And while the distinguished originator of this theory is entitled to our highest respect for his scientific researches, yet it should not be forgotten that the most conclusive evidence brought forward by him and his adherents is of a negative character, drawn from a science in which they do not pretend to have made personal investigations, that of Geology, while the proofs they offer us from their own departments of science, those of Zooelogy and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of all the glories of Paradise Lost. It is too long to quote in full: but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... as well as any one in the profession, was perplexed in the present situation as to the course of true wisdom? Incredible as it may seem, it was Adelle who during this time of doubt gave her aunt strength to resist much bad advice. Her influence was, as might be expected, merely negative. For after that single deliverance of opinion she made no comment on all the discussion and advice. She seemed to consider the question settled already: it was this tacit method of treating the guardianship as ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... dipped, but I hope not a wick-ed candle." It is said that upon another occasion, after the return of Mr. Slidell from a foreign trip, he was asked by Miss Fairlie whether he had been to Greece. He replied in the negative and asked the reason for her query. "Oh, nothing," she said, "only it would have been very natural for you to visit Greece in order to renew early associations!" Many years thereafter Priscilla Cooper, ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... ages of four and twenty, often following some childish malady, and it requires the greatest care and most nourishing food to counteract its pernicious effects. The victim of interstitial keratitis is never strong, and, although a blood test may show a negative condition, any serious illness may cause the ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... that the less a person has inside him of culture and imagination the more he wants outside him of the upholstery of life? I think it is true; and if it is, then the vacancy of Annalise's mind may be measured by the fact that what she demanded of life in return for the negative services of not crying and wringing her hands was nothing less filled with food and sofas and servants ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... 'Yes' or 'No,'" said Dorothy, never dreaming that his answer would be in the negative, for on the week that she had first come to Gray Gables he had said: "I must introduce you at once to Alice Lee, who lives across the way. She is a lovely, quiet girl, and I know you will like her." And Dorothy had liked ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey

... comment on the pathetic Funeral Oration of Bossuet. We have no grounds for asserting that the married life of Madame de la Fayette was unhappy, except through the inadequacy of a husband whose best qualities seem to have been of a negative kind. During the fifteen years which preceded the death of La Rochefoucauld her friendship for him was the centre of her existence. She seemed to bear about with her some secret grief; something remained veiled from other friends than ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... there is nothing specially English in Ivanhoe, but only an attempt to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative. Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated, not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... playfulness would seem to condone the fact that her mother found so little need of help in "bearing" the burden of her regret and of her self-reproach. But, allowing for that fact, Imogen's gravity was more than negative. It confronted him like a solemn finger laid on firmly patient lips; he felt it dwell upon him like solemn eyes while he shook hands with Mrs. Upton, whom he had not seen since the morning ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... actions confirmed it, for they approached divers persons of their acquaintance as if they had business of a confidential nature. The invariable result of these mysterious negotiations, however, was a negative shake ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... he can adduce no evidence. It was a curious intellectual experience to listen day after day to the lectures of Oken, while following at the same time Schelling's courses, where he was shifting the whole ground of his philosophy from its negative foundation as an a priori doctrine to a positive basis, as an historical science. He unfolded his views in a succession of exquisite lectures, delivered ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... out from the Bible your charge that piracy is a crime. I know not a word from the first of Genesis to the end of Revelation where piracy is once condemned. But I pass this, and, waiving my clear logical rights, undertake to prove the negative, and to show that the Bible does, most explicitly, both by precept and example, bear me out in my assertion, that piracy is not necessarily, and always, and amidst all circumstances, a sin. WHAT GOD SANCTIONED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, AND ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... their property conditions or their nerve, it is certain that a new spirit was generated. Great obstacles were overcome and determination was invincible. We were forced to act broadly, and we reversed the negative policy of doing nothing and owing nothing. We went into debt with our eyes open, and spent millions in money for the public good. The city was made safe and also beautiful. The City Hall, the Public Library, and the Auditorium make our ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... difficult to accomplish, and not altogether effective. The bullets still scattered more or less like a shotgun charge. Mr. Kincaid's score more than doubled his. Mr. Kincaid always shot the best he could; and entered a grave negative to Bobby's ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... railroad that had been making trouble in the hills all summer; that it was, in fact, merely a personal struggle for influence and gain between Jeffrey Whiting and the man who had been killed. It was skilfully done and drawn out with all the exaggerated effect of truth which bald negative and affirmative answers ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... without the intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some were out-and-out neutralistas, and some few were Socialists who had the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians must have voted for war. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... The negative came again, apparently fiercer than before, almost like an explosion indeed. But still there was a hollow ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... carriage; by a rigid expression of features; by a hard, severe intonation of voice; by set speeches of contempt for poverty and rags, and rhapsodical braggadocio about rank and breeding. My father's pride had nothing of this about it. It was that quiet, negative, courteous, inbred pride, which only the closest observation could detect; which no ordinary ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... Teeny McFarlane developed an unexpected obstinacy. She did not suggest that the young man was to be included in any of the future parties; indeed, she answered the direct question decidedly in the negative; no, there was no use trying to include anybody ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... observations of a negative character upon the object with which these preparations were made. I do not think it necessary to discuss the questions you have raised. But the result of these preparations, carried on with great secrecy, has been that the British Empire has been compelled to confront ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... been 'scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall;' and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the freedom of the city. No negative inference can be established from the contemporary notices in the Aberdeen Journal over the visit. Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when 'a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... to him by donatioun of the Governour, with a charge to the said Toune to obey him as thare lauchfull Provest. Whareat, not only the said Lord Ruthven, but also the toune, being offended, gave ane negative ansuer, alledging, That such intrusioun of men in office was hurtfull to thare priviledge and fredom; which granted unto thame free electioun of thare Provest from year to year, at a certane tyme appointed, quhilk ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... in man than the mere breath of his body. In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters: without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then—and the case is not peculiar to myself—have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... wanted here," he cried in a commanding voice. And they all moved away meekly, led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Their services proved to be unnecessary, for the result reached by the Conference was negative. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... illusory side of our life and insanity may be seen in another way. All illusion has as its negative condition an interruption of the higher intellectual processes, the due control of our mental representations by reflection and reason. In the case of passive illusions, the error arises from our inability to subordinate the suggestion made by some feature of the present ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... eighth precepts of the Decalogue. To concentrate in one word all that is to be observed regarding these essential elements of a social state, the sacred text confines itself to proclaiming, in an absolute mode, their inviolability, therefore adopting the negative or prohibitive form. It is desired to prevent and forbid every arbitrary act, and every unjust attempt, directed to deprive the legitimate possessor of, or to restrict and in any other way to disturb him in, the full, free, and exclusive enjoyment ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio

... there's nothing to be said." Mr. Burney then asked him whether he had seen the letter which Warburton had written in answer to a pamphlet addressed "To the most impudent Man alive[981]." He answered in the negative. Mr. Burney told him it was supposed to be written by Mallet. The controversy now raged between the friends of Pope and Bolingbroke; and Warburton and Mallet were the leaders of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... Minos he asked me with a smile whether I had brought my fiddle with me; and, receiving an answer in the negative, he bid me get about my business, saying it was well for me that the devil was ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding

... First, negative individuality. Second, the imperfect form of a verb. Third, the ablative form of a noun signifying a portion of the ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... development is generally ascribed to the protection afforded by such segregated districts. But protection alone is only a negative force in the life of a people; it leaves them free to develop in their own way, but does not say what that way shall be. On the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number of geographic features, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... that the book to which I have alluded, like most other modern books on Biblical criticism, was altogether negative; was possessed too often by that fanaticism of disbelief which is just as dangerous as the fanaticism of belief; was picking the body of the Scripture to pieces so earnestly, that it seemed to forget that Scripture had a spirit as well as a body; or, if it confessed that it had ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley

... profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. In all cases positive palaeontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... the communists and the anarchists; for no one is so willing to divide as he who cannot lose by division. To the man who has a plot of ground which he calls his own, division doesn't appeal with any but negative force. Neither should it, until all available lands are occupied. Then he must move up and make room for another man by ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... he could answer in the negative. He really did not know the man, and did not want to, though it certainly seemed strange that he should ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick

... cousins, without being in the least intimate with either. Indeed, of the two he preferred, perhaps, the silent, solid Cayley to the more volatile Mark. Cayley's qualities, as they appeared to Bill, may have been chiefly negative; but even if this merit lay in the fact that he never exposed whatever weaknesses he may have had, this is an excellent quality in a fellow-guest (or, if you like, fellow-host) in a house where one is continually visiting. Mark's weaknesses, on the other hand, were very plain to the eye, ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne

... having ignored the whole subject. Half-castes she instinctively despised. For India and the Indians she had little real sympathy; and the rising tide of unrest, the increasing antagonism, had sharpened her negative attitude to a positive dislike and distrust, acutely intensified since that evening at Anarkalli, when the sight of Lance and her stepfather, sitting there at the mercy of any chance-flung missile, had stirred the slumbering passion in her to fury. For one bewildering moment she had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... extensive is indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... dissipation was the billiard-table. His theory of success was founded on common sense: Take care of your health, avoid dissipation, shun any and all danger, volunteer for nothing, do only what you are compelled to do, shift all possible work on somebody else's shoulders, preserve a purely negative record, and—you are bound to rise to the highest grades in the army. It must be admitted that the laws of promotion are admirably calculated to foster just such a line of argument, and that Whaling's "head was level." Now, though wrathy at Blake, he saw at once that ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... the coast and inland. A Burwash woman told Mr. Egerton that as a child, after saying her prayers, she was put early to bed with the strict injunction, "Now, mind, if the gentlemen come along, don't you look out of the window." The gentlemen were the smugglers, and not to look at them was a form of negative help, since he that has not seen a gentleman cannot identify him. Another Burwash character said that his grandfather had fourteen children, all of whom were "brought up to be smugglers." These would, of course, be land smugglers—Burwash ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... individual woman of their acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold, encouragement—and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last, and most of them negative.'[1] ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... Colonel instead, and intercepted the path of the bath-chair. He was nearly run over, but stood his ground, and in a perfectly firm voice asked the Colonel if there was any news in the morning papers. With the Colonel's decided negative ringing joyfully in his ears, he went home again, and locked himself for the second time into ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... their heads, and murmured an answer in the negative, as each man looked round and appealed to his fellow; when a noise was heard without, and a man was heard to say that he wanted ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... convent walls, without disturbing the monk, swaying his girdle, or making his robe tremble. The alcalde, under one pretext or another, will deny you to-morrow what he grants you to-day; not a mother will let her child go to your school, and the result of all your efforts will be simply negative." ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... innocent or legitimate, that gives the first place to the calls and duties of daily life, is inconsistent with a strong faith and close intercourse with the spiritual world. "We look not at the things that are seen"—the negative side needs to be emphasised if the positive, "but at the things which are not seen," is to become natural to us. In praying, faith depends upon our living ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray

... only excuse a refusal by saying that you are hindered by the affairs of closer friends, or by cases more important or previously undertaken, quit you with hostile feelings, and are one and all disposed to prefer an insincere promise to a direct negative from you. C. Cotta, a master in the art of electioneering, used to say that, "so long as the request was not directly contrary to moral duty, he used to promise his assistance to all, to bestow it on those with whom he thought it would be most advantageously invested: ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... the statement in the last paragraph of the above citation with nothing but a direct negative. If I know anything at all about the results attained by the natural science of our time, it is "a demonstrated conclusion and established fact" that the "fourfold order" given by Mr. Gladstone is not that in which ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labour, is affected, whether windows are broken ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... contradiction to hitherto observed facts. That the phantasy of the German folk mind drew to itself the pale ghostly light of the moon and could reckon from it all sorts of wonderful things, proves nothing to us." I can only say here that ten negative cases signify nothing in the face of a single positive one and a thousand-fold experience undoubtedly represents a certain connection between the light of the full moon and the most ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... expressly stipulated with Gen. Patterson, that he was not to do so; and when, notwithstanding such stipulation, he was called upon for that service, he positively refused, although threatened with confinement. Besides, both Moultrie and Ramsey assert he did not serve with the British; and as far as negative proof can go, this should be conclusive. But the fact that he bore arms with the British is not charged against him; his accusation was, "being at his own request received as a British subject." Then Col. Hayne neither came within the letter, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James

... all this, there is the watch; the watch is very important. It may be negative, it is true, but it is nevertheless very convincing. The rope and the twine and the fish line were positive evidence. Not evidence that the murderer owned the farm or farmyard perhaps, but evidence that the articles in question were at that farmyard a considerable time; evidence ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value, since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... apartment, with his mind probably full of robbers, for he had a naked rapier in his hand, which still looked formidable, though rust had somewhat marred its shine.—What he had heard at entrance about lighting a fire, had changed, however, the current of his ideas. "No—no—no," he cried, and each negative was more emphatic than its predecessor-"The gentleman shall not have the trouble to put on a fire—ugh—ugh. I'll put it on myself, for ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... harm was severe, but long and careful nursing accomplished his recovery; the injury done to his sensitive spirit was more serious, though not so visible. Its signs were principally of a negative character, and to be discovered only by those who had previously known him. His gait was thenceforth slow, even and unvaried by the sudden bursts of sprightlier motion which had once corresponded to his overflowing gladness; his countenance was heavier, and its former ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... even without such evidence. I think that in such cases, we must look chiefly to the historical testimony of facts; and you will forgive me for saying that I think your arguments are based upon presumptive evidence, negative evidence, and the evidence of appropriateness—all of which, however valuable, must tumble to the ground before one single fact. You notice that Archbishop Ussher doubted the Epistle to Polycarp. But why? simply because its style (not having been altered ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen

... etc., have the falling circumflex, and all negative assertions of doubled meaning will have the rising. Doubt, pity, contrast, grief, supposition, comparison, irony, implication, sneering, raillery, scorn, reproach, and contempt, are all expressed by the use of the wave of the circumflex. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... nerve structures as liberations of energy or discharges, are familiar to us all, has adopted and extended Laycock's doctrine, which he designates as "one of inestimable value," and has urged the importance of Monro's doctrine of negative and positive states in cases of insanity, using the term "insanity" in an exceedingly wide sense. He has pointed out that Anstie and Thompson Dickson have also stated the doctrine that so-called "exaltation of faculties" in many morbid states is owing ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... disappointments. My failures have been illustrative of the fact that the electric bath is no more a panacea for all ills than any other remedial agent. Applicable as it is to a great variety of pathological conditions, it meets with many where it is destined to have negative or at best imperfect results. Far from discouraging me, however, failures have served to inspire me with fresh ardor to seek for light, and to persevere in my efforts to establish on the basis of statistical truth, the therapeutic merits of the ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig

... is, or should be, enough to negative all arguments in favour of Home Rule. The agitators say that Ireland is decaying from political causes, while all the while this Ulster town is getting richer and more powerful and influential. While the people of Cork are begging the Viceroy to please to do something for their port, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... Circumstances did not favor his becoming a Virginia teacher, but between his eighteenth and twenty-third years, he made several expeditions into the Southern States as a Yankee peddler, with rather negative financial results, but with much enlargement of his information and improvement of his rustic manners. Mr. Alcott was rather distinguished for his high-bred manners and, on a visit to England, there is an amusing incident of his having been mistaken for some member ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... from their decisions, except in the Comitia Tributa, where the plebeian interest predominated—an assembly representing the thirty Roman tribes, according to the Servian constitution, but which, at first, had insignificant powers. The persons of the tribunes were inviolable, but their power was negative. They could not originate laws; they could insure the equitable administration of the laws, and prevent wrongs. They had a constitutional veto, of great use at the time, but which ended in a series ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... Let us express the negative part first. This tells us that none of the Cakes, belonging to the upper half of the cupboard, are to be found OUTSIDE the central Square: that is, the two compartments, No. 9 and No. 10, are EMPTY. This, of course, is represented ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll

... of any concerted action to defend the income they draw from society against any resolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essential principles of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies have proclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negative opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the prolonged existence ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... time, the fellow who was unconsciously retarding good fellowship among the members of the team was no longer a silent negative individual, but was soon urging us ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... for a brilliant future—David Sechard, my brother, my friend. I shall find an answer waiting when I go home. All the aristocrats may have been asked to hear me read my verses this evening, but I shall not go if the answer is negative, and I will never set foot in Mme. de Bargeton's ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... (population): The annual percent change in the population, resulting from a surplus (or deficit) of births over deaths and the balance of migrants entering and leaving a country. The rate may be positive or negative. ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... on duty responded with negative movements to his companion's inquiring glances. He could hear nothing but the dialogue between the boats that had received the same warning. They too were alarmed by the sudden silence, and were changing their course going, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... planter producing 100 pounds of wound silk. There were no claimants. Two years later, the bounty was increased to 10,000 pounds of tobacco and the amount of silk required was reduced to 50 pounds. Again the results were negative. Then a bounty of fifty pounds of tobacco for each pound of silk was ordered. The effects from all these orders are summed up in an act of the General ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier

... for a moment be understood as belittling the value of faithfulness in an employee. But, after all, faithfulness is nothing more nor less than a negative quality. By faithfulness a man may hold a position a lifetime. He will keep it just where he found it. But by the exercise of this single quality he does not add to the importance of the position any more than he adds to his own value. It is not enough ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok

... testimony in favor of vegetable diet is positive; whereas that of the multitude, who have never made the change I speak of, but who are therefore the more ready to laugh at the conclusions, is merely negative. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... forehead. Was it likely that these two would take the discovery of a little misunderstanding now with a charming quiet courtesy?—that, shouting the discovery abroad to save their faces, they would have due regard for careful qualifications and for striking the right note? The reply was the negative: it ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... not, which always precedes its verb, contracts with all the forms of habban. The negative loses its e, habban its h. Ne habban nabban; Ic ne hbbe Ic nbbe; Ic ne hfde Ic nfde, etc. The negative forms may be got, therefore, by simply substituting in each case ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... harmony, and communicate to harmony its agreeableness: in this case some conjugial love is communicable; but with those who have falsified with themselves the genuine truths of the church, it is not communicable. The prevailing ignorance concerning love truly conjugial, or a negative doubting respecting the possibility of the existence of such love, is from persons of the latter description; and from the same source also comes the wild imagination, in the minds of the generality, that adulteries are not evils in a ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... ever divorced in the female character? Shall I never be able to keep the straight path in life because I can turn an awkward corner with four horses at a trot? Female voices answer volubly in the negative, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative experience is familiar do not ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony's fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle "Never ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... enquiries which Tupia had been directed to make, whether they had ever seen such a vessel as ours, or had ever heard that any such had been upon their coast. These enquiries were all answered in the negative, so that tradition has preserved among them no memorial of Tasman; though, by an observation made this day, we find that we are only fifteen miles south of Murderer's bay, our latitude being 41 deg. 5' 32", and Murderer's bay, according to his account, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... that these talks on the unwisdom of speculation he was giving Dick were not in themselves enough to affect a change in Dick. Mere words were colorless and negative; ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott

... the improvement and progress of the administration of the existing foundation of government. A step beyond this line is revolution and intrigue, and such cannot be the attitude of a right-minded active politician or statesman. This is looking at it from the negative side. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... comptez plus sur les trouvailles." Yet not so long ago I mildly chid a seeker, him of the Desiderio, for not having one of his rare pictures photographed for the use of students. He smiled and admitted that I was perfectly right, but added pleadingly, "You know a negative costs about twenty francs, and for that one may often get an original." Why, even I who write—but I have promised that this essay ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather

... gravely, making a negative gesture which was not a little droll, and proved to an observer that in his youth the sailor had been witty and loving and beloved. Perhaps his fossil life at Guerande hid many memories. When he stood, solemnly planted on his two heron-legs in the sunshine ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... yields by apparent instinct to the insignificant appendage which directs her course, the rudder. All good riders know the mystery of a "good hand" upon a horse; this is a thing that is understood, but cannot be described except by a negative. There are persons who can sit a horse gracefully and well, but who have not the instinctive gift of hand. The horse is aware of this almost as soon as the rider has been seated in the saddle. In that case, whether the horse be first-class or not, there will be no comfort ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... affirmative and negative, slender as they may appear, it was believed he was yet alive. Hence the clamor; and sooth to say it sufficed to produce the favorite; so at least the commonalty were pleased to think, though a sharper speculation ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... this holiday that the resolution concerning a school of their own assumed definite shape. Miss Wooler talked of giving up Dewsbury Moor—should Charlotte and Emily take it? Charlotte's recollections of her illness there settled the question in the negative, and Brussels was coming ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... a Delaware, by the name of "Black Beaver," who was in my party, on arriving at a particular point, suddenly halted, and, turning to me, asked if I recognized the country before us. Seeing no familiar objects, I replied in the negative. He put the same question to the other white men of the party, all of whom gave the same answers, whereupon he smiled, and in his quaint vernacular said, "Injun he don't know nothing. Injun big fool. White man mighty smart; he know heap." At the same time he pointed ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... therefore, may so legislate, that is, it may have acts and records, but each other State SHALL give to the records and proceedings of all the rest 'full faith and credit.' Does not this enactment thoroughly negative all theories of the exclusive supremacy of State rights? Independent sovereign States do not, in the absence of treaties, give any faith or credit to the records or proceedings of other independent states. Our States are ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and observations of the Stars.—The most important set of observations (of planets) was a series of measures of Saturn in four directions, at the time when his ring had disappeared. They appear completely to negative the idea that Saturn's form differs sensibly from an ellipsoid.—Among the General Remarks of the Report the following appears: 'Another change (in prospect) will depend on the use of galvanism; and as a probable instance ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... information, e.g., spies, secret agents, disaffected elements of the local population, and including two UPREA Cabinet Ministers on my payroll. I regret to report that results of this investigation have been entirely negative. No one here appears to know anything of ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper

... she would explain the thing to me. She listened with the utmost attention to the superioress who translated my words, and when Mother Becaud came to say that the woman had had a vision of my son, and that he was in paradise, Palma stretched out her arm in a solemn manner as a sign of negative, and said to me, 'He is saved, but he is ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond

... eminently uneventful. Prosperous, happy in a half-hearted, almost negative, way, somewhat selfish, he had never known hardship, had never faced adversity. It is such men as this who love what they call a serious talk, summoning the subject thereof with exaggerated gravity to a study, making a point of the mise en scene, and finally saying nothing that ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman

... Each electron carries an electric charge of electrostatic units and produces a magnetic field in a plane perpendicular to the direction of its motion. This brings us to the atom, which may be described as a number of electrons positive and negative in stable equilibrium, this condition being brought about by the mutual repulsion of the like and attraction for the opposite electrification so arranged as to nullify each other. Having thus established the law of the equilibrium of electrons, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... whiskers. The other two were young and well dressed. The girl was of our best patrician type—the type that may know little, think little, say little, and generally amount to little, and yet carry its negative qualities with so used an air of polite society as to raise them by sheer force to the dignity of positive virtues. From head to foot she was faultlessly groomed. From eye to attitude she was languidly superior—the ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... out the city of Kells in extent as it now is, and blessed it;" but he doubts if any considerable church here was founded by Columba himself, or indeed before 804. He grounds his doubts chiefly on the negative circumstance that there is "no mention of the place in the Annals as a religious seat" till the year 804. But the Annals of the Four Masters record two years previously, or in 802, that "the church of Columcille at ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... these negative virtues, ending where they begun, or enabling him to go through a long life of energetic activities without an enemy. He not only lived at peace with all men, but did his utmost to make them live at peace with each other. Says one who knew him ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... He, too, declared that he had acted throughout the affair by express command of the Earl of Leicester. Being asked if he had any written evidence of the fact, he, likewise, replied in the negative. "Then his Excellency will unquestionably deny your assertion," said the judges. "Alas, then am I a dead man," replied Volmar, and the unfortunate deacon never spoke truer words. Captain de Maulde also confessed his crime. He did not pretend, however, to have had any personal communication with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... spite of the complying temper of old Cossu in other respects when Nathalie gave her advice, he seemed obstinately bent on choosing his own son-in-law. Parents are oftener correct than romancers will allow, in their negative opinions on this delicate subject, but I cannot say as much for them when they undertake to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... of her eye-glasses, but sat very quiet, lest she should delay the opening. She would like to know what could be in that very business-like looking despatch, and Laura would be sure to tell her. It must be something pretty positive, one way or another; it was no common-place negative communication. Laura might have had property left her. Mrs. Megilp always thought of ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... the following Fifteen Battles has been selected will, I trust, appear when it is described. But it may be well to premise a few remarks on the negative tests which have led me to reject others, which at first sight may appear equal in magnitude and importance to the ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... unmerited deformity, the framers of advertisements for the apprehension of delinquents, a sincere desire of promoting the end of public justice induces me to address a word to them on the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavor to lay down a few practical, or rather negative, rules for their use, for my ambition extends no further than to arm them with cautions against the self-defeating ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... art. In fact, the printer could not depend upon sunlight for making the engravings which are used to illustrate the magazines and newspapers. The newspaper photographer may make a "flashlight" exposure, develop his negative, and make a print from it under artificial light. He may turn this over to the photo-engraver who carries out his work by means of powerful arc-lamps and in an hour or two after the original exposure was made the newspaper containing the ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... to interpret the empirical knowledge. This fact is well brought out in the following passage from Kofler: "The teacher must imitate the wrong muscle-action and tone of his pupil as an illustration of the negative side." (The Art of Breathing, N. Y., 1889.) Kofler does not touch on the question, how the teacher is able to locate the wrong muscle-action of the pupil. He takes this ability for granted; it is so purely an intuitive process that he does not stop to inquire into the source of this information ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... Those having come to an end, he completed the mystification of the nurse by producing a portrait of the Dane, while he lay asleep one day after he had been improving in health for some little time past. Fanny asked leave to look at the likeness when it had been "printed" from the negative, in the garden. He first examined it himself—and then deliberately tore it up and let the fragments fly away in the wind. "I am not satisfied with it," was all the explanation he offered. One of the garden chairs happened to be near him; he sat down, and looked like a man in a state ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... commissions. These miniatures, of which few have survived, recognisable as his work at least, possess no very marked artistic qualities. Drawn with care and not without considerable sense of construction, they are tenderly modelled but not stippled, and the colour is cool and rather negative in character. The frank way in which the sitters are regarded, and the lighting and placing of the heads are almost the only elements which hint their authorship. They are simple and straight-forward likenesses rather than works of art and bear ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw

... irrevocably separates them from that class; and, second, because they contribute in large measure to provoke and to constitute among the workers of all trades, of all localities, and of all countries the consciousness and the fact itself of solidarity: a double action, the one negative and the other positive, which tends to constitute directly the new world of the proletariat by opposing it, almost absolutely, to ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... intellectual. This may happen when the previous convictions of the mind are shaken by the knowledge of some fact newly brought before its notice; such as the apparent conflict between the Hebrew record of a universal deluge(83) and the negative evidence of geology as to its non-occurrence; or the historical discrepancies between the books of Kings and Chronicles,(84) or the varying accounts of the genealogy and resurrection of Christ. A doubt purely intellectual in its origin might also arise, as we know was the case with the pious Bengel,(85) ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... disapproval by Cicero, who began to be old men early that they might continue to be old men for a long time. His value to the institution he had served so long, and his safety in his position, lay in the possession of negative qualities. His silence was interpreted as an indication of wisdom, and the firmly cut features of his inscrutable face would have served an artist as a personification of discipline. As he exchanged the conventional greetings the occasion demanded, he might even then ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... proper time and developed in the ordinary way. After development, the plate is fixed and strongly intensified, in order to render the white portions of the drawings as opaque as possible. On looking through a properly treated negative of this kind, it will be seen that the parts representing the lines and black portions of the drawing are clear glass, and the whites representing the paper ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... put forward as the basis of its action the existing corruption of doctrine, but the corruption of administration. Its claim was a claim to manage its own local affairs, and was put into execution when the Convocation of Canterbury voted in the negative on the question submitted to it, viz., "Whether the Roman pontiff has any greater jurisdiction bestowed on him by God in Holy Scripture in this realm of England, than any other ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... thought of my lecture comes first and the thought of putting my pen into the ink to write it comes afterwards, therefore the one thought causes the other. Hence it is important to point out that I have a negative experience with which to contrast the positive experience. I do not always, even as regards my own inward experiences, assume that succession implies Causality. Supposing, as I speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly introduces itself into the succession ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... friends and guardians of everything admirable in human life; but their good intentions did not prevent them from actively or passively opposing positive intellectual and moral achievement, directed either towards social or individual ends. The effect of their whole state of mind was negative and fatalistic. They approved in general of everything approvable; but the things of which they actively approved were the things which everybody in general was doing. Their point of view implied that society and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... the noon delivery?" asked Kathleen, and her smile faded at the butler's negative reply. Why did her letters to England remain unanswered? John Hargraves was the promptest of correspondents, and the question she had asked him required an answer. Preoccupied with her own thoughts, she was about to enter the elevator totally oblivious to Vincent's agitated manner. ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... accurately; those parts of the traces which lay upon the black tessellae being less distinct in the outline than the others upon the white or colored. Most unquestionably, so far as this went, it furnished a negative circumstance in favor of the negro, for the footsteps were very different in outline from his, and smaller, for Aaron was a man of colossal build. And as to his knowledge of the state in which the premises had been found, and his having so familiarly ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... only did Professor Holden "sweep" in the solar vicinity, but Palisa and Trouvelot agreed to divide the field of exploration, and thus make sure of whatever planetary prey there might be within reach; yet with only negative results. Photographic explorations during recent eclipses have been equally fruitless. Belief in the presence of any considerable body or bodies within the orbit of Mercury is, accordingly, at a low ebb. Yet the existence of the anomaly ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... the strike for anything and everything is not only anti-social; it is anti-Socialist. Writing on the strike outbreak of 1911,[2] I said: "The mass strike is rarely effective, save in a negative fashion. It is successful mostly when used against some particular object or for some definite purpose of the moment. It can be used to break an objectionable agreement; it may prevent the putting into force of an unpopular law, or the passing of some tyrannical measure; it may check ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee

... dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I do like some one ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... French people wills the maintenance of Louis Napoleon Buonaparte's authority, and delegates to him the powers necessary to frame a constitution on the basis of his proclamation of the 2nd of December.' This was to be carried by a simple affirmative or negative by all Frenchmen twenty-one years of age, in possession of their civil rights. On the 20th and 21st of December the ballot took place, and the result was that more than eight millions of men voted in the affirmative. The ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... one occasion you very properly communicated to me. I have gotten two letters from a quarter which commands respect, containing information as to the course by which I may be enabled to prove the negative of all the crimes which even the most credulous suspicion could lay to my charge. I expected a third by this morning's post, containing documents which will set the matter for ever at rest, but owing, no doubt, to some neglect, ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... but little in his manner of approach from other strangers I had seen hovering about my friend, but to make sure of his identity—the painter had not yet noticed the man—I sent Marny a Marconi message of inquiry with my eyebrows, which he answered in the negative with ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... Portia's negative of this proposition was as keen and straight as a knife-edge. The thing wasn't to be discussed; not to be considered for an instant. "We're perfectly well off, mother and I. We're living easily within our income out here, and—we're as contented as possible." The cadence of those last three words ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... when this myth originated, we might guess from this teaching that the myth was a late one, for the earliest Greeks and Romans did not believe in a real happiness after death. They believed in existence after death, but it was a very shadowy existence, with the most negative sort of pleasures. Later, the Romans, even before they accepted Christianity, had their beliefs more or less modified ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality—intensely negative, but intense all the same—must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... their heads arrogantly in this country, or that the Kaiser in Germany believed that the United States was a mere jelly-fish nation which would tolerate any enormity he might concoct. This was the actual comfort President Wilson's message gave Germany. The negative result was felt among the Allied nations which, struggling against the German Monster like Laocoon in the coils of the Python, took Mr. Wilson's praise of Germany's imaginary love of justice and humanity as a death-warrant for themselves. They could not believe ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... on, in reply to a negative on Crevel's part, "I have fouled my life, till now so pure, by a degrading thought; and I am inexcusable!—I know it!—I deserve every insult you can offer me! God's will be done! If, indeed, He desires the death of two creatures worthy to appear before Him, they must die! I shall mourn them, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... elections, and gained control of the new parliament through his newly-created political party, Ak Jol, in December 2007 elections. Current concerns include: privatization of state-owned enterprises, negative trends in democracy and political freedoms, reduction of corruption, improving interethnic relations, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of how a man has no soul, no consciousness after death; that to the Buddhist 'dead men rise up never,' and that those who go down to the grave are known no more. I read that all that survives is the effect of a man's actions, the evil effect, for good is merely negative, and that this is what causes pain and trouble to the next life. Everything changes, say the sacred books, nothing lasts even for a moment. It will be, and it has been, is the life of man. The life that lives tomorrow in the next incarnation is no more ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... of the man of fashion is the more difficult to reduce to words, in that it is mostly negative. It is easier to say what this expression is not, than what it is. We can only say, that there is nothing professionally distinctive about it. It is the expression of a man perfectly at ease in his position, and so well aware that he is so, that he does not seem to be aware of it. An absence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... brought Monk better counsel, the morning's ransacking of the vessel and the examination of her crew proved more painstaking than Lanyard had expected. And the upshot was precisely as Monk had foretold, precisely negative. He reported drily to this effect at an informal conference in his quarters after luncheon. He himself had supervised the entire search and had made a good part of it in person, he said. No nook or cranny of the ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... his Enemy, but he is for this Reason to be excluded from every Department. Who could wish to hold a Seat in Government on so slavish a Tenure? The People of Massachusetts under the old Government have seen enough of the mischievous Effects of the Governors having a Power to negative Elections & I cannot see the Difference between this & his being able to influence or prevent an Election by causing it to be believd that a Candidate is his Enemy. He who gives his Suffrage according to the Dictates of a well informd Judgment, is certainly ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... army, and the two houses passed a bill for that purpose, to which the king found himself obliged to consent. But to the bill which followed, for establishing the regular assembling of the militia, and for providing for their being in arms six weeks in the year, he opposed his royal negative; thus making his stand upon the same point on which his father had done; a circumstance which, if events had taken a turn against him, would not have failed of being much noticed by historians. Civil securities for freedom came to be afterwards considered; and it is to ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox

... and though from the rule of opposites, this species of character awoke in her a spice of interest, yet was the interest of too faint and negative a kind to attract her more ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... changing contents as a cathedral reacts on the impressiveness of the rites performed within it, or as nature reacts on a poet's thoughts; and in the same way Bach's melody is greater than any possible mood of the moment, not because of that vague and negative pseudo-classical quality misnamed "reserve," but because of its vital individuality. In their proper directions its changes are limitless; elsewhere change is inconceivable. No amount of "Umarbeitung" could, for instance, turn the aria of Hercules into ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... intervals against the deck. He was about to kiss the feet of his former fellow- slave, the glittering gold, blue, and white of whose borrowed dress no doubt impressed him. Arthur hastily started back, to the amazement of the spectators, and called out a negative—one of the words sure to be first learnt. He tried to take Fareek's hand and raise him from his abject attitude; but the poor fellow continued kneeling, and not only were no words available to tell him that he was free, ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... I quietly closed the window and sat down as if I had not heard her; but I was so furious with rage that I could hardly restrain myself. That cold silence, that negative force, exasperated me to the last point. Had I been really deceived and convinced of the guilt of a woman I loved I could not have suffered more. As I had condemned myself to remain in Paris, I reflected that I must compel Brigitte to speak ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... stranger described some of his recent adventures in Mexico. "Oh!" exclaimed the dressmaker, "they say Eyraud, the murderer, is in Mexico! Did you come across him? Were you in Paris at the time of the murder?" The stranger answered in the negative, but his face betrayed his uneasiness. "Do you know you're rather like him?" said the woman, in a half-joking way. The stranger laughed, and shortly after went out, saying he would return. He did return on May 15, bringing with him a number of the Republique Illustree that contained an ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... such 'croppers.' But it is my contention—my superstition, if you like- -that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... out by the same train to-morrow, though it's more than likely that my report will be a negative one." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... governing the action of Life, as a tendency to individuation, is here designated polarity; for instance, the power termed magnetism (not meaning that there is necessarily an actual tangible magnet in the case) has two poles, the negative, answering to attraction, rest, carbon, &c., and the positive, answering to repulsion, mobility, azote, &c.; and as the magnetic needle which points to the north necessarily indicates thereby the south, so the power disposing to rest has necessarily a counteracting influence disposing to mobility, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... or who attribute to themselves any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals in civil affairs; in short, they exclude the Catholics. Atheists also may be excluded, as being under no possible conscientious obligation to dogmatize concerning their negative creed. The Catholics maintain the right of the sovereign to forbid the use of ceremonies, or the profession of opinions, which would disturb the public peace. Montesquieu, a nominal Catholic only, declares that it is the fundamental principle of political laws concerning religion, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... however, is not a negative one, but very affirmative and surely based. The spirit of nature and the natural sciences, those outlaws of an elder day, return in might irresistible. All idle shadows are hunted out by the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... wished Cyril to see Daniel; he said gravely that he thought Cyril ought to see him. The proposal was monstrous, inexplicable—or explicable only by the assumption that his mind, while not unhinged, had temporarily lost its balance. Constance opposed an absolute negative, and Samuel being in every way enfeebled, she overcame. As for Cyril, he was divided between fear and curiosity. On the whole, perhaps Cyril regretted that he would not be able to say at school that he had had speech with the most ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... necessity be brought forward. Some poor old woman was thereupon picked out and subjected to atrocious torture. If she "confessed," the torture ceased. Naturally she very often "confessed," thus implicating others and damning herself. Negative suggestion this modern psychologist likewise offers as light upon witchcraft. The witches seldom cried, no matter what their anguish of mind might be. The inquisitors used to say to them then, "If you're not a witch, cry, let ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... in 1931, was the first device capable of accelerating positive ions to the very high energies needed. Its basic principle of operation is not difficult to understand. A charged particle accelerated in a cyclotron is analogous to a ball being whirled on a string fastened to the top of a pole. A negative electric field attracts the positively charged particle (ball) towards it and then switches off until the particle swings halfway around; the field then becomes negative in front of the particle again, and again attracts it. As the ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson

... my turn to speak, and I asked Francis if she would keep me there a few days longer. Her answer, however, was in the negative. ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint

... to nod my head twice—once in the negative, meaning thereby that I would prefer not taking the other bottle at present—and once in the affirmative, intending thus to imply that I was sober and had positively come to my senses. By these means I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... have been found is futile, not only because such a country as Sumer is no more favourable to the preservation of such evidence than is the Delta of the Nile, but also upon the more general grounds that negative statements of this sort cannot be assigned a positive evidence for an immigration."[14] This distinguished ethnologist is frankly of opinion that the Sumerians were the congeners of the pre-Dynastic Egyptians of the Mediterranean or Brown race, the eastern branch of which reaches to ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... healthier,—braces the nerves," said Mr. Avenel; "but you young fellows relax the system by hot rooms and late hours. Fond of dancing, of course, sir?" Then, without waiting for Randal's negative, Mr. Richard continued rapidly, "Mrs. Avenel has a soiree dansante on Thursday,—shall be very happy to see you in Eaton Square. Stop, I have a card;" and he drew out a dozen large invitation-cards, from which he selected one, and presented it to Randal. The baron pressed that young ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... acid; the second was browned, declaring the presence of the alkali soda. The dissolved salt, therefore, arranged in this fashion, was decomposed by the machine, exactly as it would have been by the voltaic current. When instead of using the positive conductor he used the negative, the positions of the acid and alkali were reversed. Thus he satisfied himself that chemical decomposition by the machine is obedient to the laws which rule decomposition by ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall

... were no further witnesses for the prosecution I cross-examined these two at full length, but absolutely without results, since every vital question that I asked was met with a direct negative. ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard

... incessantly in various parts of the house; at three a servant began beating on the door with something in the nature of a sledge-hammer to know if I wished to take the train Atlantic-bound, and refused to accept a negative answer; my room-mate held the world's record for snoring; at the first suggestion of dawn every child, chicken, and assorted animal in the building and vicinity set up its greatest possible uproar; and I was half-frozen all night, even under all the clothing I possessed. Except for these ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... home; or they would both be out; or perhaps have gone down to their river cottage. Cramier! What cruel demon had presided over that marring of her life! Why had he never met her till after she had bound herself to this man! From a negative contempt for one who was either not sensitive enough to recognize that his marriage was a failure, or not chivalrous enough to make that failure bear as little hardly as possible on his wife, he had come already to jealous hatred as of a monster. To be face to face with Cramier in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... knotted, we neither of us could help fulfilling our engagements. By dint of bullying and beating, at last I was sufficiently enlightened to be able to read a romance to my mistress, or answer an invitation-note in the negative or affirmative. My mistress had two nieces who lived with her, both nearly grown up when I entered the family. They taught me dancing for their own amusement, as well as many other things, and by their care I improved very much, even in reading and writing. Although ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... they exchanged technical phrases. Cherry's Chinese boy brought in a tray, and both the other men ate and drank. Peter nodded a negative without a change of expression, but presently he roused himself to replenish the fire. The clock ticked and ticked in ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... and negative way of showing intense respect is by no means unknown among African people, and the result is that if, as is usual, the name in question has a significance, the meaning must be expressed by an idiom or other ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard

... look of relief was visible on the faces of the unfortunate girls who had gone to town with Kathleen on the preceding night. A few more questions were asked, Ruth replying on every occasion in the negative. "I can't say," or "I will not say," were the only words that ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... foolish was it in Pope to give all his friendship to Lords, who thought they honoured him by being with him; and to choose such Lords as Burlington, and Cobham, and Bolingbroke! Bathurst was negative, a pleasing man; and I have heard no ill of Marchmont; and then always saying, "I do not value you for being a Lord;" which was a sure proof that he did. I never say, I do not value Boswell more for being born to an estate, because I do not care.' BOSWELL. 'Nor for being a Scotchman?' JOHNSON. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... Sumfit drubbed and patted and flattened and rounded it in the dairy; and she ran down the slope, meeting her father at the gate. He was dressed in his brushed suit, going she knew whither, and when he asked if she had seen her uncle, she gave for answer a plain negative, and longed more keenly to be at work with her hands, and to smell the homely creamy air ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... told this outfit my experience with the vigilantes when I was a kid?" inquired Bull Durham. There was a general negative response, and he proceeded. "Well, our folks were living on the Frio at the time, and there was a man in our neighborhood who had an outfit of four men out beyond Nueces Canon hunting wild cattle for their hides. It was necessary to take them out supplies about every so often, and on one trip he ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams

... could now search for a law that would negative this provision in its effect upon social equality, he would fail to find it. But he would find it in the unwritten law of the natural aversion of the races. He would find it in public opinion, which is the vital force in every law in a free government. This is ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... Spilett, Pencroft, and Neb into the dining-room of Granite House, told them what had happened. Pencroft, seizing the telescope, rapidly swept the horizon, and stopping on the indicated point, that is to say, on that which had made the almost imperceptible spot on the photographic negative...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... that you are negative, doctor, and not suggestive. We have a criminal and you have not. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... beheld him than he dashed hastily into an adjoining room. After debating with himself whether he should further seek an interview, which, though, now in his power, was so sedulously shunned by the other party, he decided in the negative; and contenting himself with writing upon a slip of paper the hasty words,—"You are known by the villagers,—be upon your guard,"—he gave it to the ostler, with instructions to deliver it instantly to the owner of the horse he pointed ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... cold in the woman's voice, as she replied in the negative. Her husband looked sullen and merely nodded. The sheriff now rose and came toward the machine. He knew all the young folks and greeted them briefly. At his heels pressed old Harding and his companion. They whispered in the sheriff's ear as he advanced, and seemed ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham

... he asked me if I was going to the forest of evil fame, and when I replied in the negative, seemed surprised and, very much to my surprise, evidently disappointed. He even tried to persuade me to go, where before I had been earnestly recommended not to go, until, finding that I would not, he took me with him to hunt in the woods. By and by he returned to the same subject: he could not ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... microscope, it frequently occurs that the operator, instead of devoting a negative to each of two or more similar objects for comparison, printing both upon the same print, prefers to have the whole series upon one negative, and taking from this a single print. There is often room for two or more images upon the same plate. If the center of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various

... knowledge that the next day would be a repetition of the day before, was enough to try the sweetest temper; and I, for one, never professed to have such a thing. Added to this we had the feeling that our work and energies could have but a negative result—that is, the proof that the country was barren and useless; and yet its very uselessness made it harder to travel through. But with all this we never had a complaint or growl from any in the camp. About this time I again became ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... is not only that he manifestly recognized no external canons whereto to conform the expression of his thoughts, but he had, apparently, no inclination to invent and observe—except, indeed, in the most negative of senses—any style of his own. The "style of Sterne," in short, is as though one should say "the form of Proteus." He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly irregular, and that was all. His digressions, his asides, and his fooleries in general ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... (curved jewels) and kudatama (cylindrical jewels). It is generally supposed that the magatama represented a tiger's claw, which is known to have been regarded by the Koreans as an amulet. But the ornament may also have taken its comma-like shape from the Yo and the Yin, the positive and the negative principles which by Chinese cosmographists were accounted the great primordial factors, and which occupy a prominent place in Japanese decorative art as the tomoye.* The cylindrical jewels evidently owed their shape to facility for stringing into necklaces ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... will read with care the thirteenth chapter of I. Corinthians, you will find that most of the qualities of love are purely negative. "Love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave herself rudely, seeketh not her own, is not provoked, thinketh no evil." Here are "nots" enough to hold on our spiritual wardrobe. Here are reasons enough to explain the ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... (which is a true one) that you are immune to the psychic attack or influence. You should say, mentally, "I deny to any person the power to influence me psychically without my consent; I am positive to all such influences, and they are negative to me; I neutralize them by ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... undisguised hostility towards the first Mayor of Paris. I asked myself first, whether the magistrate's manners had possibly excited the susceptibilities of the Eschevins.[14] The answer is decidedly in the negative. Bailly showed in all the relations of life a degree of patience, a suavity, a deference to the opinions of others, that would have ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... like these, not in order to throw ridicule upon the Celt-lovers,—on the contrary, I feel a great deal of sympathy with them,—but rather, to make it clear what an immense advantage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the controversy about Celtic antiquity; how much a clear-headed sceptic, like Mr. Nash, may utterly demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the appearance of having won an entire victory. But an entire ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... have points of peculiar interest to the author. For instance, "Negative Gravity" was composed in Switzerland when the author was temporarily confined to the house in full ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... case, and cases 4, 5, and 6 in this room, are covered with various electro-negative metals and metalloids, classed according to the system laid down by Berzelius. In the third case are Tellurium and Tellurets. In the fourth are samples of native Arsenic, and its combinations with nickel and cobalt; Carbon in its various forms, pure as in the diamonds, which the ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... accidental, the deficient, should not be perpetuated in ideal creation. It is an Apollo who embodies the permanent ideal of manhood—not a cripple or a hunchback. Still further: art should not only refuse to embody the defective, which is a mere negative; it should not only give form to the utmost perfection it beholds in nature or in humanity, but beyond this the responsibility is upon the artist to penetrate into loftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist is, by virtue of his high calling, a ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... at a wine table, when the company are over-excited, must be answered for; and if the party insulting have no recollection of the insult, it is his duty to say so in writing, and negative the insult. For instance, if the man say: "you are a liar and no gentleman," he must, in addition to the plea of the want of recollection, say: "I believe the party insulted to be a man of the strictest ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson

... A weary little negative sent her into the pantry, and soon the hungry lad was eating bread and butter and cheese and cookies, and feasting his eyes upon Polly at ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd

... is," answered the German, as he turned a wheel which directed the negative gravity force against the surface of the ground and tilted up the nose of the Annihilator, as a skyrocket is slanted in a trough before the ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood

... her if Mrs. Falchion had risen. She said that she had not: that she had been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked; but had complained of a headache, and had not risen. I then asked Justine if Mrs. Falchion had been told who the suicide was, and was answered in the negative. At that moment a lady came to me and said in an awed whisper: "Dr. Marmion, is it true that the man who committed suicide was a second- class passenger, and that he appeared at the ball last night, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... such a temporary occupation might turn into a permanent occupation. The only escape from these alternatives may at any time be that we must ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so much as possible of a just obligation shall be paid." The Monroe Doctrine was negative. It denied to European powers a certain liberty of operation in this hemisphere. The positive obligations resulting from its application by the United States were ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... writing their letters a little before luncheon time, Walter opened the door and looked in with a comical expression on his face. "Are you all very busy?" he asked. Having received a reply in the negative, he advanced to the fire, crouched down by his aunt, hid his face in her lap, and then, looking up at her with a smile, said, "I've come to make an announcement and a confession. First and foremost, the raffle has come to grief, partly, I suppose, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... explanation. Nowhere does it become apparent that the abolition of the Bamoth and Asherim and memorial stones is the real object contemplated; these institutions are now almost unknown, and what is really only intelligible as a negative and polemical ordinance is regarded as full of ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... in 1853, built a steamboat for canals with a screw on each side of the rudder. It was made to draw four boats with 40 tons of coal in each at two and a half miles per hour, and the twin screws were to negative the surge, but the iron horses of the rail soon put down, not only all such weak attempts at competition, but almost the whole canal traffic itself, so far as general merchandise and carriage of light goods and ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... argument takes imprudence in the negative sense. It must be observed however that lack of prudence or of any other virtue is included in the lack of original justice which perfected the entire soul. Accordingly all such lack of virtue may be ascribed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... nearest to the bore is in a state of tension and that of the outer layers in a state of compression, then the cylinder will have the least strength when t0 has the greatest numerical value. Such stresses are termed injurious or detrimental stresses. With t0 negative, the strength of the cylinder increases with the numerical value of t0, and those stresses which cause compression in the layers nearest to the bore of the cylinder and tension in the outer layers are termed beneficial or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... universes. Round a central sun, termed a Proton, whirl a number of electrons in rhythmic motion and incessant swing. And these electrons and protons—what are they? Something in the nature of charges of electricity, positive and negative. So where is now ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion. But for Locke ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... but a negative point, however; and what should be carefully borne in mind is that the evidence as a whole leads to the conclusion that the Christians of the second and third centuries made use of the sign and venerated the figure of the cross without, as Dean Farrar admits, it "only or even mainly," reminding ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... Quincy arose and reached the Professor's side just as the latter finished speaking and turned towards the chorus. Quincy said something in a low tone to the Professor which caused Mr. Strout to shake his head in the negative in a most pronounced manner. Quincy spoke again and looked towards Miss Putnam, who was seated in the front row, and whose face ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin

... numerous once, reduced to few or none? Can gold grow worthless that has stood the touch? No. Gold they seemed, but they were never such. Horatio's servant once, with bow and cringe, Swinging the parlour-door upon its hinge, Dreading a negative, and overawed Lest he should trespass, begged to go abroad. "Go, fellow!—whither?"—turning short about— "Nay. Stay at home; you're always going out."— "'Tis but a step, sir; just at the street's end." "For what?"—"An please you, sir, to see a friend." "A friend!" Horatio cried, and seemed ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless traveling, but Durant was ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... gradual manner at that point of the pyritous mass most subject to the current until a continuous film of some size appears. This being formed the pyrites and gold are to a certain extent polarised, the film or irregular but connected mass of gold forming the negative, and the pyrites the positive end of a voltaic pair; and so according as the polarisation is advanced to completion the further deposition of gold is changed in its manner from an indiscriminate to an orderly and selective deposition concentrated upon the negative or gold plate. The ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... the insight born of familiarity; but no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack what Keats calls "negative capability"—"that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... manners, tastes, sentiments, and general life of the nobility. Through him the poem was brought outwardly more into line with the literary ideals of the court circles. This shows itself chiefly in a negative way, namely, in the almost complete avoidance of the coarse language and farcical situations so common with the popular poet, the spielmann. Beyond this no violence is done to the simple form of the original. The style is still inornate and direct, facts still speak rather than words, and ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler

... Jackson's conduct is that he should have informed Lee of his inability to force the passage across the Swamp, and have held three divisions in readiness to march to Glendale. This, so far as can be ascertained, was left undone, but the evidence is merely negative. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... left commanding officer, had given himself leave, and, with a few men, had joined Bob Short and the first party at the Lust Haus, leaving the corporal as the next senior officer in charge. The answer in the negative was a great mortification to Mr Vanslyperken, and he descended to his cabin in no very good humour, and summoned Smallbones. But before Smallbones was summoned, he had time to whisper to one or two of the conspirators—"He's gone." ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... arrives when the inconsistencies which have prevailed in this union rise up like branches of a tree bent down for a moment under a weight which has been gradually lightened. You have mistaken for love the negative attitude of a young girl who was waiting for happiness, who flew in advance of your desires, in the hope that you would go forward in anticipation of hers, and who did not dare to complain of the secret unhappiness, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... otherwise then Sir William Throckmorton's, Captain Christopher Dawnes'[147] and other men's patentes) exempteth himselffe and his people from all services of the Colonie excepte onely in case of warre against[148] a forren or domesticall enemie. His answere[149] was negative, that he would not infringe any parte[150] of his Patente. Whereupon it was resolved by the Assembly that his Burgesses ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various

... here to enter upon, was become so unpleasing to the multitude, that anything confessedly Scotch awakened the embers of discussion, and fed the flame of party. Mr. Garrick therefore put a direct negative at once upon my appearance in 'Douglas;' 'Oroonoko' was substituted in its place; for even to have performed the play of 'Douglas' would have been hazardous, and to have exhibited the Highland dress upon the stage, imprudence in the extreme. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... another mechanical point I'd like to ask about. When the two types of cells differ, will the difference in degree of capillarity regulate the amount of pabulum distributed, or does it depend upon negative ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association

... repeated negative replies a mystery full of unkindness; he began to look round the apartment with a suspicious air. There happened to be in La Valliere's room a miniature of Athos. The king remarked that this portrait bore ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... this exploration, Hudson had at his command a mass of information—positive as well as negative—that at once narrowed his search and directed it; and there is very good reason for believing that he actually carried with him charts of a crude sort on which, more or less clearly, were indicated the ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier

... seldom possible to prove a negative. But no evidence has ever been brought forward to substantiate the rumors brought against Hortense. These vile slanderers have even gone so far as to accuse Napoleon of crimes, in reference to the daughter of Josephine and the ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... maidenly security, and to bring her face to face with her destiny. Then his openly avowed siege speedily compelled her to withdraw her thoughts from man in the abstract to himself. She could not brush him aside by a quiet negative, as she had already done in the case of several others. Clinging to her old life, however, and fearing to embark on this unknown sea of new experiences, she hesitated, and would not commit herself until the force that impelled was greater than that which restrained. He at ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... deserved. He would have it that this miraculous system had compensated for the want of those doctrines (of eternal rewards and punishments, &c.), without which no state can subsist; and that such a compensation even proved what that want at first sight appeared to negative. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... changes were due to the influence of one man was undoubtedly true, but that he was necessarily a superior man did not follow. Elijah's success was due partly to the fact that he had been enabled to impress certain negative virtues, which were part of his own nature, upon a community equally constituted to receive them. Each was strengthened by the recognition in each other of the unexpected value of those qualities; each ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte

... himself, his proceedings were beyond speculation. From time to time he made mysterious appearances at the windows of the loft, usually arrayed in what looked suspiciously like a nightshirt. Sometimes I would see him holding a negative up to the light, at others manipulating a photographic printing-frame; and once I observed him with a paintbrush and a large gallipot; on which I turned away in despair, and ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... Mary timidly expressed her wish to be permitted to return to Lochmarlie, and mentioned that her uncle and aunt had repeatedly offered to come to Bath for her, if she might be allowed to accompany them home; but to this her mother also gave a decided negative, adding that she never should see Lochmarlie again, if she could help it. In short, she must remain where she was till something could be fixed as to her future destination. "It was most excessively tiresome to be clogged with a great unmarried daughter," her Ladyship observed, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... to each one all the liberty consistent with the general safety. Security, being the only common object, should be the sole duty of the common agent. The government being confined to the performance of this negative duty, it must not exercise its power except when necessary. The inquiry, Is it necessary? not, Is it advantageous? is the test to be applied to every measure. The rigid application of this rule excludes the state ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... although the other party maintains that it is a justiciable case, the Bench which is to serve as Bench of First Instance shall investigate the matter with regard to the question whether the case is more political than legal in nature. If the Court decides the question in the negative, then the same Court shall give judgment on the dispute; but, if the Court decides the question in the affirmative, then the case shall be referred by the Court to the International Council of Conciliation. ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim

... words of Charles Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of men, and he was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would have been an impostor.' But the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in 'La Saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject. Christ remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love, but no messenger ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... word of Arab origin signifying a cipher, and employed to denote a neutral point in scale between an ascending and descending series, or between positive and negative. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... greater or less broadening of the accent on the second syllable according to the social standard of the speaker. Her tastes were comprehended and sympathised with by her gardener, and by the clerk at Mudie's who refilled her box. The view taken of her by her husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound puppy. She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very successful ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... with a view to a final return to it. Let me know soon, in a post or two, if possible, as well as the circuit you mean to go on.... Now as I have gone on with this scheme, I find myself grow warm on it, so do not throw cold water upon it by a negative. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... word "excuses" a cloud passed over the brow of Athos, a haughty smile curled the lip of Porthos, and a negative sign was the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... experience; but neither party found anything to throw the least light upon the fate either of the raft or of the unfortunate man who had gone to sea in her; and when at length they met they had at least the negative satisfaction of being able to say that, after a thorough search of the entire seaboard of the island, they had discovered no actual proof that the captain ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive—what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Said I, what else can your son do, besides writing a good hand? Can he post a set of books in a mercantile manner? Can he write a neat piece of composition in prose or in verse? To these interrogations he answered in the negative. Said I, Did your son learn, while he was at school, the width and depth of English Grammar? to which he also replied in the negative, telling me his son did not learn those things. Your son, said I, then, has hardly any learning at all—he is almost as ignorant, and more so, than ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet

... should they be at a disadvantage in an affair which concerns the happiness of the whole life? They have as much right to a choice as men, and to an opportunity to exercise it. Why should they occupy a negative position, and be restricted, in making the most important part of their career, wholly to the choice implied in refusals? In fact, marriage really concerns them more than it does men; they have to bear the chief of its burdens. A wide and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... shouting or compulsion, to the seemingly sacrilegious work of destruction. When the history of the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament is finally written, it will be declared most unfortunate that the results first presented to the rank and file of the Christian Church were, as a rule, largely negative and in many cases relatively unimportant. In their initial enthusiasm for scientific research scholars, alas! sometimes lost the true perspective and failed to recognize relative values. The date, for example, of Isaiah xl.-lv. is ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent

... galaxy. A living anachronism, a refugee from the history books. Abravanel had singlehandedly worked out the equations, spelled out his science of Societics. Then he had trained seven generations of students in its fundamentals. Hearing the article of his faith defamed by its creator produced a negative feedback loop in Neel so strong his hands vibrated in tune with it. It took a jarring effort to crack out ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)

... the normal and average man. The apparent exceptions seem to prove the rule, for it will generally be found that the women who are, not immodest (for immodesty is more closely related to modesty than mere negative absence of the sense of modesty), but without that fear which implies the presence of a complex emotional feminine organization to defend, only make a strong sexual appeal to men who are themselves lacking in the complementary masculine qualities. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... thought—remembering his tastes the last time, that the long blue room? Exactly! The long, low-arched room, with the faded blue tapestry, looking upon the gallery—capital! He had always liked that room. From purely negative evidence he had every reason to believe that it was the one formidable-looking room in England that Queen Elizabeth had ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... nothing nicer could happen than that they should make a match of it. Mother prophesied they would. But I did not believe it. I was afraid of Gerald—that disposition in him to consider too finely, to halt on the brink, that negative, renunciatory way he has settled into. I thought the thing would end in mere philandering. I am glad"—she threw the weight of conviction on the word,—"glad it hasn't! I don't see, my dear Estelle, what you can find ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... grief of the parents had somewhat subsided at this dreadful intelligence, Mr. Goodwin asked Sarah Sullivan if his daughter had heard the wail of this prophetic spirit of death; and on her answering in the negative, he enjoined, her never to breathe a syllable of the circumstance to her; but she told him she had come to that conclusion herself, as she felt certain, she said, that the knowledge of it would occasion her mistress's ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... expressed in her tones, but, being more disquieted than she wished to acknowledge, she went forth to search the neighboring wood-paths and the sea-shore. When she returned, Rosa ran out with the eager inquiry, "Is she anywhere in sight?" In reply to the negative answer, she said: "I don't know what to make of it. Have you ever seen anybody with ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... her hands. "You who uphold all these social arrangements, how do you feel when you find yourself obliged to urge me to marry, not for the sake of the positive joys of domestic existence, but for the merely negative advantage of avoiding a hapless and forlorn state? You propose it as a pis-aller. Does that argue that all is sound in ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... in the negative. Pendleton, standing fifteen feet to the right of his principal, said: "One—two—three—present!" and as the last final sounding of the letter "t" escaped his teeth, Burr fired, followed almost ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... obliged to answer in the negative, and the other seemed a little doubtful. "Look," said Constans, and, drawing rein, he took aim at a beech-tree a few yards distant. The bullet ploughed into the wood, leaving a small, round hole in the smooth bark. "See how deeply it has penetrated," he continued. "Think ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... say that the harm of the idolatry must depend on the certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin to bow ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... account, written so few days after the battle, detailing affirmatively the command to the guards as heard by one of themselves, will probably countervail the negative testimony of C. as derived from the Duke's want of recollection: as well as the "Goodly Botherby's" of MR. CUTHBERT BEDE. As an instance of the Duke's impressions of the battle, I may add, that he stated that there was no smoke, though Mr. Jones told me, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various

... beloved, and successful, while others drag out a negative existence, of no use to themselves or anyone else? Except in a few cases the answer is to be found in a state of freedom from the troubles known as "female." The well woman radiates cheerfulness and serenity, while the ailing one repels you with her despondency. It is not necessary, however, ...
— Food and Health • Anonymous

... had existed within the Democratic party since the second administration of Cleveland was still the important fact about the organization. Having been out of power, the party could take only the negative position of hostile criticism; there had been no reorganization and clarification of purposes, and no new leader had appeared who combined the personal prestige of Bryan with those qualities of conservatism and solidity which the East demanded, so that from the beginning there was no doubt that ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... aspect. Here, in 1818, a species of constitution had been adopted by popular vote in a manner that appeared to show remarkable unanimity, for the books in which the "ayes" and "noes" were to be recorded contained no entries in the negative! What the records really prove is that O'Higgins, the Supreme Director, enjoyed the confidence of the ruling class. In exercise of the autocratic power entrusted to him, he now proceeded to introduce a variety of administrative reforms of signal advantage to the moral and material welfare of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... is also cut through by a magnificent valley, which extends for many miles beyond the limits of the formation. There is a fine central mountain, on which M. Gaudibert discovered a crater, the existence of which has been subsequently verified by Professor Weinek on a Lick observatory negative. ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... wrote,—"So far as quantity is concerned, to eat a crocodile would be no more than to eat an ox." You have omitted the negative. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various

... on March 19; not until June 15 was the vote taken, and then it showed 93 ayes, 65 noes, being a discouraging deficiency of 27 beneath the requisite two thirds. Thereupon Ashley of Ohio changed his vote to the negative, and then moved a reconsideration, which left the question to come up again in the next session. Practically, therefore, at the adjournment of Congress, the amendment was left as an issue before the people in the political campaign of the summer of 1864; and in that campaign it was second only ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... and expression were a blank, and it took most of the work-period even to make him understand what Hanlon was trying to ask. When he did finally manage to grasp the thought-concept, his answer was a decided negative. ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... Dalis were moving soundlessly. His right hand started to rise, as though he would make it signal the negative he was unable for a moment to speak. But even as he stood there, swaying slightly on his feet, Sarka dashed to the lights on the table, disconnecting them one by one; to the Revolving Beryl, which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... the Isaac Newton, on a certain evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base would it be to exhibit their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... Bishop Briconnet's merely negative course, the Parliament of Paris at length cited him to appear and answer before a commission consisting of two of its own counsellors. The information thus obtained was next to be submitted to the judges delegated by the Pope, a tribunal of the institution of which an account will be given ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... life. It is the science of feeling or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that feeling existed would be to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... that I was sane the tribe split into two factions—one wanted to finish me but the other insisted that my coming was a good augury. It was rather queer to lie here and listen to the arguments pro and con—I pulled pretty hard for the negative contenders! The question was finally decided by the old chief, Ohto, who announced that my fate would be determined when next the limocons sang. That settled the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... been led exclusively by avowed atheists like Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no leading Fabian found ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... ever separated as by an impassable gulf. Leaving aside entirely the enamored state, do men as a rule seek the society of women and prefer it to that of men? The thriving clubs, the billiard- and drinking-saloons, and the other resorts of men common all over the civilized world, seem very like a negative answer to the question. In savage life we know that the sexes do not hunt or fish or do any work together. In our modern drawing-rooms most men confess themselves "bored." They long to get away to their clubs or some other resort of their fellows. When husbands spend their evenings at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... character-study—a man made up entirely of limitations. His conservatism and negative qualities to be represented as causing him to attain success where men of conviction and real ability ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Grieg was eager to meet Gade, and an opportunity soon occurred. Gade expressed a willingness to look at some of his compositions, and asked if he had anything to show him. Edward modestly answered in the negative. "Go home and write a symphony," was the retort. This the young composer started obediently to do, but the work was never finished in this form. It became later Two Symphonic Pieces ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... people and the railroad that had been making trouble in the hills all summer; that it was, in fact, merely a personal struggle for influence and gain between Jeffrey Whiting and the man who had been killed. It was skilfully done and drawn out with all the exaggerated effect of truth which bald negative and affirmative answers ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... looking at him with amazement as she sensed the marvelous coincidence of their meeting, he told it as he had not told it to McDowell or even to Miriam Kirkstone. A third time the facts were the same. But it was John Keith now who was telling John Keith's story through the lips of an unreal and negative Conniston. He forgot his own breakfast, and a look of gloom settled on Wallie's face when he peered in through the door and saw that their coffee and toast were growing cold. Mary Josephine leaned a little over the table. Not once did ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood

... examples of duality taken from nature. The current of electricity is polarised into a positive and a negative current. It is the same with the magnet; though you break a bar into a hundred pieces, you bring into being a hundred small magnets, each possessing its positive and negative side; you will not have destroyed ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... the country, in her adverse hour, must have his services; the King desired them, solicited them. With a remarkable degree of reticence he declined all these overtures, and in a letter addressed to his sovereign gave a most respectful, but decided negative. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... bottom, two sides. It is, in the first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the interest ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... kept to his first impression of her, for first impressions are nearly always right; he should have sought for the reason of so much charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction proving so negative in effect. But he did not. He just took her as he found her and was glad she ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau

... in theorising and his inexperience in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors. Gradually he left behind him "this low practical dexterity"; gradually he learnt that "the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle." Browning urges that Shelley, before the close, had passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith. "I shall say what I think," he adds—"had ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... depositor or the holder of an ordinary insurance policy is a negative rather than a positive factor in economic control. Not only does he exercise no power over the dollar which he has placed with the bank or with the insurance company, but he has thereby strengthened the hands of these organizations. Each dollar placed with the financier is a dollar's more power ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... surrounded by a sinful world, is an astounding fact indeed, a sublime moral miracle in history. But this freedom from the common sin and guilt of the race is, after all, only the negative side of his character, which rises in magnitude as we contemplate the positive side, namely, absolute moral and religious perfection. It is universally admitted, even by deists and rationalists, that Christ taught the purest and sublimest system ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... report, followed by the electronic engineers, followed by the physicist—all negative. But each group had a suspicion that another had overlooked something. Before it regressed to a high-school debate, the general ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll

... Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of protest as they passed by it. The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unaccountable dissident. In Gwendolen's habits of mind it had been taken for granted that ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... the other, with a negative shake of his head. "I myself haf also read ze signs pret well, but zey do not tell vat it ees zey haf do to cage us. Zere, you see ze smoke ett haf done. I zink zey must be put ze ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson

... splinters of the bone continually worked out, and he was doomed to constant disappointment. At last it healed; but years of suffering had quenched the ardour of youth, and when he did apply for employment, his services had been forgotten. He received a cool negative, almost consonant to his wishes: and returned, without feeling mortified, to the cottage we have described, where he lived a secluded yet not an unhappy life. His wants were few, and his half pay more ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... & CO., Chemists, 289. Strand, have, by an improved mode of Iodizing, succeeded in producing a Collodion equal, they may say superior, in sensitiveness and density of Negative, to any other hitherto published; without diminishing the keeping properties and appreciation of half tint for which ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... it in this company; we have it emphatically given in the munificent generosity of your own merchants of Manchester, of all sects and kinds, when this establishment was first proposed. But are the advantages derivable by the people from institutions such as this, only of a negative character? If a little learning be an innocent thing, has it no distinct, wholesome, and immediate influence upon the mind? The old doggerel rhyme, so often written in the beginning ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... neighborhoods,—with as little effect as ever. Thugut's Name, it seems, was originally TUNICOTTO (Tyrolese-Italian); which the ignorant Vienna people changed into "THU-NICHT-GUT (Do-no-good)," till Maria Theresa, in very charity, struck out the negative, and made him "Do-good." Do-good and his Congress held Friedrich till August 10th: five more weeks gone; and nothing but reconnoitring,—with of course foraging, and diligently eating the Country, which is a daily employment, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... entirely different route without either road or trail, a Delaware, by the name of "Black Beaver," who was in my party, on arriving at a particular point, suddenly halted, and, turning to me, asked if I recognized the country before us. Seeing no familiar objects, I replied in the negative. He put the same question to the other white men of the party, all of whom gave the same answers, whereupon he smiled, and in his quaint vernacular said, "Injun he don't know nothing. Injun big fool. White man mighty smart; he know heap." At the same time ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... correspondent with the appearance of the quartier in which they were situated, and tended inquiry for some article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the answers he received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his disappointment and discontent. At length, at one house, the landlord, a sturdy butcher, after rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto received, added, "But if this vill do as vell, Dummie, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... foe to instinct is reason. They are the negative and positive of mental volition. The man who retains the animal gift of unreasoning divination, preserving that clear power against the handicaps which mind training and education impose, is necessarily psychic, or, as they say in certain ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... Mr Humphreys—just that. The flash flickering slowly away in the pan,' said Cooper, with what he considered an appropriate gesture,—'the golden bowl gradually ceasing to vibrate. But as to your other question I should return a negative answer. General absence of vitality? yes: special complaint? no, unless you reckon a nasty cough he had with him. Why, here we are pretty much at the house. A handsome mansion, Mr ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James

... expedition through the hot streets, and was laughed at in some instances for even imagining that employment could be obtained at the dullest season of the year. As soon as their errand was made known they were met by a brief and often a curt negative. Mrs. Jocelyn would soon have been discouraged, but Belle's black eyes only snapped with irritation at their poor success. "Give up?" she cried. "No, not if I have to work for nothing to get a chance. Giving up isn't my style, at least not till I'm ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... metallic substances themselves seem to be endowed with properties peculiar to each of them, and it is principally in consequence of those properties that the produced electricity is sometimes positive, at other times negative, and ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... "bullock" eating itself in indelible characters into his heart, and he will refrain from mercy to working bullocks as long as he lives. But as there are few positive pleasures equal in intensity to the negative one of release from pain, so it is when at last a group of six oblong objects, five dark and one white, appears in remote distance, distinct and unmistakable. Yes, they are our bullocks; a sigh of relief follows, and we drive them sharply ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... and printing departments, and next to that the studios themselves with the scenery, the heat of the lights, the wires, etc., we have located them in the most distant corner of the quadrangle. The negative, you see, represents our actual invested capital to a considerable extent. The prints wear out and frequently large sections are destroyed and have to be reprinted. Then sometimes we can reissue old subjects. All in all we guard the ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... we might guess from this teaching that the myth was a late one, for the earliest Greeks and Romans did not believe in a real happiness after death. They believed in existence after death, but it was a very shadowy existence, with the most negative sort of pleasures. Later, the Romans, even before they accepted Christianity, had their beliefs more or less modified ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... entered, which were important factors in the case. Both sides thoroughly understood the significance of either question as an issue in the discussion; and both sides were, therefore, equally on the alert—the one to maintain the affirmative, and the other the negative, side of these questions. The first was the claim that it was the inherent right of the Church of England to be an established church in every part of the empire, and, therefore, in Upper Canada. Both sides knew that ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... contact after the rubbing has ceased the two electricities come together again and the electrical phenomena disappear. They have been added together, and the result is zero. Franklin proposed to call these electricities positive and negative. These names are well chosen, but we do not know any reason why one should be called positive rather than the other. The electricity generated on glass when rubbed with silk is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... Surely those that have even the slightest advantage over their fellows will live when their companions perish. It is impossible that the result could be otherwise; it must follow inevitably from what has been described before. The whole process has its positive and its negative aspects: the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit. Perhaps it would be more correct to say the more real element is the negative one, for those which are least capable of meeting their ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... and purposes limited to the direct tradition we have through Landa, and the deductions immediately involved in these. We know the day and month signs, the numbers, including 0 and 20, four units of the archaic calendar count (the day, tun, katun and cycle), the cardinal point signs, the negative particle. We have not fully solved the uinal or month sign, which seems to be chuen on the monuments and a cauac, or chuen, in the manuscripts. We are able to identify what must be regarded as metaphysical ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... enormous value to a crew of absolute strangers, of whose characters he would have no time or opportunity to judge? Upon this point he had no doubt whatever; the answer to this question was a most emphatic negative. But if—so ran his thoughts—he was not prepared to ship the treasure aboard this unknown barque, and entrust it to her unknown crew, what was he to do with it? Was he to leave it concealed in the ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... importance of the disease in the history of the Southern States. Havana, ever since its foundation, had been a hotbed of yellow fever. The best minds of the profession had been attracted to a solution of the problem, but all in vain. Commission after commission had been appointed, with negative results; various organisms had been described as the cause, and there were sad illustrations of the tragedy associated with investigations undertaken without proper training or proper technique. By the year 1900, not only had the ground been cleared, but ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... the General Assembly for 1884, page 114, and of 1888, page 640, we find an overture asking if the education of deaconesses is consistent with Presbyterian polity, and, if so, should they be ordained, answered in the negative in the following words: "The Form of Government declares that in all cases the persons elected [deacons] must be male members. (Chap. 13. 2.) In all ages of the Church godly women have been appointed to aid the officers of the Church in their labors, especially for the relief of the poor and ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... Hockin is so well known as a thoroughly practical chemist, that it may suffice to call attention to the fact of his having published a little brochure entitled How to obtain Positive and Negative Pictures on Collodionized Glass, and copy the latter upon Paper. A Short Sketch adapted for the Tyro in Photography. As the question of the alkalinity of the nitrate bath is one which has lately been discussed, we will give, as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various

... provided with a more stated ministry, and that thus men in every corner of the land might attain some knowledge of the truths of our holy religion, as well as some feeling of godliness. (4) Finally, the bishop in all episcopal churches, so far as my knowledge extends, is allowed to claim a negative voice in synods of his clergy, and can in no case be taken under discipline and judged by them, but only by a synod of his own order; while the superintendent in the Scottish Church was merely the permanent Moderator of Synod, and was bound to give ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... secretary, containing a good many personal letters and one or two business missives which were of little interest. Altogether the examination of the trunk—a process which occupied three hours—established nothing definite, save that there was nothing to be discovered. Its results were hopelessly negative. ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen

... content myself, in this section, with an easy task, and shall pretend only to give a negative answer to the question here proposed. I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding. This answer ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al

... not until her door had closed behind her did he move. Had she spoken the truth? Had she in those few moments been temporarily irresponsible because of grieving over the baby's death? Some inner consciousness answered him in the negative. It was not that. And yet—what more could there be? He remembered. Jean's words, his insistent warnings. Resolutely he moved toward Josephine's room, and knocked softly upon her door. He was surprised at the promptness with which her voice answered. ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... have become a positive magnet in the fall; the forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to all intellectual conditions, and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... a man they must both remember,—Hugh Dalton,—a bold, but reckless fellow, who had played cavalier, buccaneer, and a thousand other characters in turn—all characters, in fact, save that of a coward. Burrell replied in the negative; but confessed he knew the man had been upon the coast; cunningly adding, that since his affections had been so entirely fixed upon Constantia, he had given up every connection, every idea, that might hereafter draw him from ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... proposed an alliance between Sweden, Denmark, and the grand duchy of Warsaw; a northern confederation, of which he would have declared himself protector, like that of the Rhine. The answer of Bernadotte, without being absolutely negative, had the same effect; it was the same with the offensive and defensive treaty which Napoleon again proposed to him. Bernadotte has since declared, that in four successive letters written with his own hand, he had frankly stated the impossibility he was under of complying ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... nothing is doing; art, science, and business, are alike at a stand-still. The stage, the press, the easel, the loom, the rudder of the merchantman, and the helm of the state, all are alike in a most extraordinary negative condition. The world is in a catalepsy. It hears and sees, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various

... have been generally considered by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, as deficient in energy and courage. Their virtues have been supposed to be principally negative ones." Speaking of the incidents in Mr. Nell's collection she says: "They will redeem the character of the race from this misconception and show how much injustice there may often be in a generally accepted idea". Continuing, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney

... of liberty which our Constitution secures may be enjoyed alike by minorities and majorities, the Executive has been wisely invested with a qualified veto upon the acts of the Legislature. It is a negative power, and is conservative in its character. It arrests for the time hasty, inconsiderate, or unconstitutional legislation, invites reconsideration, and transfers questions at issue between the legislative and executive departments to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... this I must pause to guard against; I must not be interpreted as saying that all natural feelings or actions are to be crushed out by a cold, reasoning logic. But it must be remembered that every virtue has its negative representative, and that this negative phase is simply and only the same virtue, but in an uneducated state, and not at all another and different thing; as, for instance, license is not different in its essence from self-control—it is only uneducated self-control. Obstinacy is merely uneducated ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... of Essex for the annoyance of the enemy, either by an attack on Corunna, or on St. Sebastian and St. Andero, or by sailing to the Azores in quest of the homeward-bound carracks, all experienced the same mortifying negative from the members of the council of war, of whom lord Thomas Howard alone supported his opinions. But undeterred by this systematic opposition, he persevered in urging, that more might and more ought to be performed ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... to the very tips of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, "This influence has taken complete possession of me, as none of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to." I asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me some advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly invitation and manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... I took it, and in an hour—oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an unheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... done everything, almost," said he. "Put it in the 'negative case,' and my history'll ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... body. In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? Why have not ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... an emphatic negative answer, the Captain continued: "How did you happen to cast your fortunes with the insurgents in the first place, and why were you so terror-stricken when first discovered after ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves

... repeated Brigitte. I quietly closed the window and sat down as though I had not heard her; but I was so furious with rage that I could hardly restrain myself. That cold silence, that negative force, exasperated me to the last point. Had I been really deceived and convinced of the guilt of the woman I loved, I could not have suffered more. As I had condemned myself to remain in Paris, I reflected that I must compel Brigitte to speak at ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... when he comes there he finds Mr. De Berenger to be the writer of the note, and he has all this extraordinary conversation with him about going on board the Tonnant to instruct the crew in sharp-shooting, and then when a negative is put upon Mr. De Berenger's application at least for the present, Mr. De Berenger tells him he cannot forsooth "go to Lord Yarmouth or to any other of his friends in this dress." Why, I beg to know, cannot Mr. De Berenger go to Lord Yarmouth ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney

... Lady Betty said, all who knew her, would clear her of censoriousness: that it gave her some opinion, she must needs say, of the people, that he had continued there so long with me; that I had rather negative than positive reasons of dislike to them; and that so shrewd a man as she heard Captain Tomlinson was ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... venture." Why didn't Stephen put an end to such ill-timed jocularity? "And Mr. Penny had spoken to you of his—his relations with Mrs. Scofield, the woman in whose house Culser was killed. Did he refer to her on this particular evening, standing by the river's brink?" Susan replied in the negative. "Did he seem ill at ease, worried about anything? Was he ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... which side he had espoused, or in fact whether he himself understood the proposition—unless, indeed, as was sometimes the case, he commenced his speech by saying, "Mr. President, I are in favor of the negative of that are question." In the ordinary tasks of his class he contrived from day to day, by the promptings of others, to work his way along; and previous to the quarterly examinations, it was his practice to obtain the assistance of some of his classmates to go over his exercises with him, which ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone

... addressed by the same hand that wrote the letter I have just read you. And, in his opinion, the handwriting is that of the prisoner. No letter was found in the deceased man's room corresponding to this envelope, but the jury will observe that what I have called the negative of the letter on the blotting-paper was dated June 21st, the day that the prisoner suspected the slander that had been levelled at him. The suggestion is that the deceased opened this before leaving for London, and took the letter with him. And ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson

... think the prosperity of Mrs. Harmon would convince the most negative of agnostics that there was an overruling Providence, if nothing else did," said Sewell. "It's so defiant of all law, so delightfully independent ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... earths and salts,* to the growth of plants,** or to some other chemical decompositions on the surface of the earth, to the unequal distribution of heat in the strata of the air,*** and, finally, according to Peltier's intelligent researches,**** to the agency of a constant charge of negative electricity in the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... romantic extravagances of the Wallack family; he applauded the sound judgment, and deplored the hard manner of Davenport; he viewed calmly what he regarded to be an overestimation of Edwin Booth—one of the first criticisms of an avowedly negative character I have seen aimed directly at this actor. In other words, Bunce fought hard against the encroachment of the new times upon the acting of his early theatre days. The epitome of his old-time attitude is to be found in Appleton's ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce

... Canada, I asked many people who have traveled much in North America whether they ever met with mountains so high that the snow never melts on them in summer, to which they always answered in the negative. They say that the snow sometimes stays on the highest, viz., on some of those between Canada and the English colonies during a part of the summer, but that it melts as soon as the great heat ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... She spoke very slowly, and for a moment Owen wondered whether it would be possible to continue the present arrangement. Then common sense and creative ardour combined to utter a decided negative, and feeling himself to be brutal he ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... of silken skirts, then a resolute and very important-looking woman paused at the table. Just behind her waited a short, thin, rather negative-looking man. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock

... the investigation of the psychologist. The practical result of these inquiries must be allowed to be, to a large extent, negative. In many quarters, where thirty or forty years ago we should certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less far-reaching, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... She thought of the strange operation of a simple-minded man's ruling passion, that it should have led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place them here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his dream. Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that those scholared walls ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... broke into his thoughts insistently, "is purely negative, Professor! How can you know there are no beings in the fourth dimension, unless you actually enter this realm, to see ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer

... on in the house,' contentedly Vida told off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I do like some one about me—that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... Quantity" were, perhaps, suggested by Mr Matthew Arnold's Lectures on the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W. Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... efficient and cost more than with continued corporate ownership. This appears to be bare assertion, as from the very nature of the case there can be no data outside those furnished by the government-owned railways of the British colonies, and such data negative these assertions; and the advocates of national ownership are justified in asserting that such ownership would materially lessen the cost, as any expert can readily point out many ways in which the enormous costs of corporate management would be lessened. With those familiar with present methods, ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... been visited by Portuguese, but its position not well ascertained, my inquiries referred to the identity of Naliele with Lui. On asking the head man of the Mambari party, named Porto, whether he had ever heard of Naliele being visited previously, he replied in the negative, and stated that he "had himself attempted to come from Bihe three times, but had always been prevented by the tribe called Ganguellas." He nearly succeeded in 1852, but was driven back. He now (in 1853) ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... freedom, but we hope with moderation, of public schools, we may, perhaps, be asked our opinion of universities. Are universities the most splendid repositories of learning? We are not afraid to declare an opinion in the negative. Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, has stated some objections to them, we think, with unanswerable force of reasoning. We do not, however, wish to destroy what we do not entirely approve. Far be that ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... exigencies required that I should take my full share in the duties of the barrack, I was found adequate to their proper fulfilment. I made cakes and porridge of fully the average excellence; and my brose and brochan enjoyed at least the negative happiness of escaping ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... crafty Leon skate up alongside and speak insinuatingly to the other, as though trying to persuade him to agree to something; but on each occasion Nick shook his head in the negative, and broke away. Leon looked after him rather disconsolately, as though at a loss to understand what could have happened to take all the fight and "bumptiousness" out ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... are," Laura repeated, slowly moving her head from side to side as if to negative contradiction in advance. She smiled too; it was as if she had remembered a ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... individual variability unless we choose to regard chance as an efficient agency. Consequently, the only efficient principle conceivably connected with the process is the "struggle for existence;" and even this has only a purely negative function in the origination of species or of adaptations. For, the "surviving fittest" owe nothing more to the struggle for existence than our pensioned veterans owe to the death-dealing bullets which did not hit them. Mr. Darwin has, however, obviated all difficulty regarding ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... young tradesman as setting up with the ordinary stock, that is to say, a negative character, namely, that he has done nothing to hurt his character, nothing to prejudice his behaviour, and to give people a suspicion of him: what, then, is the first principle on which to build a tradesman's reputation? and what is it he is ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... however, had led him only through ways peopled by men: and for men and their deeds he was more than a match. Their caprices, their follies, their faithlessness, their treachery even, he had learned long since to calculate and to cope with. Women, also, he had known: many women; experienced, innocent, negative, or wicked. And those who had ventured upon his ground, he had not failed to conquer. It was in the knowledge of these experiences that he had stood; by its light preparing a coup that was to carry the last fortress of that ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... he went on. "I get all my lady acquaintances into the papers,—makes 'em famous in a day! The women I like are made to look beautiful, and those I don't like are turned into frights—positive old horrors, give you my life! Easily done, you know!—touch up a negative whichever way you fancy, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... peremptorily refuse Weissenfels, and take to a bed of sickness; inexpugnable there, for the moment. Baireuth is but a weak middle term; and there are disagreements on it. Answer from England, affirmative or even negative, we have yet none. Promptly affirmative, that might still avail, and be an honorable outcome. Perhaps better pause till that arrive, and declare itself?—Friedrich Wilhelm knows nothing of the Villa mission, of the urgencies that have been used in England: but, in present circumstances, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... occupations were suspended; study was forbidden; reading was injurious; to read aloud might terminate fatally. To go abroad was death; to stay at home the grave. Bysshe became nothing; I of course much less than nothing,—a negative quantity of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... seek the advice herein of such as make profession in cosmography, Ptolemy, the father of geography, and his eldest children, will answer by their maps with a negative, concluding most of the sea within the land, and making an end of the world northward, near the 63rd degree. The same opinion, when learning chiefly flourished, was received in the Romans' time, as by their poets' writings it may appear. "Et te colet ultima Thule," said Virgil, ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt

... tremendous mystery, and, to her mind, indicated the nature of it. First she came upon the little picture of Joe's ship in its rough gilded frame. This might be an innocent gift from some of the young men who had asked in the past to be allowed to paint Joan and received a curt negative from Gray Michael. But the other discovery meant more. Pushing her hand about the drawer she found a pile of paper, felt the crackle of it, and pulled it eagerly to the light. Then, and before she learned the grandeur ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... she askit for the pipes?" old Donald whispered mysteriously; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, he looked reproachfully at the speaker. "She's waiting and retty," he would say; "and a good lilt on ta pipes would do her all ta ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... asked whether her grandsire was at home, or near at hand, and being answered in the negative, appeared much disappointed. He then said that he must borrow the skiff for a short while, as he wished to visit some nets on the lake. Mabel readily assented, and the stranger quitted the house, while Fenwolf lingered ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... geological causes, has increased the slope of the bed of the river between the points in question and the sea. In this instance, then, the relative permanency of the river level at certain points may be, not the ordinary case of a natural equilibrium, but the negative effect of an increased velocity of current which prevents deposits where they would otherwise have happened.] They are attended, too, with some collateral disadvantages. They deprive the earth of the fertilizing deposits ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... importance, but out of love to Schlosser, and by way of nailing his guarantee to the counter—not altogether as a bad shilling, but as a light one. At p. 5 of vol. 2, in a foot-note, which is speaking of Kant, we read of his attempt to introduce the notion of negative greatness into Philosophy. Negative greatness! What strange bird may that be? Is it the ornithorynchus paradoxus? Mr. Schlosser was not wide awake there. The reference is evidently to Kant's essay ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... diminish such depredations for the future. Not that I consider the preservation of these wild herds will be attended with any advantages to the colony. On the contrary, it is my belief, that their total destruction ought to be effected; since the increase of them is of mere negative importance, compared with the positive disadvantage that attends their occupation of one of the most fertile districts in the colony, which it is to be hoped will be soon covered with numerous flocks of fine wooled ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... is, as we shall see, an essential member of the Triple Alliance, we must repair the errors of the past, and in the next great war win back Tunis for Italy. Only then will Bismarck's great conception of the Triple Alliance reveal its real meaning. But the Triple Alliance, so long as it only aims at negative results, and leaves it to the individual allies to pursue their vital interests exclusively by their own resources, will be smitten with sterility. On the surface, Italy's Mediterranean interests do not concern us closely. But their real importance ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... count decidedly troublesome, not to say impertinent, had opened her lips to give an unqualified negative, but another glance from Trenta ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... regarded as the bulbous root of a nervous plant whose branches grow downwards—is twofold; to affect, and to be affected. In its active or positive condition it affects the whole of the vital and muscular processes in the man, finding expression in vital action. In its passive or negative state it is affected by impressions coming to it in different ways through the sense-organs, resulting in nervous and mental action. It is this latter phase of brain-function with ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial

... rage for saying something, when there's nothing to be said." Mr. Burney then asked him whether he had seen the letter which Warburton had written in answer to a pamphlet addressed "To the most impudent Man alive[981]." He answered in the negative. Mr. Burney told him it was supposed to be written by Mallet. The controversy now raged between the friends of Pope and Bolingbroke; and Warburton and Mallet were the leaders ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... hardly see her horse's head—a thing of itself that seemed to have infinite powers for mischief, and which no amount of argument ever induced any normally constituted woman to believe was the mere negative absence of light, and not a terrible entity potent for all sorts of mischief. Then that wailing howl that rose and fell betimes; no wind ever made such a noise she felt sure. There were those shining white gleams which came from the little pools of water on the road, looking like ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... Ashe smiled as he rose to shake hands. (Carr's friendliness seemed a trifle negative, reserved; he had ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... palace that evening, De Froilette inquired whether Lord Cloverton had arrived, and being answered in the negative, remained at the head of the stairs, speaking a few words to this acquaintance and to that, bowing a well-turned compliment to one fair lady, or meeting another's pleasantry with an answering jest. He ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... Street, W.. before the 14th January, 1910. No replies received after that date were admitted. The Simian League, which has agents in every constituency, acted according to the replies received, and treated the lack of reply as a negative. Of 1375 circulars sent, 309 remained unanswered, 264 were answered in the negative, 201 gave a qualified affirmative, all the rest (no less than 799) a clear and, in some cases, an enthusiastic adherence to our principles. It is a sufficient proof of the power of the League and the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc

... is being blown down by the hurricane, small fungi or other minute vegetation spring up in its rifts; every social shock of the day is promptly scened and 'tagged' at the minor theatres; and shall this war escape its novels? Mr. WOOD votes in the negative, and supplies us with a somewhat sensational yet not badly manufactured article, which, like the melo-dramas referred to, will be received with delight by a certain line of patrons, and, we presume, be also relished. It is a first-rate specimen ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... itself, but it is made doubly difficult by novels, which depict the ways of the world and of men who do not exist in real life. But these are accepted with the credulity of youth, and become incorporated with the mind; so that now, in the place of purely negative ignorance, a whole framework of wrong ideas, which are positively wrong, crops up, subsequently confusing the schooling of experience and representing the lesson it teaches in a false light. If the youth was previously in the dark, he will now be led astray by a will-o'-the-wisp: ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... affirmative and striking sense of the character attributed to our thrifty friend, was detached from this delay, filled up by a negative movement ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave any authority, and which Mr. Hudson triumphantly refuted, in his speech on the Bill next day. But Lord John further said, that he was resolved to meet the second reading with a direct negative, and that he would resign if the Government were out-voted; an announcement which, although it lacked argument, had ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... Ann Whitworth. When asked if he liked to talk about his childhood days, he answered: "Yes Ma'am, but is you one of dem pension ladies?" The negative reply was an evident disappointment to Alec, but it ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... however, lost its validity when residents "elsewhere" had to allow that no traces of infanticide could be found in their neighbourhood; and so on. Luckily, still greater comfort is to be found in the following argument,—a rare example of proving a negative—from which it will be readily seen that female infanticide on any abnormal scale is quite beyond the bounds of the possible. Those who have even a bowing acquaintance with Chinese social life will grant that every boy, at about the age of eighteen, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... Cannot Stand If You Do Not like Him, Let Him Alone In the Course of Ultimate Extinction Institution of Slavery in the States Where it Exists It Will Become All One Thing, or All the Other Kingcraft Lincoln and Douglas Debates Man Cannot Prove a Negative Mexico Nationalization of Slavery Negro Cannot Make a Choice No Legal Power to Choose No Wrong Without its Remedy People Were Better off for Being Ridden Perfect an Understanding Without Talking as with It Physical Difference Between the Two Political Effects of Their ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger

... of negative corroboration of this is offered by a work of high rank, the famous Speculum Regale, written in Old Norse in Norway in the middle of the thirteenth century. It contains much trustworthy information on Greenland; it tells, "with bald ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... descendants. But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. In all cases positive palaeontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... in a free condition in metallic conductors. Each electron carries an electric charge of electrostatic units and produces a magnetic field in a plane perpendicular to the direction of its motion. This brings us to the atom, which may be described as a number of electrons positive and negative in stable equilibrium, this condition being brought about by the mutual repulsion of the like and attraction for the opposite electrification so arranged as to nullify each other. Having thus established the law of the equilibrium of electrons, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... weight upon her. Somehow, they were not in the current of good times that the other girls and boys of their ages were having. If she suggested brightly that they go over to the Parmalees' or the Morans' and see if the young people were playing tennis, she knew that Charlotte would delicately negative the idea: "They've got their sets all made up, M'ma, and one hates to, unless they specially ask one, don't you know?" They might go, of course, and greet their friends decorously, and watch the game smilingly for a while. Then they would come home with Fraulein, not forgetting to say ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... nor any other art whatever, this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained to moral and thereby even to political importance. In an utterly wretched and cowardly age his courage and his negative virtues told powerfully on the multitude; he even formed a school, and there were individuals—it is true they were but few—who in their turn copied and caricatured afresh the living pattern of a philosopher. On the same cause depended also his political influence. As he was the only conservative ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... the doctor's new runabout, driving the high-stepping bay, natty in a "brand-new" tan harness—the first Hattie had ever seen. He asked her to come with him for a drive, and again her mother's nipping negative influenced her decision against the pleadings of ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... sugar? Will future varieties of wheat and other grain produce heavier crops than our present varieties? These questions cannot be positively answered; but it is certain that we ought to be cautious in answering by a negative. In some lines of variation the limit has probably been reached. Youatt believes that the reduction of bone in some of our sheep has already been carried so far that it entails great delicacy of constitution.[595] But seeing the great improvement ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... but he limited himself strictly to the home industry of adventurer, preferring to exploit the assured rather than to explore the unknown. Lulu's intercourse with him had been restricted of recent years to the negative processes of being out of town when he called on her, and short of money when he wrote to her. Now, however, she bethought herself of his eminent suitability for the direction of a treasure-seeking experiment; if anyone could extract gold from an unpromising situation it would certainly ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... may so legislate, that is, it may have acts and records, but each other State SHALL give to the records and proceedings of all the rest 'full faith and credit.' Does not this enactment thoroughly negative all theories of the exclusive supremacy of State rights? Independent sovereign States do not, in the absence of treaties, give any faith or credit to the records or proceedings of other independent states. Our States are not only compelled to do this, by this section, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... hypothesis is simply that we have no experimental knowledge of its being able to produce the mutual infertility which is so striking a character of species. This difficulty is, in the first place, the difficulty of proving a negative. It might be possible to prove that its operation actually does produce species; it will always be impossible to prove that, in the past, natural selection, and no other known or unknown agency or combination of agencies, had a share in the process. All naturalists are ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... not made up of the good of the parts, and whether as a part he have not some right to his share of good, the dexterous logical arithmetician answers, that B is totally out of the question, because B is a negative quantity in the equation. And if obstinate B, still conceiving himself aggrieved, objects to this total annihilation of himself and his interests, and asks why the lot of extinction should not fall upon the debtor C, or even upon the calculator himself, by whatever letter of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... frustrate the intentions of the founders.[254] Private charity, he thinks, would meet the distress which might afterwards arise, though humanity imperiously requires that it should be 'sparingly administered.' Upon this duty he writes a sensible chapter.[255] To his negative proposals Malthus adds a few of the positive kind. He is strongly in favour of a national system of education, and speaks with contempt of the 'illiberal and feeble' arguments opposed to it. The schools, he observes, might ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... in this way, and coming from an ordinary source, would have met with a courteous negative. But the firm of Williams & Mann were under obligations to Mr. Joyce, who had on several occasions indorsed their notes for many thousands of dollars. Besides, all three men were old friends; so Mr. Mann ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer

... retired location. He knew that it was just as necessary for him to keep out of the sight of the man he sought as it was for the thief to keep outside the pale of his vision. He easily found the photograph gallery of Markham, but nothing of a satisfactory nature developed. True, the negative was at last found with a number 1,761 upon it, but no name, and the artist didn't so much as ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor

... flowering and not flowering. A zoological classification divides animals into vertebrate and not vertebrate. By continuing the process of division in the same manner, the division is obviously exhaustive of the subject, there being always a negative subdivision to receive any subsequently created or discovered species. Although bifurcate division has been ridiculed by some, it is agreed by highest authority that it is the only plan of division by which one can be sure to have a consistent place for everything, ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office

... given, but to appear to the world something that he was not was an art that Bunning and his kind could never acquire—that is their tragedy. It was the fate of Bunning that his boots and spectacles should always negative any attempt that he might make at ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... importance. All Americans are loyal citizens, whichever side they adopt in politics. But the two parties are the positive and negative poles that provide the current of electricity for our nation, and keep it going properly. Also they safeguard our interests by watching ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne

... persons, and those of respectability, who deposed positively to the prisoner's commanding his soldiers to fire, and himself firing his piece, of which some swore that they saw the smoke and flash, and beheld a man drop at whom it was pointed, with the negative testimony of others, who, though well stationed for seeing what had passed, neither heard Porteous give orders to fire, nor saw him fire himself; but, on the contrary, averred that the first shot was fired by ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... am here is called an affirmative statement. A denial of that, I am not here, is called a negative statement. The words, not, neither, never, none, nothing, etc., are all negative words; that is, they serve to make ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... of that servant of his who was killed, you remember. I told Pauline I would resent that conduct if it were repeated, and on the same occasion I asked her whether she had engaged herself to him in any shape or form. Her answer was a simple, straightforward negative, and the child is ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the negative, "Why not? Couldn't they get ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... They murmured a negative, and Stafford begging to be excused, left the room, signing to Howard to follow him. He did not mean it, but his manner, in the abstraction of his grief was as lordly as if he had inherited an earldom of ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... same circumstances as other people. In amazement, she rounded and protruded the lips, opened them, and breathed strongly. It is remarkable that she constantly accompanied her "yes" with the common affirmative nod, and her "no" with our negative shake of the head, as these gestures are by no means universal and do not seem clearly connected with emotion. This, possibly, may be explained by the fact that her ancestors for many generations had used ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... correct." Now I propose to disprove his general law by simply giving one instance of its failing. One instance is quite enough. In logical language, in order to disprove a "universal affirmative," it is enough to prove its contradictory, which is a "particular negative." (I must pause for a digression on Logic, and especially on Ladies' Logic. The universal affirmative "everybody says he's a duck" is crushed instantly by proving the particular negative "Peter ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll

... arm of his slumbering son. The foremost of the searchers, who kept a phial of vinegar to his nose all the time he remained in the room, then demanded in a low tone whether there were any other of the household infected? The grocer replied in the negative. Upon this, Chowles, whose manner showed he was more than half intoxicated, took off his hat, and bowing obsequiously to the grocer, said, "Shall I prepare you a coffin, Mr. Bloundel?—you are sure to want one, and had better ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... that when he could not conveniently find an audience he created one by his own imagination. This peculiarity of his rendered me good service. Though for some time I understood very little of what he said, and very often misplaced the positive and negative monosyllables which I hazarded occasionally by way of encouragement, he talked vigorously all the same. Like all garrulous people, he was constantly repeating himself; but to this I did not object, for the custom—however disagreeable in ordinary society—was ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... the development of the dynamo and its work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both for ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... having occurred in the icy blast which was blinding him, he perceived, at a short distance in front of him, a cluster of gables and of chimneys shown in relief by the snow. The reverse of a silhouette—a city painted in white on a black horizon, something like what we call nowadays a negative proof. Roofs—dwellings—shelter! He had arrived somewhere at last. He felt the ineffable encouragement of hope. The watch of a ship which has wandered from her course feels some such emotion ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... can commence with electricity which will generate mechanical motion; or to take a simple arithmetical instance: if 10/2 5, then 10/5 2; and therefore if we once recognize the power of thought to produce any results at all, we shall see that the law by which negative thought produces negative results is the same by which positive thought produces positive results. Therefore all our distrust of the law of growth, whether shown in the anxious endeavour to bring pressure to bear from without, or in allowing despair to take the place of cheerful ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... the negative, he laid his hand upon Moffat's breast and said, "Father, I love you much. Your visit and your presence have made my heart as white as milk. The words of your mouth are sweet as honey, but the words of a resurrection are too great to be heard. I do not wish to hear again about the ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane

... few hairs on his upper lip—a female attendant holding a looking-glass before him. He was an old man of Arab race, with a long white beard, and he looked sullen and angry. He surveyed me with attention, and inquired of the Moors if I could speak Arabic. Being answered in the negative, he appeared surprised, and continued silent. The surrounding attendants, and especially ladies, were much more inquisitive. They asked a thousand questions, inspected every part of my apparel, searched my pockets, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... Sauviat appeared, coming down a path as if she meant to join them; but Veronique drew out her handkerchief and made a negative sign; saying, with an asperity she had never before shown to ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... errors, is to take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war. When the clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this negative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes from those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which demand righting, but the ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... And different spirits animated the two hosts. The Persians were moved solely by the desire for glory; the Greeks by the stern alternatives of victory, slavery, or death. These differences in strength and motive went far to negative the difference in numbers; and the Greeks, caught like lions in a snare, dashed into the combat with the single feeling that they must ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... little soprano asked me in a shy, conscious way if my friend were quite well. Had I ever fancied his brain affected? I might have answered with a simple negative: I shall always think a little better of myself, Steve, that then and there, in the full bewitchment of Miss Sparrow's presence, I had manliness enough to speak a good word for Timothy—to tell her that, spite of some eccentricities, he had the finest brain, as well as the warmest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... himself without having it look as though nobody wanted to be seen with him. And he's a stranger over there, and doesn't need to get chummy with the girls. The boys here all know me, and ask me to go, and—a man, you see, can just be passive and nothing happens. But a girl's got to be downright negative, and it's no joke. One misses so many good times. You see the cases ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston

... unfortunately, that most of all affected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon spent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing annoyance. "God knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed discontentedly, seated—as customary—before the eminently truthful reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough to begin to look ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... earth. The earth is the nursery-ground of heaven. The Angels are therefore not Angels as such ('Angelic Wisdom,' 57), they are transformed through their close conjunction with God; which conjunction God never refuses, because the essence of God is not negative, but essentially active. The spiritual angels pass through three natures of love, because man is only regenerated through successive stages ('True Religion'). First, the love of self: the supreme expression of this love is human genius, whose works ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... "Have given negative results for the most part. I found Doctor Norbury, at the British Museum, very friendly and helpful; so friendly, in fact, that I am thinking whether I may not be able to enlist his help in certain private researches of my own, with reference to the changes effected ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... angrily demanded it, that M. de Blacas, the king's premier, consented to draw up the letters-patent in a different style. They read: "The king appoints Hortense Eugenie, included in the treaty of the 11th of April, Duchess of St. Leu." This was, to be sure, merely a negative and disguised recognition of the former rank of the queen; but it was, at least no longer ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... first of all, calls men to repentance, bids them turn away from their natural selves, and, to find that other and realer self, enter the straight and narrow gate. The call is not an arbitrary command, born of a negative and repressive spirit. It is a profound exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human progress, having behind it the inviolable sanction of the truth. Such preaching would have the authentic note. It is self-verifying. It stirs to answer that quality—both moral ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... his first impression of her, for first impressions are nearly always right; he should have sought for the reason of so much charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction proving so negative in effect. But he did not. He just took her as he found her and was glad ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... scoops the stakes—wins dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... as this attitude of yours is merely passive, sullen, negative, as it mainly is, despairing of our capacity and anticipating a future of gloom, it is no game for man or woman. It is certainly the opposite of that for which I plead. Do not stand aloof, despising, disbelieving, ...
— Courage • J. M. Barrie

... was a Wee Free Presbyterian Congregationalist; and for the sixth time the worthy recipient of this news had retired to consult War Office Sealed List of Religions A.F.31 to find out if he was entitled to be anything of the sort. In each case the answer had been in the negative, and Vane had been entered as "Other Denominations" and regarded with suspicion. One stout sergeant had even gone so far as to attempt to convert him to Unitarianism; another showed him the list, and asked him ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... such wonderful eyes should transform everything to beauty," he smiled. "In a negative way ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... little doubt, of course, that under a voluntary blocking regime, even with adequate notice, some children will be exposed to signal bleed; and we need not discount the possibility that a graphic image could have a negative impact on a young child. It must be remembered, however, that children will be exposed to signal bleed under time channeling as well. . . . The record is silent as to the comparative effectiveness ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... begun about whether Jane should or should not marry a certain person, Jane representing the affirmative and her father the negative, had taken on new aspects, had grown and altered, and had, to be brief, become a contest between the masculine Johnson and the feminine Johnson as to which would take the count. Not that this appeared on the surface. The masculine ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... that he was hopelessly astray—one usually is on such occasions—but this time, it so happened, he was singularly right. Before one thing only his ready invention stopped every time. This vileness, this notion of unworthiness in Vance, could not be negative merely. A man with that face was no inactive weakling. The motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. Disguised, it never slept. Vance was sharply on the alert. He had a plan deep out of sight. And Henriot ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... with a thick layer of peroxide of lead. On leaving the bath it undergoes various preparations and several washings, and is then fit to be mounted along with others to form an accumulator ready to be charged and to work. The second, or negative, plate is covered with a thick sponge of lead. It is carefully washed, preserved in water with exclusion of air, and submitted to a very considerable pressure. After this operation it presents the appearance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various

... one we had passed the village of Hwang-shih-kiang, and were entering that part of the river I described as a fine site for a Highland deer forest, when the 'Lee' hoisted the 'negative' (the signal to stop). She had got on a rock, where, on our way up, we had found no bottom at ten fathoms. I landed immediately, and found the people engaged in quarrying and manufacturing lime from the hills on the right bank. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... venture to say, of absolute, though, no doubt, largely negative faith. Neither memory of pain that is past, nor apprehension of pain to come, once arises to give him the smallest concern. In some way, doubtless very vague, for his being itself is a border-land of awful mystery, he is aware of being surrounded, enfolded ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... inquire his business. The youth returned an evasive answer, and withdrew; but the next day he was there again. On this occasion, Mr. Bloundel pointed him out to Leonard Holt, and asked him if he had seen him before. The youth's back being towards them, the apprentice unhesitatingly answered in the negative, but as the subject of investigation turned the next moment, and looked up, revealing features of feminine delicacy and beauty, set off by long flowing jet-black ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... was certain to find a welcome at Mr Allworthy's table, to whom misfortunes were ever a recommendation, when they were derived from the folly or villany of others, and not of the unfortunate person himself. Besides this negative merit, the doctor had one positive recommendation;—this was a great appearance of religion. Whether his religion was real, or consisted only in appearance, I shall not presume to say, as I am not ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... argument," he went on. "You know, of course, that the force of magnetic attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the distances separating the magnet and the attracted particles, and also that each magnetized particle had two poles, a positive and a negative pole, or a north pole and a south pole, as they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and purchase that liberty ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... becomes (especially in times of pressure and competition) very important to inquire if it be not worth while to cease paying wool and fur prices for mere water. This question was answered long ago in the negative by our Continental neighbours, and in Germany, France, and Switzerland official conditioning establishments have been founded by the Governments of those countries for the purpose of testing lots of purchased wool and silk, etc., for moisture, ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... Another politician in his circle was Fitzherbert, a man of whom Burke had the highest opinion, and of whom Johnson made the curious remark that he was the most "acceptable of men because his good qualities were negative and he offended no one." Fitzherbert spoke of Johnson in the House of Commons as his friend and called him "a ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... therefore, that we may justly award to the medical pages of the Compendium not only the rather negative praise of being written as well as the work of any of Gilbert's contemporaries, but the more positive credit of being thoroughly abreast of the medical science of its age and country, an "Abstract and brief ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... man and woman who truly loved each other were cast away upon a desert island, he would tire of her long before she wearied of him. The sequence of attraction and repulsion, the ultimate balance of positive and negative, are familiar electrical phenomena. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the supreme form of attraction is governed by the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... elements, whether spiritual or material, that menace the life of men, of animals, and of plants. According to the one theory the fire is a stimulant, according to the other it is a disinfectant; on the one view its virtue is positive, on the other it is negative. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... the land; and he would support it, not against the crown or the aristocratic party only, but against the representatives of the people themselves. This was not a government of balances. It would be a strange thing if two hundred peers should have it in their power to defeat by their negative what had been done by the people of England. I have taken my part in political connections and political quarrels for the purpose of advancing justice and the dominion of reason, and I hope I shall never prefer the means, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... attentively, and I had read the Vestiges with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical attitude. As for the Vestiges, I confess that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... air filter to the open end of the pressure tubing; open the screw clamp gradually, and allow filtered air to enter the flask, to abolish the negative pressure. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... have a special "distinction" or gift, which it is the task of the educator to discover. This distinction found, the child achieves happiness in creation and contribution. Self-realization demands knowledge and training: the doing of right is not a negative but a positive act; it is not without significance that the Greek word for sin is literally "missing the mark." Christianity emphasizes above all else the worth of the individual, yet recognizes that the individual can develop only in society. And if the individual be of great worth, this ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... has first learned the true theory and practical intent of the Constitution, in giving to the Executive a qualified negative on the legislative power of Congress. Far from being an odious, dangerous, or kingly prerogative, this power, as vested in the President, is nothing but a qualified copy of the famous veto power vested in the tribunes of the people among the Romans, and intended to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... to say against Monsieur de Fischtaminel: he does not gamble, he is indifferent to women, he doesn't like wine, and he has no expensive fancies: he possesses, as you said, all the negative qualities which make husbands passable. Then, what is the matter with him? Well, mother, he has nothing to do. We are together the whole blessed day! Would you believe that it is during the night, when we are the most closely united, that I am the most ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac

... apparently have occurred, if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession in the Book of the Dead; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... attaining its assent to those measures. During the recess a question was raised by the Crown lawyers as to the competency of the proctors to vote, while admitting their right to be present as councillors and assistants; this question, on an appeal to England, was declared in the negative, whereupon that learned body were excluded from all share in the future Irish legislation of this reign. Hence, whoever else are answerable for the election of 1541 the proctors of ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... most clownish personality. I do not know; certainly some great and fine things came from him; but whether they were motions of his own soul (if he had one), or whether the Gods for Rome's sake took advantage of his quite negative being, and prompted it to their own purposes, who can say?—Sitting down, and keeping still, and saying nothing, the old man could look rather fine, even majestic; one saw traces in him of the Claudian ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... we die," Buddhism starts with the idea of the entire abnegation of self. But a self-denial that is undertaken, not for God, and in God for man, but merely to secure one's own peace and well-being—what is this but selfishness after all? Enjoining a rule of life that is essentially negative—the natural product of that blank despair of the world and of human nature which led to the Great Renunciation—Buddhism, as a religious system, has yielded but scanty fruits of positive holiness, of active benevolence. And ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... sailors, their life delays growth, as shewn "by the great difference between the statures of soldiers and sailors at the ages of seventeen and eighteen years." Mr. B.A. Gould endeavoured to ascertain the nature of the influences which thus act on stature; but he arrived only at negative results, namely that they did not relate to climate, the elevation of the land, soil, nor even "in any controlling degree" to the abundance or the need of the comforts of life. This latter conclusion is directly opposed to ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... clear also that the supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective testimony of the persons experimented upon. I cannot think that there is sufficient certainty of their reliability in this negative observation to make us accept a difficult and revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have failed to observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the fact that ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... embryologists of different persuasions. It is perhaps easy to underestimate the impact and general importance of Harvey's work in view of these qualifications, and so it should be remarked that both positive and negative features of De Generatione influenced profoundly subsequent ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... A negative shake of the golden head and ringleted curls was the answer, though the cupid mouth and the blue eyes smiled with tenderness. They stood very close to another, like poles of a magnet twixt which ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... to be wasted?" she asked calmly; and thus questioned, there was no alternative but to reply in the negative. It would never do for the head of the house to pose as an advocate of extravagance; but all the same he was irritated by the necessity, and with Agnes ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... letterboxes in spats, militant checks, high collar and a choker tie, which, yearning toward his ears, gave him the appearance of one who had floundered up out of his clothes for the third and last time. He came forward, frowned at the group, scowled at the negative distractions of the reading-room, and finally dragged over his chair just ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... fig. 883, by turning the flowers first to the right and then to the left and making the stalks come out underneath the ears of corn. In order to reverse the position of the flowers thus, you will have to make two tracings of the spray, one negative and one positive. ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont

... with that peculiar back-handed shake of the right forefinger which is the most expressive negative in ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... his on a priori principles: Aristotle formed his by an analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his realised for him in the actual world of fact. Aristotle criticised the deductive speculations of Plato by means of inductive negative instances, but Polybius will not take the 'Cloud City' of the Republic into account at all. He compares it to an athlete who has never run on 'Constitution Hill,' to a statue so beautiful that it is entirely removed from the ordinary ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... conversation; and he hastily asked, 'Did Mr. Falconer sleep here last night?' Rose, not much pleased with the abruptness of the first question which the young stranger had addressed to her, answered drily in the negative, and the conversation again ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... be an art-critic, save as complying with Blake's negative injunction or qualification "not to be connoisseured out of my senses," and I do not know what is the technical word in the arts of design corresponding to [Greek: dianoia] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... nor negative; it's just neutral. So we separate it into two parts; and all we have to do, when we want to get away from the earth or any other magnetic-sphere, is to aim a bunch of positive current at the corresponding pole of the planet, ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... then began to offer him bribes, one after the other, making the man's eyes glisten when he promised him his double gun; but directly after the man made a negative sign, merely told him to finish his meal, and returned to ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... basin, which a waiter carried round upon his head; those that liked the person to be chosen dropped their ball into the basin without altering its figure, and those who disliked him pressed it between their fingers, and made it flat; and this signified as much as a negative voice. And if there were but one of these pieces in the basin, the suitor was rejected, so desirous were they that all the members of the company should be agreeable to each other. The basin was called caddichus, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... swiftly obeyed her desire. He then asked her if the dinner were to be kept for Monsieur Pierre, who had not yet returned. She did not know what to say, but lest he should wonder at her ignorance of Piers' doings, she answered in the negative, and ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... the important question whether the end of the new community would be better attained with the usual religious vows or without them was decided in the negative. They were not definitely rejected in the beginning; but starting without them, the Fathers were willing to allow experience to show whether or not they should be resumed. The lapse of time but confirmed the view that the voluntary agreement and the bond of fraternal ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... east, there are no sensational evidences of the great conflict of September—only, here and there, in an unploughed field, or among the fresh brown furrows, a little mound with a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins to perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... She would have been amazed, unbelieving, had he told her that it was her beauty; that he was clinging rather desperately to the unlovely number, which had no individuality and whose features were altogether neutral and negative. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... armed boats frequently, pushed inside the inlets, seizing coasters, and at times even attacking the gunboats. While the positive loss thus inflicted was considerable, it will readily be understood that it was much exceeded by the negative effect, in deterring from movement, and reducing navigation to the limits of ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... fascination which Alexander exercised over everybody. If it is possible to explain it at all, which is more than doubtful, I should think that it might be accounted for on some such theory as this. Hermione was negative as compared with Paul, but in comparison with Alexander she was positive. It is clear that if this were so she must have experienced two totally different sets of impressions, according as she was with the one or ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... written nothing but the 'Ernest Maltravers' books, you would think perhaps more highly of him. Do you not think it possible now? It is his most impotent struggling into poetry, which sets about proving a negative of genius on him—that, which the Athenaeum praises as 'respectable attainment in various walks of literature'—! like the Athenaeum, isn't it? and worthy praise, to be administered by professed judges of art? What is to be expected of the public, when the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... thence into the language of Puritanism for the living Christian, as in Baxter's famous book, The Saints' Rest. The exact meaning of sanctus is extremely difficult to fix, and this may be why it was found to be a convenient word for a type of character negative rather than positive. The lawyers defined it as meaning what is sancitum by the State,[979] without tracing it back to a time when the State was a religious as well as a civil entity. But there was ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... domestic relations,—it cannot be that anybody ought to have all this, and yet do nothing for it; nor do I believe that any one's duties are bounded by the half-animal instincts of loving husband, wife, or children, and the negative virtue of wronging no man: besides we are villainously wronging many men.... What would I not give to be able to awaken in others my own feeling of this ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... subject. There is always a negative lesson implied, when the positive lesson is expressed; and there is in like manner a positive implied, whenever it is the negative that is expressed. As for example, when the child, from the history of Cain and Abel, draws the negative lesson that he should not hate his brother; the opposite of that lesson is equally binding in the positive form, that he should love his brother. And when, from the history of Job, the positive lesson is drawn that we ought to be patient; the negative of that lesson becomes ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... word apologise, a cloud passed across the features of Athos, Porthos smiled contemptuously, Aramis made a negative sign. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... last cars stood a young girl and three men. One of the men was elderly, with white hair and side whiskers. The other two were young and well dressed. The girl was of our best patrician type—the type that may know little, think little, say little, and generally amount to little, and yet carry its negative qualities with so used an air of polite society as to raise them by sheer force to the dignity of positive virtues. From head to foot she was faultlessly groomed. From eye to attitude she was languidly ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... the title of the office to which each of them is to be elected. Ballot, from the French, means a little ball, and is used in voting. Ballots are of different colors; those of one color signifying an affirmative vote, or yes; those of another color a negative vote, or no. From this has come the application of the word ballot to the written or printed ticket now used ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young

... he murmured, "whether personality survives or whether it, too, when up against the irresistible, dissolves and resolves itself into a series of negative reactions?" ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... to one when Berry's antagonist rose again to his feet. Shortly he opened his case. Nothing, he said, was more difficult to prove than a negative. But for one thing, it might have gone hard with an innocent man. Everything looked very black, but, as luck would have it, most fortunately for himself, Mr. Bladder could prove incontestably that upon the twenty-second of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... glossy. Whiskers that belonged rather to the chin, leaving bare the jawbone, expressive of firmness and resolve. Firm thin lips, handsomely moustached; when parted, displaying teeth well set and of dazzling whiteness. A face that might be called beautiful; and yet its beauty was of that negative order which we admire in the serpent and the pard. The smile was cynical; the eye cold, yet bright; but the brightness was altogether animal—more the light of instinct than intellect. A face that presented in its expression a ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... the churches to a need for more united efforts along lines of social and moral reform carries with it a great responsibility for women, who, representing two-thirds of the numerical power of the churches, are in their present disfranchised condition negative factors in those broader fields of activity which now constitute church work. Women are beginning to realize that they are wasting their efforts and energies in trying to effect moral and social reforms dependent upon legislative action or law enforcement and they are asking: ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... Pencroft, and Neb into the dining-room of Granite House, told them what had happened. Pencroft, seizing the telescope, rapidly swept the horizon, and stopping on the indicated point, that is to say, on that which had made the almost imperceptible spot on the photographic negative...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... 'moon walking' is a legend which stands in contradiction to hitherto observed facts. That the phantasy of the German folk mind drew to itself the pale ghostly light of the moon and could reckon from it all sorts of wonderful things, proves nothing to us." I can only say here that ten negative cases signify nothing in the face of a single positive one and a thousand-fold experience undoubtedly represents a certain connection between the light of the full moon and the most complicated forms of ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... prudent inquiries as to his family and condition. At the same time, she began by a refusal. Then she discussed the propriety of the matter with M. de Champignelles, directing her questions so as to discover, if possible, whether he knew the motives for the visit, and finally revoked her negative answer. The discussion and the discretion shown perforce by the Marquis had piqued ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac

... David's, that he would make a bridge with his ships from that spot to Ireland—a haughty boast, not quite so easily accomplished. His speech was repeated to the King of Leinster, who inquired "if the king, in his great threatening, had added, 'if it so please God'?" The reporter answered in the negative. "Then," said he, "seeing this king putteth his trust only in man, and not in God, I fear not his coming." When Dermod Mac Murrough was driven in disgrace from Ireland, he fled at once to Bristol. There he learned that Henry ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... soil samples to be taken from an area covering ten thousand square miles. Our chemical analysis has been thorough, and we find nothing that could be remotely harmful to human life. Atmospheric samples produce the same negative results. On the other hand, we have direct evidence that no animal life has ever evolved on Rythar; the life cycle is ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox

... followed out to the limit of its value. In the same manner it is often of value to tell what a thing or a proposition does not resemble, to contrast it with one or more ideas, and by this means exclude what might otherwise be confusing. Note that after the negative comparison the paragraph closes with what it is like, or what ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... discussed of late, whether Alesia is not rather to be identified with Alaise (25 kilometres to the south of Besancon, dep. Doubs), has been rightly answered in the negative by ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... friends—" suggested Barlasch, and, on receiving a more decided negative, returned the coins to ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... as in any other Part of America, and at set Times have a pretty deal of Liberty in their Quarters, as they are called. The Argument of the Reasonableness and Legality, according to Nature, of the Slave-Trade, has been so well handled on the Negative Side of the Question, that there remains little for an Author to say on that Head; and that Captives taken in War, are the Property of the Captor, as to Life and Person, as was the Custom amongst the Spartans; who, like the Americans, perpetuated a Race of Slaves, by marrying them to one another, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... from the depths of her soul. How well I remember her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving-time ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... these violent events, and contending hypotheses, while La Table Parlante took a Catholic view, and Science a negative view, M. Agenor de Gasparin, a Protestant, chose a ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... in the earlier part of the poem that appear to negative the idea of its having been written in 1800. The opening lines seem to hint at an experience somewhat distant. He speaks of being "wont" to do certain things. But, on the other hand, I find an entry in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, which leads me to believe that the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... will add to the clearness and distinctness of the picture. Our first impression of a house may include windows, but the mention of them later will bring them out clearly on our mental picture much as the details appear when one is developing a negative ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... sending them to sea; of their officers and crews; of their passengers and lading; of the troubles that assailed before they had "shaken off the land," and of the final consolidation of the passengers and lading of both ships upon the MAY-FLOWER, for the belated ocean passage. The wholly negative results of careful search render it altogether probable that the original journal or "Log" of the MAY-FLOWER (a misnomer lately applied by the British press, and unhappily continued in that of the United States, to the ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... How handy." He punched at the calculator again. "Ah! You see, Jules! Just as we suspected! Negative gees at the surface, on the equator, comes to ten to the minus third standard gees—almost exactly one centimeter ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett

... bank depositor or the holder of an ordinary insurance policy is a negative rather than a positive factor in economic control. Not only does he exercise no power over the dollar which he has placed with the bank or with the insurance company, but he has thereby strengthened the hands of these organizations. Each dollar ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... be prudent or advisable to entrust a property of such enormous value to a crew of absolute strangers, of whose characters he would have no time or opportunity to judge? Upon this point he had no doubt whatever; the answer to this question was a most emphatic negative. But if—so ran his thoughts—he was not prepared to ship the treasure aboard this unknown barque, and entrust it to her unknown crew, what was he to do with it? Was he to leave it concealed in the cavern that had already been its hiding-place for so many years, and return to fetch it ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... written to my aunt Hervey, to supplicate her interest in my behalf, for my clothes, books, and money; signifying to her, 'That, if I may be restored to the favour of my family, and allowed a negative only, as to any man who may be proposed to me, and be used like a daughter, a niece, and a sister, I will stand by my offer to live single, and submit, as I ought, to a negative from my father.' Intimating, nevertheless, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... not a rack behind; go, be no more; die &c 360. annihilate, render null, nullify; abrogate &c 756; destroy &c 162; take away; remove &c (displace) 185; obliterate, extirpate. Adj. inexistent^, nonexistent &c 1; negative, blank; missing, omitted; absent &c 187; insubstantial, shadowy, spectral, visionary. unreal, potential, virtual; baseless, in nubibus [Lat.]; unsubstantial &c 4; vain. unborn, uncreated^, unbegotten, unconceived, unproduced, unmade. perished, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... music, in this connexion. A letter from Keats has been published showing that at one time he expected to meet Moore personally (see p. 45). Whether he did so or not I cannot say for certain, but I apprehend not: the published Diary of Moore, of about the same date, suggests the negative. ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... domestic institutions in their own way."[368] So stated the principle seems direct and simple. But was Toombs willing to concede that the people of a Territory might exclude slavery? He never said so; while Douglas conceded both the positive power to exclude, and the negative power to permit, slavery. Here was a discrepancy.[369] And it was probably because they could not agree on this point, that a provision was added to the territorial bills, providing that cases involving title to slaves might be appealed to the Supreme Court. Whether the people of ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... enough; the snake as a poisonous terrible animal indicates, however, a special phallus, a libido burdened with anxiety. Jung, who has copious material with which to treat this symbolism, calls the snake really a "negative phallus," the phallus forbidden with respect to the mother, etc. I would recall that alchemy, too, has the symbol of the snake or the dragon, and used in a way that reenforces the preceding conception. It is there connected with the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... my friends, with the definition of a pseudoscience. A pseudoscience consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative practical application. Its professors and practitioners are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... wondering now whether Boots had recognised Alixe when he had blundered into the room that night. He had never asked the question; he was very much inclined to, now. However, Boots's reply could be only the negative answer that any ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... of horror that was, in the great dark empty room, in a silence that was something more than negative, that ghastly figure frozen into stone by some unexplained terror! And the silence and the stillness! The very thunder had ceased now. My heart stood still with fear. Then, moved by some instinctive feeling, under whose ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... at the request of the defendant, enquired if either of the Jurors was a member of the Constitutional Association. The answer was in the negative. ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper

... just now dismissed the sniveling toad Dorcas, who was introduced to me for my pardon by the whining mother. I gave her a kind of negative and ungracious forgiveness. Yet I shall as violently curse the two nymphs, by-and-by, for the consequences of my own folly: and if this will be a good way too to prevent their ridicule upon me, for losing so ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... board merely to fulfil some selfish purpose of his own. To the theorist who has sampled them only from a distance, these off-scourings of Middle Europe are downtrodden people with souls; to those who happen to know them personally, all their qualities seem to be conspicuously negative. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... Corliss made a negative gesture. "He'll come back when he gets hungry. It's a long ride to the water-hole. Sinker had sand to get as near home as he did. It's going to be straight ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... table, when the company are over-excited, must be answered for; and if the party insulting have no recollection of the insult, it is his duty to say so in writing, and negative the insult. For instance, if the man say: "you are a liar and no gentleman," he must, in addition to the plea of the want of recollection, say: "I believe the party insulted to be a man of the strictest ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson

... both the affirmative and the negative and there was something subtly insolent in his tone—something that aroused more ire than a cruder retort would have accomplished. He turned his back on the cursing man and went on down to the bridge. He waited there for a time and watched the drift of foam on the fretted waters. The ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... nothing in that to worry mother, and soon I shall have good news for her." (If he had seen its reception, he would have learned his mistake. The intuitions of love are keen, and this formal negative note in the constrained hand told more of his disappointment than any words could have done. While he knew it not, his mother was suffering with him. In reply she wrote a letter full of general sympathy, intending to be more specific when he gave ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... understood. A dish of boiled fish, pickled ginger, chicken entrees, young onions, together with rice enough to feed a pig, form the ingredients of a very good Chinese meal. Chop-sticks are, of course, provided; but, as yet, my dexterity in the manipulation of these articles is decidedly of the negative order, and so my pocket-knife performs the dual office of knife and fork; for the rice, one can use, after a manner, the little porcelain dipper provided for ladling an evil-smelling liquid over that staple. Bread, there ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... receiving station normally maintained upon the main line a continuous electric current of a negative polarity, which did not produce a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... relentless tenacity of purpose. In particular, it owes a debt which it can never liquidate to what was at once the cause and the result of his over-seriousness,—to his lack of any sense of humour,—a negative quality which allowed his practical logic to run its course without let or hindrance, and prevented the "brakes" of common-sense from acting when he found himself, in his very zeal for the Law, descending an inclined plane into an unfathomable ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... you could not have been made opaque, without being so thick and suffocating; why it would not be as well to sit up all night half asleep in an ordinary passenger-car as to lie awake all night in a Pullman. But the snoring of my fellow-passengers answered this question in the negative. ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... takes two forms. One complacently traces himself up to a coronet; another, defiantly, to a lapstone. The sentiment is precisely the same in both cases, only that one is the positive and the other the negative pole ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... are you, Master Wag?" said he, when they met. "Did you observe that green chariot that stands down in the yard there, and came in more than an hour ago?" Jeremiah answered in the negative. "Well," continued mine host, "it belongs to one of the oddest, rummest, little old gentlemen I ever clapped my eyes on. He's been asking me all sorts of questions, and seems mightily tickled with your name above all things. I think he's ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... fearful fiasco with CHAPLIN last Friday, OLD MORALITY checked disposition to give young Ministers opportunity of distinguishing themselves. If MAXWELL made a mull of this, following on Friday week's catastrophe with CHAPLIN, it would be serious. MAXWELL won more than negative credit of not making mistake. He delivered excellent speech, showing complete ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various

... to her annoyance, Wharton came forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm, embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity but to talk of something else and go—above all, to talk of something else before going, lest the would-be benefactor ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... seems that the definition of eternity given by Boethius (De Consol. v) is not a good one: "Eternity is the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life." For the word "interminable" is a negative one. But negation only belongs to what is defective, and this does not belong to eternity. Therefore in the definition of eternity the word "interminable" ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... more than negative difficulty to be feared, have you ever tried in thought to change places with such a girl? Have you ever considered how impossible it is for such a one to grow? The simple grace of continuance is in danger of withering ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... scarcely found in the category of those entailing punishment. Murder must sometimes be expiated by a pilgrimage to the Ganges, but other criminal offences against the person and property are not taken cognisance of by the caste committee unless the offender is sent to jail. Both in its negative and positive aspects the category of offences affords interesting deductions on the basis of the explanation of the caste system already given. The reason why there is scarcely any punishment for offences against ordinary morality ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... Gospel in very early times is well authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In one instance, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession in the Book of the Dead; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... Sandwich's business is not like to come on to-day, which I am heartily glad of. This law against Conventicles is very severe; but Creed, whom I met here, do tell me that, it being moved that Papists' meetings might be included, the House was divided upon it, and it was carried in the negative; which will give great disgust to the people, I doubt. Thence with Creed to Hercules Pillars by the Temple again, and there dined he and I all alone, and thence to the King's house, and there did see "Love in a Maze," wherein ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... unless indeed they should happen to be the possessors of a great historic name or should occupy in their own country a position out of the reach of ordinary mortals. This careful exclusion of all originality and diversity has, by degrees, communicated to the club a complexion somewhat negative and colorless, but at the same time, it must be admitted, of the most perfect distinction. The most influential members, although generally very wealthy, live in Paris with but few of the external signs of luxury, and devote their incomes to home comforts and to the improvement of their estates. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... brought charges against him. Two of the principal ones were: "1. His unseemly gestures and carriage before the church, in the mixed assembly;" and "2. That when the church did agree to two charges (namely, of assumption and partiality), he did not give his vote either to the affirmative or the negative." ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... of this class of superstition in certain districts, and not in others, is indicative of an ancient origin, and it is exactly what might be expected to have been produced from totem-peoples. Unfortunately, neither the negative evidence of superstitious beliefs nor the local distribution of superstitious beliefs has ever been considered worthy of attention. But some little evidence is incidentally forthcoming, and I would submit that this may ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... it soon comes to pass that parties gather round the negative and positive poles of some opinion or notion, and that the intolerant spirit of a triumphant majority will allow no deviation from the standard of orthodoxy which it has set up for itself. Freedom of opinion will be professed and pretended to, but every one will ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... things recorded of him. Fierce though he looked, he was, for the most part, it must be confessed, null. He seldom asserted himself. There was so little of that for him to assert. He had, therefore, no personal enemies. In a negative way, he was popular, and was positively popular, for a while, after his assassination. And this it is that makes him now the less able, poor fellow, to understand and endure the shame he is put to. 'Stat rex indignatus.' He ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... construction and destruction, man relates himself constantly with one or both through the simple law of his own consciousness, and only as he learns the laws of his own being and consciously places himself in a position of power can he ever hope to escape the results which the negative, destructive currents produce in his body and ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.

... To this I replied, "I had never been at his door, nor out of my bed the whole night." He then inquired of all the maids, who only lay in the house, whether any of them disturbed him; to which they all answered in the negative. Soon after this, Mr. Cranstoun came to Henley, as has been already observed, and was put into a room, called the hall-chamber, over the great parlour; which was reckoned the best in the house. Here he was shut out from the rest of the family. ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead

... she exclaimed to me, when the concierge had given her a negative reply. "He fears ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux

... the hotel, Berry told the porter that he need not uncover, as he was travelling incognito, and asked if Mrs. Pleydel had arrived. Receiving a negative answer, he gave the man five marks and asked him to be very careful as to the way he lifted the cat's basket out of his wife's cab. Then he suffered himself to be conducted to the sitting-room which I had engaged on ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... legislative body by refusing to them his assent. So a similar power has necessarily resulted from that instrument to the judiciary, and yet the judiciary forms no part of the Legislature. There is, it is true, this difference between these grants of power: The Executive can put his negative upon the acts of the Legislature for other cause than that of want of conformity to the Constitution, whilst the judiciary can only declare void those which violate that instrument. But the decision of the judiciary is final in such a case, whereas in every instance where the veto of the Executive ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... me to show that the negative particle is here wanting, which I have supplied in brackets, and I wonder none have hitherto suspected that ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... the right to adopt and execute such a system having been presented for my signature at the last session, I was compelled, from the view which I had taken of the powers of the General Government, to negative it, on which occasion I thought it proper to communicate the sentiments which I had formed, on mature consideration, on the whole subject. To that communication, in all the views in which the great interest to which it relates may be supposed to merit ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... Editor was privileged to know Fitch as a friend. And to be taken into the magic circle was to be given freely of that personal equation which made his plays so personal. This association was begun over a negative criticism of a play. An invitation followed to come and talk it over in his Fortieth Street study, the same room which—decorations, furniture, books and all—was bequeathed to Amherst College, and practically ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch

... They need our care more than I can tell you. The boy is still very ill. Won't you let my love for you plead for them, and withdraw from the case? Do, Dear, and let me call Horace. Will you, Everett? He's so sad over it! Oh! may I call him?" She had risen from her chair; but a negative shake of the man's head made her resume her place again, and she continued, "It will be a dreadful thing for them, if they have to go back. Now, listen, Everett! If you will withdraw and let Horace settle it with that man, our arrangements," her face ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White

... mind, which, of course, disconnects man from rightful association with the Divine. A man must, therefore, think right. Yet, because of centuries of erroneous conception of God and of the world, man has been a negative instead of a positive being, and his unwisdom has reacted upon ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush

... determined to tell her so. To continue living in this uncertainty, with the memory of her pressed against him always compelling him to put out his arms and draw her again to himself, was intolerable. He would speak, and settle it once for all, nor would he take any compromising negative as a reply. That tone she had used could indicate but one thing, she loved him, and whether she knew it or not, whether she wanted to know it or not, should not matter. He would argue it out with her, showing her with the inexorable logic back of ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... most cultivated can display; you were never noisy when you came home late, never made any disturbance when you got up in the morning; you overlooked trifles, drew aside when ideas became conflicting; in a word, you were the perfect companion; but you were altogether too submissive, too negative, too quiet, not to have me reflect about it in the course of time. And you are fearful and timid; you look as if you led a double life. Do you know, as you sit there before the mirror and I see your back, it's as if I were looking ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg

... silence. Some object had been obtained, but what it was exactly regimental officers could not know till they read all about it in the papers afterwards. However, the question of advancing that evening, which had before been answered practically, was now settled officially in the negative, and the order to make the zereba was issued. Mimosa and cactus trees, many of them seven feet high, grew thickly around, so there ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... awake all sorts of evil passions in other people's minds if we are better-looking or better dressed, or more admired; and have them aroused in our own if we are not? Does a ball amuse? Does a dinner-party? Does even a comedy, after the first quarter of an hour? I can answer for myself in the negative, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... of Charles Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of men, and he was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would have been an impostor.' But the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in 'La Saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject. Christ remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... Dayton (one of my aides) were sent to meet him, and to keep him in conversation as long as possible. They soon returned, saying it was the adjutant of the rebel general Chalmers, who demanded the surrender of the place. I instructed them to return and give a negative answer, but to delay him as much as possible, so as to give us time for preparation. I saw Anthony, Dayton, and the rebel bearer of the flag, in conversation, and the latter turn his horse to ride back, when I ordered ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... "Vigilant," Bob bowled a 9-pound shot across that craft's fore-foot, as an invitation to her to heave-to. Monsieur Durand, however, seemed in no humour for accepting any such invitation just then, for he immediately returned a decided negative from his long brass 9-pounder, sending the shot very cleverly through both Bob's topsails, and narrowly missing the mainmast- head. I expected to see Master Bob round-to and deliver his whole broadside in retaliation—it would have been quite like him to do so; instead of this, ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... ask whether we can attribute beauty to the ideas of painting and sculpture, a negative answer is at once suggested. It is manifestly impossible to establish an order of aesthetic excellence between these subjects. The idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautiful than the idea of a ruthless destroyer only ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... said to himself:—"So it is to such as this man that I give my hospitality;" and going back into the chamber he bade lock the door, and asked of his attendants whether the vile fellow that sate at table directly opposite the door was known to any of them, who, one and all, answered in the negative. Primasso waited a little, but he was not used to fast, and his journey had whetted his appetite. So, as the abbot did not return, he drew out one of the loaves which he had brought with him, and began to eat. The abbot, after a while, bade one of his servants go see whether ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... it was a curious thing to see this stately woman handling a gun with all the skill and quickness of a practised shot. Besides, as the loader idea involved a whole afternoon of Ida's society he certainly was not inclined to negative it. But Edward Cossey did not smile; on the contrary he positively scowled with jealousy, and was about to make some remark when Ida held ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard

... a quick negative, and tried to hide her interest in the subject by an eager attention to her brother, who was driving as hard a bargain, and imposing on her as much as he could; but Crawford pursued with "No, no, you must not ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... wife casually, while inquiring for others, whether the prince's Roumanian friend had yet left Fuerstenstein, and she had answered in the negative. He had not expected Hartmut to leave at once, for the latter had declared most positively he would not. But Wallmoden imagined he would think it all well over, and when Prince Adelsberg left Rodeck that would end the whole ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... Strategical theory will at once reply that it is an operation which involves "an arrest of the offensive," a situation which is usually taken to exhibit every kind of drawback. Close blockade is essentially an offensive operation, although its object is usually negative; that is, it is a forward movement to prevent the enemy carrying out some offensive operation either direct or by way of counterstroke. So far the common tendency to confuse "Seeking out the enemy's fleet" with "Making the enemy's coast your frontier" may be condoned. But the two operations ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... know that the enemy of his father and mother did not thrive on the spoils of his oppression could have yielded Shamus any consolation in his lot, he had long ago become aware of circumstances calculated to give this negative comfort. His maternal uncle enjoyed, indeed, his newly acquired property only a few years after it came into his possession. Partly on account of his cruelty to his relations, partly from a meanness and vulgarity of character, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... identity; the very essence of it lies in coincidence in some points, with diversity in others; if the two were identical, there were no longer an analogy. Take two pictures of a person printed from the same negative photograph; you do not say they are like each other, they are the same. It is most dangerous to fasten on any point of the depicted human procedure, and found on it the affirmation that the divine must be ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... passed away, during which the former investigators called constantly on the Fox family to enquire if their spirit friends had returned. For the first few days a stoical negative was their only reply; after this, they began more and more fully to recognise the loss they had sustained. The wise counsellors were gone; the sources of strange strength and superhuman consolation were cut off. The tender, loving, wonderful presence no more flitted around their steps, cheered ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd

... maintains that it is a justiciable case, the Bench which is to serve as Bench of First Instance shall investigate the matter with regard to the question whether the case is more political than legal in nature. If the Court decides the question in the negative, then the same Court shall give judgment on the dispute; but, if the Court decides the question in the affirmative, then the case shall be referred by the Court to the International Council of Conciliation. Whatever the decision of the Bench ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim

... Cicero, the tablet or ballot of the people of Rome (who gave their votes by throwing tablets or little pieces of wood secretly into urns marked for the negative or affirmative) was a welcome constitution to the people, as that which, not impairing the assurance of their brows, increased the freedom of their judgment. I have not stood upon a more particular description of this ballot, because that of Venice exemplified in the model is ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... elevated in air, while the same number were displayed in the negative. The landlord ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... talent than for tender, pious feeling—less marked by genius than goodness, yet of a kind which the impartial critic will still sincerely commend, simply because its defects are negative while its merits are positive and apparent to all who will read only a few pages in it. The author seems to us as one who has gleaned the best from mystical Christianity or Quietism, without having taken up its defects—one who has ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... epoch. His works speak for him, and will to all time. Of his poetical writings it may be said that though only surpassed in wit and humor by his more universally known prose, they are infinitely NASTIER than any thing else in the English language. They have, however, the negative virtue of being nowise licentious or demoralizing—or at least no more so than is inseparable from the choice of obscene and repulsive subjects. Nearly all his unobjectionable comic verses may be found in ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... argument, because our knowledge of those classes of animals in which natural selection could act is even now very incomplete; and our knowledge of their past history is still more limited, so that we are not in a condition to prove a negative. But in such a case as this the onus of proof should surely lie on the other side. It is for those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... substances, and the bodies, wills, faculties, and affections of men, has the Devil, or would the Devil have, a personal self-subsistence? Does he, or can he, exist as a conscious individual agent or person? Should the answer to this query be in the negative: then— ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... knowledge of principles or facts received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... measured pauses. Correspondingly, the next in the series of Turner drawings, the "Aysgarth Force," shows no attempt to give the real color of Nature, but a single color governing the whole drawing, a golden brown passing in shadow into its exact negative. There is an absolute tint, full, and inflected through every shade of its tones to the bottom of the scale. The strict analogy is broken in this case by a dash of delicate gray-blue in the sky and gray-red in the figures, the slightest possible accompaniment to his golden-brown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold, encouragement—and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last, and most of them negative.'[1] ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... Phineas' feeling against Captain Hunniwell had softened at all. Leander's reply was a vigorous negative. ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... investigations would naturally lead to results that might bring authority into discredit, make the governed presuming and prying in their dispositions, and cause much derangement and inconvenience to the regular and salutary action of government. My father took the negative of the proposition, while my uncle maintained its affirmative. I well remember that my poor aunt looked uneasy, and tried to divert the discourse by exciting our curiosity ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... for example, could even import and export commodities to and from remote countries by sea, free of duty, while their merchandize to and from Castile was crushed by imposts. As this ingenious perversity of positive arrangements came to increase the negative inconveniences caused by the almost total absence of tolerable roads, canals, bridges, and other means of intercommunication, it may be imagined that internal traffic—the very life-blood of every prosperous nation—was very nearly stagnant in Spain. As an inevitable result, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... with difficulty maintained an irregular and precipitate flight. A carefully compiled record was made of variations of temperature and humidity, and they succeeded in determining that the upper air was charged with negative electricity. In all this these two accomplished physicists may be said to have carried out a brilliant achievement, even though their actual results may seem somewhat meagre. They not only were their own aeronauts, but succeeded in arranging and carrying ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... the other day—the central heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go on. Only you would be lost ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... informed me he would take care to have a ticket sent me for his great matinee, which was to take place shortly. My sole attempt to introduce an artistic theme of conversation was a question as to whether he knew Lowe's Erlkonig as well as Schubert's. His reply in the negative frustrated this somewhat awkward attempt, and I ended my visit by giving him my address. Thither his secretary, Belloni, presently sent me, with a few polite words, a card of admission to a concert to be given entirely by the master himself in the Salle Erard. I duly wended my ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... misunderstanding now with a charming quiet courtesy?—that, shouting the discovery abroad to save their faces, they would have due regard for careful qualifications and for striking the right note? The reply was the negative: it ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... This negative result was easy to foresee. The Buprestis emerging from the depths of the trunk in which he has spent his larval life; the Geotrupes and the Phanaeus leaving their natal burrows possess their final adornments, which will not become richer in the rays of the sun, at the time ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... of the following treatise consists in its giving at the outset, and maintaining as the foundation of all subsequent reasoning, a definition of Intrinsic Value, and Intrinsic Contrary-of-Value; the negative power having been left by former writers entirely out of account, and the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... self-commanding attitude of the body cannot be too strongly urged at this point, for the voice cannot be used safely with great power when the body itself is in a negative attitude; for it must be remembered that the voice is a reporter, and if we attempt to force it to report something that is not there it will repay us by casting the lie in our throat. Power is the result of growth, and can be developed only by patience ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick

... these stories have points of peculiar interest to the author. For instance, "Negative Gravity" was composed in Switzerland when the author was temporarily confined to the house in full ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... this with more or less astonishment. Apparently, while he had the utmost faith in Hugh's ability to do most things, at the same time he considered that this would be in the form of a miracle. He smiled, and again shook his head in the negative. ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson

... of its value. In the same manner it is often of value to tell what a thing or a proposition does not resemble, to contrast it with one or more ideas, and by this means exclude what might otherwise be confusing. Note that after the negative comparison the paragraph closes with what it is ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... Huxley, to requote what has before been quoted, says: "I can not see one tittle of evidence that the great unknown stands to us in the light of a Father." What a contradiction is here! He knows that the great unknown can not be proved to be our Father. Then he must know of the great unknown the negative aspects so minutely as to be sure that no Fatherhood is in the great unknown. Then he knows the great unknown much better than he is willing to admit, ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell

... knowledge of which Tatius promised himself the advantage in the ensuing conspiracy. When they were in the open air, and at some distance from the gloomy towers of the Palace, he bluntly asked the Count of Paris whether he knew Agelastes the Philosopher. The other answered in the negative. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... replied Brutus, without being discomposed, "we shall meet again." Upon this the phantom vanished; when Brutus, calling to his servants, asked if they had seen anything; to which they answering in the negative, he resumed his studies. 24. Struck with so strange an occurrence, he mentioned it to Cassius, who rightly considered it as the effect of an imagination disordered by vigilance and anxiety. 25. Brutus appeared ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... Edward. But Louise of Stolberg had doubtless absorbed, from her mother, from her older fellow-canonesses, nay, from the very school-girls in the convent where she had been educated, all proper views, negative and positive, on the subject of marriage; nor must we give to a girl who was probably still too much of a child, too much of an unromantic little woman of the world, undeserved pity on account of degradation which she had most probably, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... the Lady Aphrodite. If we were to puzzle our brains for ever, we could not give you the reason. Nothing happened, nothing had been said or done, which could indicate its origin. Perhaps this was the origin; perhaps the Duke's conduct had become, though unexceptionable, too negative. But here we only throw up a straw. Perhaps, if we must go on suggesting, anxiety ends ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli

... of all the impressions of his visit to Professor Kelton, and he had been recalling that errand again to-day. The old gentleman had given his answer with decision; Harwood recalled the crisp biting-off of the negative, and the Professor had lifted his head slightly as he spoke the word. Dan remembered the peace of the cottage, the sweet scents of June blowing through the open windows; and he remembered Sylvia as she had opened the door, and their colloquy later, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... him that she did not love him was impossible to her. But how was she to refuse him without telling him either a lie, or the truth? Some answer she must give him; and as to that matter of marrying him, the answer must be a negative. Her education had been of that nature which teaches girls to believe that it is a crime to marry a man without an assured income. Assured morality in a husband is a great thing. Assured good temper is very excellent. Assured talent, religion, amiability, truth, honesty, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... and the same hostile look in her eye earlier in the evening. He had found her alone, reading a letter which, as the stamp on the envelope showed, had come from England. She had seemed so upset that he had asked her if it contained bad news, and she had replied in the negative with so much irritation that he had desisted from inquiries. But his own idea was that she had had bad news from home. Mr Pickering still clung to his early impression that her little brother Percy was consumptive, and he thought the child must have taken a turn for the worse. It ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... original copy this negative is by some accident thrust into the next line, so as to destroy at once the metre and the meaning. It is still too ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... more. But she accompanied the simple negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... it was a negative movement she was unaware of. Well, anyway, the game had begun, and she was in it. Her duty was clear enough. And meanwhile she would miss no opportunity to pull her whole weight for her side, even when she knew that was not the ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... person as this was certain to find a welcome at Mr Allworthy's table, to whom misfortunes were ever a recommendation, when they were derived from the folly or villany of others, and not of the unfortunate person himself. Besides this negative merit, the doctor had one positive recommendation;—this was a great appearance of religion. Whether his religion was real, or consisted only in appearance, I shall not presume to say, as I am not possessed of any touchstone which can distinguish ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... spectrum is made to act on paper which has been previously darkened, by exposure to sunshine under cupro-sulphate of ammonia, the phenomena are materially different. The photographic spectrum is lengthened out on the red or negative side by a faint but very visible red portion, which extends fully up to the end of the red rays, as seen by the naked eye. The tint of the general spectrum, too, instead of brown is dark grey, passing, however, at its most refracted or positive end ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling

... observation in; practical; primitive; pure; social. Scientific inquiry, curiosity and; law; method. Self-assertion; consciousness of the; development of; display; preservation; sufficiency; surrender; satisfaction and dissatisfaction; the divided; the negative; the permanent; the social; types of the. Sense satisfaction basis of aesthetic experience. Sex, and creative activity; and racial continuity; influence of on individual differences; instinct of. Shakespeare. Shelley. Sidgwick. Smith, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... me a fool, Mr. Berkeley,' cried Lady Hilda, delighted even with that very negative bit of favourable appreciation. 'Now, that I call a real compliment, I assure you, because I know you clever people pitch your standard of intelligence so very, very high! You consider everybody fools, I'm sure, except the few people ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... not for a moment be understood as belittling the value of faithfulness in an employee. But, after all, faithfulness is nothing more nor less than a negative quality. By faithfulness a man may hold a position a lifetime. He will keep it just where he found it. But by the exercise of this single quality he does not add to the importance of the position any more than he adds to his own value. It is not enough ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok

... 'Horrors of the French Revolution,' there was abundance to be said and shrieked. With and also without profit. Heaven knows there were terrors and horrors enough: yet that was not all the Phenomenon; nay, more properly, that was not the Phenomenon at all, but rather was the shadow of it, the negative part of it. And now, in a new stage of the business, when History, ceasing to shriek, would try rather to include under her old Forms of speech or speculation this new amazing Thing; that so some accredited scientific Law of Nature ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Chris spoke. She made utterance under the weight of great emotion and with evident desire to escape the necessity of a direct negative, while yet leaving her refusal of Martin's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... occupation. The only escape from these alternatives may at any time be that we must ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so much as possible of a just obligation shall be paid." The Monroe Doctrine was negative. It denied to European powers a certain liberty of operation in this hemisphere. The positive obligations resulting from its application by the United States were points ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... up. She certainly adapted herself well to whatever society she happened to be with; neither patricians nor plebeians found any thing to criticise; but, whether this were the result of tact, or owing merely to the adoption of a negative standard, no one could say. In language she was uniformly correct, without seeming at all scholastic; she occasionally used the idioms and dialectic peculiarities of those around her, though never with the air of being heedlessly ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... it seemed for the purpose of giving Mme. Eames an opportunity to contend with Miss Geraldine Farrar in the field of Japanese opera; but the opera calls for some comment. Why "Iris"? It might be easier to answer the question if it were put in the negative: Why not "Iris"? The name is pretty. It suggests roseate skies, bows of promise, flowery fields, messages swiftly borne and full of portent. The name invites to music and to radiant raiment, and it serves its purpose. Mascagni and his librettist do not seem to have been ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... Senate? None, separately. It can only act jointly with the other House, or jointly with the Executive. And although the theory of the Constitution supposes, when consulted by him, it may freely give an affirmative or negative response, according to the practice, as it now exists, it has lost the faculty of pronouncing the negative monosyllable. When the Senate expresses its deliberate judgment, in the form of resolution, that resolution has no compulsory force, ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay

... off,' said Hazel. 'Nobody can teach me anything about complications!Push him off, sir. Just give him a negative and do not ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... there this negative power in the hands of the advertiser, that of refusing the favour or patronage of his advertisements, there was also a positive one, though ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... yacht's boat. She was dismayed at the task before her. Not a sound broke the stillness and she felt as if she were lost in empty space. Then suddenly someone amidships yawned immensely and said: "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" A voice asked: "Ain't they back yet?" A negative ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... commonly in order to ask whether or not a proposed course of action was desirable; the answer was "yes" or "no."[1682] The famous warrior and poet, Imru'l-Kais, desiring to go to war to avenge his father's death, received at a shrine three times a negative answer, whereupon, hurling abusive epithets at the god, he exclaimed, "If it were your father, you would not say 'no.'" Such independence was probably rare; most men would have accepted the divine decision. The answer ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative experience is familiar do not pass beyond ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... wondered that on the day after Lady Audley's departure, the two young men (one of whom was disabled by that heart wound which he bore so quietly, from really taking pleasure in anything, and the other of whom looked upon almost all pleasure as a negative kind of trouble) began to grow weary of the shade of the willows overhanging the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... tells of the animal kingdom, or the geologist relates of the formation of the crust of the earth. It takes men of larger vision and higher inspiration, with a power to impart a larger vision and a higher inspiration to the people, to make history. It is not a negative, but a positive achievement. It is unconcerned with idolatry or despotism or treason or rebellion or betrayal, but bows in reverence before Moses or Hampden or Washington or Lincoln or the ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge

... may be a Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative." ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc

... affirmative and the negative and there was something subtly insolent in his tone—something that aroused more ire than a cruder retort would have accomplished. He turned his back on the cursing man and went on down to the bridge. He waited there for a time and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... gods, the authors of the Upanishads discovered the Atman or Self. Of that Self they predicated three things only, that it is, that it perceives, and that it enjoys eternal bliss. All other predicates were negative: it is not this, it is not that—it is beyond anything that ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... with the halo of flames about his head had given him a vision. A great gladness came up within him that some day he would surely see Stephen Marshall again, grasp his hand, make him know how he repented his own negative part in the persecution that had led him to his death; make him understand how in dying he had left a path of glory behind and ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... DEAR JOHN RUSSELL,—I certainly inferred from what Clarendon said this afternoon at your house, that he had pretty well made up his mind to a negative answer, and I could only say to you that which I said to Derby when he asked me to join him, that I should be very unwilling, in the present state of our Foreign relations, to belong to any Government ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... an absolutely unbroken and perfect succession of all the deposits which have ever been laid down since the beginning. If, however, we ask the physical geologist if he is in possession of any such uninterrupted series, he will at once answer in the negative. So far from the geological series being a perfect one, it is interrupted by numerous gaps of unknown length, many of which we can never expect to fill up. Nor are the proofs of this far to seek. Apart from ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... unnerved, almost incoherent, shocked him. He realised the depth of the impression that had been made upon her—deep indeed to produce such a result. But what she asked was impossible. He made a little negative ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... for several years. Their ship, a silvery ball, rested on a rock ledge, its pilot and crew having lingered to learn the results of Ashe's search. Four days more and they would have to lift for home even if the Agents still had only negative ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... distinguish them from those accumulated by art; thus the natural adhesive electricity of silver is more of the vitreous kind compared with that of zinc, which consists of a greater proportion of the resinous; that is, in his language, silver is positive and zinc negative. This experiment I have successfully repeated with Mr. Bennet's ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... this: that it was she, and not Miss Weeks who was playing a part, and that whatever her inquiries, she need have no fear of rousing suspicion against Oliver in a mind already dominated by a belief in John Scoville's guilt. The negative with which she followed up this sigh was consequently one of sorrowful acceptance. She made haste, however, to ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... the hands had been paid off and gone home. The book-keeper noted the absence in his pages, asked if work was so pressing as to make the appointment of a substitute necessary or advisable, and being answered in the negative quite forgot to inform his employer of ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow

... Eddie answered in the negative, but said he had been hurt, though he hoped not seriously. Hearing Mr. Thompson and his sons coming with his father, he ran to meet them; his mother, having by this time mastered her emotion, was now quite calm and prepared for the worst. They bringing him in ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... from her aunt. He was quite sure it would be the best possible exercise for her, now that she was so much stronger. So far, she had met all his representations with her gentle—no! not gentle; Geoffrey would be switched if she was gentle; her quiet negative. Her aunts would not like it, and there was an end. Well, there wasn't an end! A reasonable person ought to listen to reason, and be convinced by it. Vesta did not appear to be reasonable yet, but she was intelligent, and the rest would come as she grew stronger. And—he had no right to ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards

... according to the social standard of the speaker. Her tastes were comprehended and sympathised with by her gardener, and by the clerk at Mudie's who refilled her box. The view taken of her by her husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound puppy. She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very successful complexion and blue ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... posts here, Congress passed Bills for the Organization of three new Territories: Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado; and in the sixth section of each of those Bills, after conferring, affirmatively, power on the Territorial Legislature, it went on to exclude certain powers by using a negative form of expression; and it provided, among other things, that the Legislature should have no power to legislate so as to impair the right to private property; that it should lay no tax discriminating against one description ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... Lotur, and Bravais, near the North Cape; Wrangel and Anjou, on the coast of the Polar Sea, have together seen the Aurora thousands of times, but never heard any sound attending the phenomenon. If this negative testimony should not be deemed equivalent to the positive counter-evidence of Hearne on the mouth of the Copper River and of Henderson in Iceland, it must be remembered that, although Hood heard a noise as of quickly-moved ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... clear day, around noon, even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that the writer has travelled in. There are those who write that they can always hold a camera still enough to get a sharp negative at even one tenth of a second. Probably the personal equation counts largely in such a matter, and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may have advantage over his more sanguine and nervous brother. The thing may be done; the writer has done it himself; but the point is it ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... utilitarian view of religion. The Chinese visit a temple much as they visit a shop or doctor, for definite material purposes, and if it be asked whether they are a religious people in the better sense of the word, I am afraid the answer must be in the negative. It is with regret that I express this opinion and I by no means imply that there are not many deeply religious persons in China, but whereas in India the obvious manifestations of superstition are a superficial disease and the heart of the people is keenly sensitive to questions ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing counting them off on his fingers and trembling to receive the Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... expenditure will take, and as to the degree to which this "higher" need will dominate a people's consumption. In this respect the control exerted by the accepted standard of living is chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... during depression may be likened to a photographic film, seven hundred and ninety-eight days long. Each impression seems to have been made in a negative way and then, in a fraction of a second, miraculously developed and made positive. Of hundreds of impressions made during that depressed period I had not before been conscious, but from the moment my mind, if not my full reason, found itself, they stood out vividly. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... and they use it practically. They use it where it has a meaning, and he uses it where it has no meaning at all, except in an a priori way, like a pair of brackets with nothing between them. When the Agnostic speaks of the "possibility" of miracles, he only means that we cannot prove a universal negative. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... that the argument just used is but negative: it does not positively combat the superiority claimed for the Greek organization; that superiority may be all that it is described to be; but it is submitted that perhaps the manifestation of this advantage was not made on a sufficient breadth ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... as other men, is always striving to prove that he sees at least twice as far as the most sharpsighted: after many demonstrations of superabundant activity, he inquired if I wanted anything more; I answered in the negative. He had already opened the door: 'Shall I sport, Sir?' he asked briskly as he stood upon the threshold. He seemed so unlike a sporting character, that I was curious to learn in what sport he proposed to indulge. I answered—'Yes, by all means,' and anxiously watched him, but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various

... light in connection with the studies of radioactivity have settled it that we actually do have a much smaller unit than the hydrogen atom, one of only about 1/1760 its mass, in fact; and that this smallest of the small things of nature is none other than a particle of negative electricity, now ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... contradictions, surely it was this genius, who immortalized our national glory at the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar! That a man of his calibre, surrounded with eternal fame, should be inflamed with a passion for a woman of negative morals who was refused admittance to the same circle that, but for this attachment would receive him as their triumphant hero, is an example of human eccentricity that never has and never can be accounted for. It may be taken for granted that at the very time he was writing ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... young, handsome, distinguished in appearance—not one of these ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of protest as they passed by it. The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unaccountable dissident. In Gwendolen's habits of mind it had been ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... by their greatness of mind, some by their religious profession, some by the fear of public opinion; but I suppose the run of experimentalists, external to the Catholic Church, have more or less inherited the positive or negative unbelief of Laplace, Buffon, Franklin, Priestley, Cuvier, and Humboldt. I do not of course mean to say that there need be in every case a resentful and virulent opposition made to Religion on the part of scientific men; but their emphatic silence or phlegmatic ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... from the dominion of wrong tastes and habits, and from the despair of ever shaking them off which is only too well grounded in the experience of the past, is the beginning of salvation for each of us. That great keyword of the New Testament covers the whole field of positive and negative good which man can need or God can give. Negatively it includes the removal of every evil, whether of the nature of sorrow or of sin, under which men can groan. Positively it includes the endowment with all good, whether of the nature of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... at once conceded that the answer must be in the negative as regards the immediate future and the mass of mankind. The simple truths of religion are intelligible to all, and strike all minds with equal force, though they may not have the same influence with all moral natures. A child ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... animated by a new motive, the development of moral character in all the people. With reference to this new motive social selection is either direct or indirect. Direct selection is highly artificial, but it is only negative. It consists in segregating the degenerates to prevent propagation. Society cannot, of course, directly interfere with the marriage choice of normal persons, for that would be to choke the purest expression of personality. But it can isolate ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau

... authorities, it would be known that he had been selected for political office by "the mouthpiece of the Almighty." I cited the case of Apostle Moses Thatcher as proof that the Church did exercise power openly to negative an apostle's ambition. If it failed now to rebuke Smoot, this very failure would be an affirmative use of its power in his behalf; all Mormons who did not wish to raise their hands "against the Lord's anointed," would ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... enable the reader to form a general notion of the several subjects on which the Mishna treats. The Gemara or Commentary is often overloaded with ineptitudes and ridiculous subtilties. For instance, in the article of "Negative Oaths." If a man swears he will eat no bread, and does eat all sorts of bread, in that case the perjury is but one; but if he swears that he will eat neither barley, nor wheaten, nor rye-bread, the perjury is multiplied ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Augustus and that of Tiberius, who applied the same principles with still greater vigour, was above all a negative policy. Accordingly, it could please only those denying as useful to progress another kind of men, the great agitators of the masses. Shall we therefore conclude that Augustus and Tiberius were useless? So doing, ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... was a learned lady, a blue-stocking, who could not possibly suit him. Ever docile to the voice of friendship, Lord Byron yielded, and allowed his friend to write a proposal to the other lady. Soon after a negative answer arrived, one morning, that the two ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... rather for the honor of the Earls of Downe than of Pope to make out the connection, we must observe that Lord Guildford's testimony, if ever given at all, is simply negative; he had found no proofs of the connection, but he had not found any proofs to destroy it; whilst, on the other hand, it ought to be mentioned, though unaccountably overlooked by all previous biographers, that one of Pope's anonymous enemies, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... inspires love, but cannot return it; he feels, he admires, but he shrinks from any step demanding resolution or self-devotion. Hence, instead of conferring happiness, he makes victims,—victims not of an active, but of a merely passive and negative egotism. A conjunction of circumstances brings him to a sudden and vivid realization of his condition and its results. Instead of escaping by suicide, as might be expected,—and as would probably have been the case if Werther had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... hair and side whiskers. The other two were young and well dressed. The girl was of our best patrician type—the type that may know little, think little, say little, and generally amount to little, and yet carry its negative qualities with so used an air of polite society as to raise them by sheer force to the dignity of positive virtues. From head to foot she was faultlessly groomed. From eye to attitude she was languidly superior—the impolitic ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... them about the nocturnal visitors of the previous night, and inquired if they had seen anything of the men. Both stoutly replied in the negative, but a swift, covert glance that passed between them did not ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon

... any gratitude. The balance of favors was on the other side. He had done more for Jack than Jack for him. He asked himself if he wanted to go with Jack Morgan on this journey, and he answered his own question in the negative. It was better that he should leave him now forever. With him he could only look forward to a future of shame ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger

... in individual variability unless we choose to regard chance as an efficient agency. Consequently, the only efficient principle conceivably connected with the process is the "struggle for existence;" and even this has only a purely negative function in the origination of species or of adaptations. For, the "surviving fittest" owe nothing more to the struggle for existence than our pensioned veterans owe to the death-dealing bullets which did not hit them. Mr. Darwin has, however, obviated all difficulty ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... properly points out that bhava and abhava and kala are included by the speaker within bhutas or primary elements. Bhava implies the four entities called karma, samanya, visesha and samavaya. By abhava is meant a negative state with respect to attributes not possessed by a thing. We cannot think of a thing without thinking of it as uninvested with certain attributes whatever other attributes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... fibrous spray of hemlock, and had severed it with his knife? That was all the others had seen; but there was a great deal more, for in the act their hands had touched, and both had seemed in a positive state in the power to give, and in the negative in readiness to receive, a subtile influence, compared with which electricity is a slow and material agent. And he had lifted his large gray eyes to hers full of—he did not realize what, nor did she—but the cause was there, and ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... the enemy is to be forced to regulate his movements. Howe sees the defence of the empire in the preservation of his own fleet; Jervis in the destruction of the enemy. The one view is local, narrow, and negative; the other general, broad, and positive. As often happens—and very naturally—Jervis's preoccupation with considerations wider than his own command found expression, twice at least, in phrases which pithily summed up his steadfast enduring habit of mind. On the morning of St. Vincent he ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... not my business now to prove that the legend is untrue in fact, or I should insist, first, that its omission by previous writers, who refer both to Leofric and Godgifu and their various good deeds, is strong negative testimony against it; and I should show, from a calculation made by the late Mr. M. H. Bloxam, and founded on the record of Domesday Book, that the population of Coventry in Leofric's time could scarcely have exceeded three hundred and fifty souls, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... the balcony, sliding up and down the bamboo-pole, or reaching for pieces of bananas which the boarders passed him from the dinner-table. "Have you chowed yet?" asked a grating voice, which, on a negative reply, ordered a place to be made ready for me at the table. Barefooted muchachos placed the thumb-marked dishes on the dirty table-cloth. I might add that a napkin had been spread to cover the spot where the tomato catsup ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... recollection how, when a lad at King's College, he had been 'scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall;' and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the freedom of the city. No negative inference can be established from the contemporary notices in the Aberdeen Journal over the visit. Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when 'a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... at once accommodated with a chair in the witness-box, and the magistrate, after a few words of kindly sympathy, asked him if he had anything to add to his written statement. On Mr. Morton replying in the negative, the magistrate added: ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... I can make out," said the anarchist, "the negative is still undeveloped. Pether took it to Palma, and he has it there now, not daring to trust it in a photographer's hands, and not being able to develop it himself. Senores, I believe it will be for us to unlock that tremendous mine of potential energy. Mallorca, I regret to say, is ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... connection with it I am not sure, though I doubt if my services were sufficiently important to contribute toward even this result. A month later I obtained another position and, after that, another. I was never discharged; I declare that with a sort of negative pride; but when I announced to my second employer my intention of resigning he bore the shock with—to ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... this chapter is as far as our investigation is concerned, negative. The deifying love of man has no parallel phenomenon in the ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... in the land struggle—that was the soil and climate that would fight inexorably against the settlers; but with them we have little to do, since the Happy Family had nothing to do with them save in a purely negative way. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... party visited the locality, in March, 1870. When the settlers on the Muddy and the Virgin balloted upon the proposition of abandoning the country, Daniel Bonelli and wife were the only ones who voted the negative. When the Saints left southern Nevada, Bonelli and wife moved to a point about six miles below the mouth of the Virgin, and there established a ferry that still is owned by a son of the founder. ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... water. Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it. Life revived with passion. Longings which you had forgotten came and took you by the throat, saying, "You shall no longer be satisfied with negative peace. Rouse, and live!" Then flitting, exquisite, purple flaws struck across milk-opal water in the bay. Fishing boats lifted themselves in mirage, sailing lightly above the water; and islands sat high, with a cushion of ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... society, pomp, pleasures dearly bought; had it been otherwise, he would have, without hesitation, sacrificed his most lively wishes to the appearances which it was important to give himself. Some words on the character of this man. He was a son of the grand family of misers. Avarice is, above all, a negative, passive passion. Yet Jacques ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... of the alkalies and acids in the water was explained, however, their respective migrations to the negative and positive poles of the battery remained to be accounted for. Davy's classical explanation assumed that different elements differ among themselves as to their electrical properties, some being positively, others negatively, electrified. Electricity and "chemical affinity," ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... received any educational training, "Aunt Bess" replied in the negative, but stated that the slaves on the Hiwards plantation were permitted to pick up what education they could without fear of being molested. No one bothered, however, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... night I had not the least doubt that my unfortunate host was really insane. All the same, I had a curious unwillingness with regard to signing the certificate. Bagwell eagerly asked me if I did not intend to sign. To his astonishment, I replied in the negative. I said that the case was a very peculiar one, and that it would be necessary for me to pay a second visit to the patient before I could take this extreme step. He was, I could see, intensely ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade

... the grass toward Marble Arch and down to Hyde Park Corner. The speaker's further words were drowned in a confused hubbub of applause, cheers, laughter, shouts of "Are we downhearted?" raucous answers in the negative, and cries of "Never mind the chairman!" and "He's a jolly ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... where the organism is perfect, excludes the possibility of oppression, by giving to each interest, or portion, or order,—where there are established classes,—the means of protecting itself, by its negative, against all measures calculated to advance the peculiar interests of others at its expense. Its effect, then, is to cause the different interests, portions, or orders,—as the case may be, to desist from attempting to adopt any measure calculated to promote ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... 'he mentions the unreasonable rise of rents in the Highlands, and says, "the gentlemen are for emptying the bag, without filling it"; for that is the phrase he uses. Why does he not tell how to fill it?' JOHNSON. 'Sir, there is no end of negative criticism. He tells what he observes, and as much as he chooses. If he tells what is not true, you may find fault with him; but, though he tells that the land is not well cultivated, he is not obliged to tell how it ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... gazed awhile along the road, as if undecided whether to take it or not. Having resolved in the negative, he moved on, and rode nearly a mile farther under the shadow of the bluffs. Again he halted, and scanned the country to his right. A bridle-path seemed to run in the direction of the town, or towards ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... after a brief glance at me, began to signal with great vigour. He meant well, and out of consideration for his feelings I restrained a desire to tell him that he was creating a beastly draught. However, I asked him if he had any brandy, and, on receiving an answer in the negative, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various

... found a challenged rate to be unreasonable, to declare what thereafter should, prima facie, be the reasonable maximum rate for the transportation in dispute. The Supreme Court finally resolved that question in the negative, so that as the law now stands the Commission simply possess the bare power to denounce a particular rate as unreasonable. While I am of the opinion that at present it would be undesirable, if it were not impracticable, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... what were the religious belief and worship of the Irish Celts while still pagans? Very few positive facts are known on the subject; but we have data enough to show what they were not; and in such cases negative proofs ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James

... oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... possible that a king or an aristocracy may soon be saturated with the objects of their desires, and may then protect the community in the enjoyment of the rest? Mr Mill answers in the negative. He proves, with great pomp, that every man desires to have the actions of every other correspondent to his will. Others can be induced to conform to our will only by motives derived from pleasure or from pain. The infliction of pain is of course direct injury; and, even if ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... her head, and from a corner of the room where the brothers' weapons stood, selected a hunting-spear. She asked if this weapon might be recognized as belonging to them, and, on their answering in the negative, said: ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... especially good for all matters relating to gold-mining.... The Sun negative rules the emerald, the musical note D sharp, and the number four. The lunar hours are a good time to deal in public commodities, and to hire ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... produce superstition. But the spread of this class of superstition in certain districts, and not in others, is indicative of an ancient origin, and it is exactly what might be expected to have been produced from totem-peoples. Unfortunately, neither the negative evidence of superstitious beliefs nor the local distribution of superstitious beliefs has ever been considered worthy of attention. But some little evidence is incidentally forthcoming, and I would submit that this may be taken as indicative of what might be obtained more fully by further ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... intimation, that the reserve under which he had placed his disposition for gallantry, since the morning of the proposed duel, had not altogether effaced the recollection of his previous conduct. He hastened to put a strong negative upon a proposal which appeared so much to embarrass her. "It is impossible for me, indeed, Sir Henry, to use Alice's services—I must walk as if blood-hounds were at ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... them certain advantages—advantages which they had without winning a decisive victory. Germany and Austria were cut off from the Western Hemisphere, and were troubled, in consequence, by shortage in food for their civilian populations to a greater or lesser degree. This was perhaps a negative benefit derived by the Allies from their naval supremacy; the affirmative benefit was that their own communications with the Western Hemisphere were maintained, enabling them not only to get food for their civilian populations, but arms and munitions for their ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... I was awake, and yet I felt too languid to open my eyes. I was little more than barely conscious of existence, and I rather enjoyed this negative condition of complete inertia. The thought floated through my mind that I was like a new-born child, that knows nothing, fears nothing, thinks nothing, but simply breathes, and I felt so tired and "gone" that I coveted an ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... gentleman who walks in my shoes—there's what I call a friendship beyond question. Well, my good fellow, if you should ever have need of discretion, understand that there are two sorts of discretion—the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the discretion of locked doors—mere impotence! Active discretion proceeds by affirmation. Suppose at the club ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... Bench which is to serve as Bench of First Instance shall investigate the matter with regard to the question whether the case is more political than legal in nature. If the Court decides the question in the negative, then the same Court shall give judgment on the dispute; but, if the Court decides the question in the affirmative, then the case shall be referred by the Court to the International Council of Conciliation. Whatever the decision of the Bench of First Instance may be, each ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim

... quiet kind hung in the corners, one a large grey photograph of a very young man in uniform, another a red chalk sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau whether the soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly in the negative; it was the prince's younger brother, Captain Stephen Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up suddenly and ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... to land and explore this picturesque island; the weather is so fine, and the waving groves of green, the little rocky bays and inlets of the island, appear so tempting; but to all my entreaties the visiting surgeon who came on board returned a decided negative. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... this part of the subject. While assuring him that he might make himself perfectly easy, and that his innocence in the matter would beyond all doubt be fully recognised, he had preferred to lead him to imagine that the result of the trial would be altogether negative; that it would be found that no case that would warrant a conviction should be made out ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... to the peril of their souls. Just how and when the saga attached itself to the historical minnesinger Tannhuser is not known. Urban IV, referred to in the last stanza, was pope from 1261 to 1265. 43: A form of the old negative particle; en nit nicht. 44: Jemands ... Ihr, 'any one but you.' 45: Bleiben. 46: Equivalent to gleichgltig. 47: The legendary old man, faithful Eckart, who warns of danger and rebukes ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... was reminding us that a year ago she was wrestling with the servant question, and Cheon coming by, we indulged in a negative anniversary. "A year ago, Cheon," we said "there was no Cheon in our lives," and Cheon pitied our former forlorn condition as only Cheon could, at the same time asking us what could be expected of one of ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... is not the negative right of being without any particular religion, just as self-government is not anarchy. It is the right of religious communities to the practice of their own duties, the enjoyment of their own constitution, and the protection of the law, which equally secures ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... portraits of his feminine ancestors that he might decide, as one without bias, whether Matocton had ever boasted a more delectable mistress. Equity—or in his fond eyes at least,—demanded a negative. Only in one of these canvases, a counterfeit of Miss Evelyn Ramsay, born a Ramsay of Blenheim, that had married the common great-great-grandfather of both the colonel and Patricia—Major Orlando Musgrave, an aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee in the Revolution,—Rudolph ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... pas desagreables." In another place, it is added, "Il paroit manquer de jugement et de resolution:" an opinion, unhappily, too correct.[58] On the question being put by Bolingbroke to the Duke of Berwick, whether the Prince was a bigot, the answer was in the negative. "Then," said Bolingbroke, "we shall have no objection to place him on the throne." This anecdote, which was told by the Chevalier himself to Brigadier Nugent, probably gave countenance to the rumour spread in England, that James was likely to renounce the Catholic ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... acquired since the age of Lucretius is enormous, and is infinitely valuable; while our power of tabulating, methodising, and extending the sphere of experimental knowledge seems to be unlimited. Only ontological deductions, whether negative or affirmative, remain pretty ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... double negative, as often used, merely intensified the negation. See "Measure for ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... Allies, those powers, and in developing those virtues, which were producing themselves by a natural process, and to which these breathings of insult must have been a deadly check and interruption. Nor would the evil be merely negative; for the interference of professed friends, acting in this manner, must have superinduced dispositions and passions, which were alien to the condition of the Portugueze;—scattered weeds which could not have been found upon the soil, if our ignorant hands ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... your respected mother is the same way of thinking. It's that that emboldens me to be so sudden. Not but what my heart has been yours and yours only all along, before the old lady so much as mentioned it." Clara would give him no assistance, not even the aid of a negative, but stood there quite passive, with her hand on the door. "Since I first had the pleasure of seeing you I have always said to myself, 'Augustus Musselboro, that is the woman for you, if you can only win her.' But there was so much against ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... requests him to take advantage of his position to open a window. The players examine the tips of their cues in sudden silence. The Colonel refuses the offer of six vacated chairs with a slightly impatient negative and inquires as to the probable length of the game. He accepts the obvious untruth that it has just ended, smiles with satisfaction, and proposes to the Adjutant a game of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various

... fully, whereas only a few can be devoted to the purpose here. "The Hina-yana Sutra is intended for beginners; the Maha-yana for those more advanced in the path of the law." The teaching in the former is negative; in the latter, positive. In the Hina-yana the perfect path is to abstain from four things—women, palaces, beautiful objects, and riches. In the Maha-yana perfect virtue is the presence of four things—the spirit of wisdom, the love of virtue, patience and firmness, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... FOEDUS: this seems opposed to pacem as a formal engagement is to a mere abstention from hostilities. — NON DUBITAVIT DICERE: when dubitare means 'to hesitate' (about a course of action), and the sentence is negative, or an interrogative sentence assuming a negative answer, the infinitive construction generally follows, as here; but the infinitive is rare in a positive sentence. When dubitare means to 'be in doubt' (as to whether certain statements are true or not), the regular construction is either quin with subj. or some ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... wished to see the present which had been put in twelve boxes. Greatly excited and enraged by a picture of myself, which represented me armed and with a cane in my hand, he asked in a loud voice whether this were intended as a threat. He was answered in the negative, but that it was a custom of persons who held high offices to send their portraits as tokens of regard and friendship when embassies were despatched. Thereupon he was appeased, and ordered the picture to be placed in a large hall, and directed his wives ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair

... singularly negative so far as its results were expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. These celebrated constitutional documents made little provision for national self-government. One king, it ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two forces, Yang and Yin, positive and negative;—or simply the Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong the Shen or gods,—all conscious beneficent forces within and without man. To the Yin or lower belong the kwei, the opposite of gods: fan means foreign; and Fan Kwei is the familiar Chinese term for white men. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... insisted on this measure. I shall return by Bordeaux, Nantes and L'Orient, to get the necessary information for finishing our commercial regulations here. Permit me, however, to ask as immediately as possible, an answer, either affirmative or negative, as Congress shall think best, and to ascribe the delay on which I venture, to my desire to do what is ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... when she had courted privation, when she had thought all longing, all impatience was subdued; but that condition seemed irrecoverably gone, and she recoiled from the remembrance of it. No prayer, no striving now, would bring back that negative peace; the battle of her life, it seemed, was not to be decided in that short and easy way,—by perfect renunciation at the very threshold of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... neighbouring village he consorted much for a time with some followers of William Law, who had not long before passed away in a village in the neighbourhood, and select passages from whose writings the Moravian minister, Francis Okely, of Northampton, had versified. These completed the negative process. "I felt ruined and helpless." Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there appeared the Crucified One; and to his spiritual intelligence there was given the Word of God. The change was that wrought on Paul by a Living Person. It converted the hypocritical ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... account also she must go. And then she must go also because of Major Grantly. Whether he was minded to come and speak to her that one other needed word, or whether he was not so minded, it would be better that she should be away from Silverbridge. If he spoke it she could only answer him by a negative; and if he were minded not to speak it, would it not be better that she should leave herself the power of thinking that his silence had been caused by her absence, and not by his ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... to which I can give no distinct information, or, at least, only information of a negative kind. I once sent out a small quantity of the muriate of potash, but my manager could perceive no effects from it whatever, and I have been informed of an instance of its having been applied to an estate in Coorg at the rate of one quarter of a pound a tree, or at the rate of between ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... is there?" said Mrs. Upjohn, looking up sharply from her embroidery. She always contradicted, if only for argument's sake, so that even her assents usually took a negative form. "It's enough if he's able to put out a fire in that Church. It doesn't take much of a man, I understand, to fill an Episcopalian pulpit." (Nobody had ever yet been able to teach the good dame the difference between Episcopal ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield

... percentage of sugar? Will future varieties of wheat and other grain produce heavier crops than our present varieties? These questions cannot be positively answered; but it is certain that we ought to be cautious in answering by a negative. In some lines of variation the limit has probably been reached. Youatt believes that the reduction of bone in some of our sheep has already been carried so far that it entails great delicacy of constitution.[595] But seeing the great improvement within recent times ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... his shoulders, "the wind is blowing in that direction, then? Prussia asked me if she would cause us any trouble by tolerating the French princes within her boundaries. I replied in the negative; and when Prussia went further and asked whether we should feel offended or not, if she paid an annual pension to the Bourbons, I permitted even that on condition that the princes remained quiet and did not carry on any intrigues. They believed, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... Hazel. 'Nobody can teach me anything about complications!Push him off, sir. Just give him a negative and do not ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... to whom she applied was German and shook his head with a forcible negative. So he, too, moved on and she stopped to think and recover some portion of that courage which ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... saw Lady Constantine walk this way,' he rejoined to Tabitha's negative. 'I am very anxious ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... warning given him by Miss Horn, and the strange influence her presence had had on his grandfather, Malcolm preferred keeping up a negative ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... begged them to go at once to the place de l'Eveche, escorted by the first company, which was on guard at the town hall. They agreed, and set off. On the way several shots were fired at them, but no one was hit. When they arrived at the square, the cebets fired a volley at them with the same negative result. Up the three principal streets which led to the palace numerous red-tufts were hurrying; the first company took possession of the ends of the streets, and being fired at returned the fire, repulsing the assailants and clearing the square, with the loss of one ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Azol's fate might be one of the things that had given her a negative attitude towards plasmoids. With Mantelish and Doctor Gess Fayle, Azol had been the third of the three big U-League boys in charge of the initial investigation on Harvest Moon. As she remembered it, it was Azol who discovered that Plasmoids ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz

... law, and deals with sins of commission. The other, which we are now discussing, is the negative, and deals with sins of omission. It does not say anything about sowing but about not sowing. It takes up the case of souls which are lying fallow. It does not say, if we sow corruption we shall reap corruption. Perhaps we would not be so unwise, so regardless of ourselves, of public opinion, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... told them what had happened. Pencroft, seizing the telescope, rapidly swept the horizon, and stopping on the indicated point, that is to say, on that which had made the almost imperceptible spot on the photographic negative...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... Johnson observes, "I put down at his [the Nabob Fyzoola Khan's] particular desire, but otherwise useless; as my orders" (which orders do not appear) "were, not to receive any palliation, but a negative or affirmative": though such palliation, as it is called by the said Johnson, might be, as it was, in the strictest conformity ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... German, as he turned a wheel which directed the negative gravity force against the surface of the ground and tilted up the nose of the Annihilator, as a skyrocket is slanted in a trough before the fuse ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood

... always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific blue-and-white flowering of the earth ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... certainly inferred from what Clarendon said this afternoon at your house, that he had pretty well made up his mind to a negative answer, and I could only say to you that which I said to Derby when he asked me to join him, that I should be very unwilling, in the present state of our Foreign relations, to belong to any Government in which the management of our ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of men, and he was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would have been an impostor.' But the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in 'La Saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject. Christ remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love, but no messenger ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... and sympathetic in town, had grown steadier and clearer in the open air. His short curly beard and yellow hair had reddened in the sun and wind. The pleasant vigor of his person was always delightful to her, something to signal to and laugh with in a world of negative people. With Fred she was never becalmed. There was always life in the air, always something coming and going, a rhythm of feeling and action,—stronger than the natural accord of youth. As she looked at him, leaning against the sunny wall, she felt a desire to be frank with ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... for the negative pole of Being—the very negation of Pure Spirit, and opposing it in every way. We shall see the part played by it in the astral colors as ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi

... of these mountains are very high. During my stay in Canada, I asked many people who have traveled much in North America whether they ever met with mountains so high that the snow never melts on them in summer, to which they always answered in the negative. They say that the snow sometimes stays on the highest, viz., on some of those between Canada and the English colonies during a part of the summer, but that it melts as soon as the great ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... "That is a very negative sort of goodness," returned May, smiling. "However, if you must go to see some one, Jamieson is better than Smithers; but why not come home and consult ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... do more than answer your question in the direct negative," was the firm reply. "I will assure you that no such ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of religion from the bishops, and had communicated with great self-possession; he scarcely spoke now, and breathed with difficulty. "Can this last long?" he asked the physician, who made a sign in the negative. He had sent for the Earl of Portland, Bentinek, his oldest and most faithful friend; when he arrived, the king took his hand and held it between both his own, upon his heart. Thus he remained for a few moments; then he yielded up his great spirit to God, on the 19th (8th) of March, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the old, solemn thought that character makes capacity for heaven. 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place?' asked the Psalmist; and a prophet put the question in a still sharper form, and by the very form of the question suggested a negative answer—'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire; who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?' Who can pass into that Presence, and stand near God, without being, like the maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into ashes by the contact of the celestial fire? 'Holiness' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... sketch, etching, chromolithograph, pasticcio, tableau, portrait, illustration, cyclorama, silhouette, carte-de-visite, minette, caricature, vignette, draught, aquarelle, thermotype, tintype, ambrotype, cabinet, heliograph, chrysotype, photogravure, oleograph, cut, negative, study, likeness, scene, landscape, view, stereogram, stereograph, panorama, aristotype, heliotype, diorama, diaphanotype, decalcomania, mosaic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... finance, originate ordinarily with the Chancellor and the Bundesrath; the procedure followed in the shaping of revenue and military measures puts the Reichstag distinctly at a disadvantage; and, at the best, the part which the chamber can play in the public policy of the Empire is negative and subsidiary. It can block legislation and discuss at length the policy of the Government, but it is not vested by the constitution with power sufficient to make it an effective instrument of control. It is within the competence of the Bundesrath, with the assent of the Emperor, to dissolve ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... reticence. Even during our walk to the police office he debated several times with Johnson, the third officer, whether he ought not to give up himself, as well as to denounce the captain. He had decided in the negative, arguing that "it would probably come to nothing; and even if there was a stink, he had plenty good friends in San Francisco." And to nothing it came; though it must have very nearly come to something, for Mr. Nares disappeared immediately from view, and was scarce less closely hidden ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 'A complete negative,' added Havill, brightening into a civil sneer. 'That is, he would be, if he were not a maker of ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... the Americans. In 1776 it was openly debated in parliament whether British officers ought to serve their sovereign against the Americans, and no less a person then General Conway leaned decidedly to the negative, and compared the case to that of French officers who were employed in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Just after the battle of Bunker Hill, the duke of Richmond declared in parliament that he "did not think that the Americans were in rebellion, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... microscopic examinations showed the absence of fungi or bacteria in the vascular system or other plant tissues. The browning in the vascular bundles appeared to be confined to the phloem tissue. All attempts to culture a pathogenic fungus or bacterium from affected tissue was negative. Portions of diseased plants with discolored vascular bundles were placed in a damp chamber and no fungus or bacterial growth developed from the vascular system. From these field and laboratory studies, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various

... can't be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in the negative. You know that that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens. God ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the last straw. The question could not be answered except in the negative, for if the ordination of the Apostles be not recorded after the Resurrection [John twenty 21-23], then there is no record of their having been ordained at all. To be put in a corner in this manner was more than a ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... that lady, but the sight of a negress I had seen before, I should have hailed with rapture in so desolate and inhospitable a place. If my pleasure at seeing Lady Harriett was great, her's seemed equally so at receiving my salutation. She asked me if I knew Lady Chester—and on my negative reply, immediately introduced me to that personage. I now found myself quite at home; my spirits rose, and I exerted every nerve to be as charming as possible. In youth, to endeavour ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... elderly, with white hair and side whiskers. The other two were young and well dressed. The girl was of our best patrician type—the type that may know little, think little, say little, and generally amount to little, and yet carry its negative qualities with so used an air of polite society as to raise them by sheer force to the dignity of positive virtues. From head to foot she was faultlessly groomed. From eye to attitude she was languidly superior—the impolitic would ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... dozen little girls in one. A romp, a chatterbox, a living question mark, a philosopher, a dreamer, a veritable angel, all these and many more change places rapidly in the child's mood. She is taken to the photographer's for her portrait, and the negative shows only a sober little face intently anxious to look pleasant. A more fortunate photographer may perhaps catch her expression of eager interest as some curious new toy is shown her. But that innocent smile of happiness that comes into her face when singing, or that far-away ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... conflict of September—only, here and there, in an unploughed field, or among the fresh brown furrows, a little mound with a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins to perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team stood ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... position of the American short story as compared with the English short story, I am more impressed than ever with the leadership maintained by American artists in this literary form. Mr. James Stephens has been criticising us for our curiously negative achievement in novel writing. He has compared the American novelist with the English novelist and found him wanting. He is compelled to deny literary distinction to the American novel, and he makes a sweeping indictment of American fiction in consequence. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... replied in the negative, qualifying it a moment afterward by a perplexed "Well, I ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as well as theoretical, including the historical and physiological aspects of gastronomy be acquired in one year. Richard Gollmer, another Apicius editor, declares that the results of this course in gastronomy were negative. We might add here that Schuch's edition of Apicius, apart from the unwarranted inclusion of the excerpta of Vinidarius is the ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... of those whose mental powers are strong, and whose bodily frame is yet stronger—a conjunction of forces often detrimental to a literary career in an age of intellectual predominance. His temper was good and bad; his pride was humility; his humility was pride; his vanity, in being negative, was of the most positive kind. He was reticent and candid, measured in speech, with an emphasis that makes trifles significant. Borrow was essentially hypochondriacal. Society he loved and hated alike; he loved ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... decisions, except in the Comitia Tributa, where the plebeian interest predominated—an assembly representing the thirty Roman tribes, according to the Servian constitution, but which, at first, had insignificant powers. The persons of the tribunes were inviolable, but their power was negative. They could not originate laws; they could insure the equitable administration of the laws, and prevent wrongs. They had a constitutional veto, of great use at the time, but which ended in a series ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... to negative the positive is the height of folly, but fools will deny anything and everything save their own wit. It does not follow that because one palmist has been at fault, all palmists are at fault. I believe ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... enjoying the negative luxury of being liberated from a ship, at the Fountain Inn, I strolled about the place. You know that I had twice visited England professionally before I was eighteen; and, on one occasion, the ship I was in anchored off this very island, though not at this precise spot. I now thought ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Oliphant, whether he would recant his opinions, he answered in the negative, saying, He would sooner forfeit ten thousand lives, than relinquish a particle of those heavenly principles he had received from the suffrages of his ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... devil which is worth all the prettiness in the world; and, what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... it must, in its attempt at self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible reconciliation—at most a compromise—so that in the last analysis it appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that is, contrary to the will of the community; and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... who truly loved each other were cast away upon a desert island, he would tire of her long before she wearied of him. The sequence of attraction and repulsion, the ultimate balance of positive and negative, are familiar electrical phenomena. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the supreme form of attraction is ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... that twining stems have a dull kind of irritability, so that they bend towards any object which they touch; but this is denied by Palm. Even before reading Mohl's interesting treatise, this view seemed to me so probable that I tested it in every way that I could, but always with a negative result. I rubbed many shoots much harder than is necessary to excite movement in any tendril or in the foot-stalk of any leaf climber, but without any effect. I then tied a light forked twig to a shoot of a Hop, a Ceropegia, Sphaerostemma, and Adhatoda, so that the fork pressed on one side alone ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... "surface," or identical susceptibility, of this ebbing and flowing stream of emotion is memory; but the emotion itself, divided into the positive and negative "pole," as we say of love and malice, is an actual projection upon the objective universe of the intrinsic "stuff" or psycho-material "substance" of which the substratum of the soul is actually composed. The other ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... her two neighbours, while the weak-eyed child, and the pale sewing girl who had helped to finish Evelina's wedding dress, took turns in minding the shop. Every morning, when her friends appeared, Ann Eliza lifted her head to ask: "Is there a letter?" and at their gentle negative sank back in silence. Mrs. Hawkins, for several days, spoke no more of her promise to consult her husband as to the best way of tracing Mrs. Hochmuller; and dread of fresh disappointment kept Ann Eliza from ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted the sitting-room; there was sacrilege ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... for the apprehension of delinquents, a sincere desire of promoting the end of public justice induces me to address a word to them on the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavor to lay down a few practical, or rather negative, rules for their use, for my ambition extends no further than to arm them with cautions against the self-defeating ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... of the West and Northwest, destroyed the hopes of the secession element in Kentucky, renewed the drooping spirits of the East Tennesseans, and demoralized the disunionists in Middle Tennessee; yet it was a negative victory so far as concerned the result on the battle-field. Rosecrans seems to have planned the battle with the idea that the enemy would continue passive, remain entirely on the defensive, and that it was necessary only to push forward our left in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... almost needless question whether Clarence had been with his brother on these occasions, there was a most decided negative. He had never gone out with Griffith except once to the theatre, and to dine at the Castlefords, and at first he had sat up for his return, 'but it led to words between the young gentlemen,' said Peter, whose confidences ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... inquire who I might be. Finally, he came up to me and said that as I bore a striking resemblance to a family of Stanburys, he was induced to inquire if I was connected with them. I was sorry to be obliged to answer in the negative. At another place they took me for a lawyer in search of a place to settle, and strongly recommended their own village. Moreover, I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman, and to-day, as I was standing ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... are equivalent to 100 of the given colour; and the sum of V, U, E gives a coefficient, which gives a general idea of the brightness. It will be seen that the first admixture of yellow diminishes the brightness of the blue. The negative values of U indicate that a mixture of V, U, and E cannot be made equivalent to the given colour. The experiments from which these results were taken had the negative values transferred to the other side of the equation. They were all made by means of the colour-top, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell

... that the pictures, or negatives, are taken on a continuous strip of celluloid film in a specially prepared camera, which takes views at the rate of sixteen per second. Then, after this long strip of negative is developed, a positive, as it is called, is made, and this is run through the projecting machine in the theatre. Thus, by means of powerful lenses, and intense lights, the miniature pictures, less than an inch in width, are ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope

... property-man or assistant director, a very realistic storm scene can be secured. Many extremely realistic rainstorm effects can also be arranged for exterior scenes, and as for lightning—sheet, forked, or any other variety—it is one of the easiest things to "get" imaginable. The mere scratching of the negative film with a pin, throughout the number of frames covering the flash of the lightning, the scratching, of course, being in the shape the lightning is to take, makes it possible to have thrillingly natural stabs of fork and chain lightning just where it is needed in any ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... way of negative argument as against the reputed differences between Biological and other methods. No such differences, I believe, really exist. The subject-matter of Biological science is different from that of other sciences, but the methods of all ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... am of the difficulty of disproving a negative, and aware as I must be of the weighty grounds there are for opposing my belief, it still seems to me that the Homeric question is one that is reserved for a higher criticism than it has often obtained. We are ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... seemed that the answer would be negative, for he disappeared behind some dense shrubbery on the plain below and seemed to be on the point of passing the hill. But just at the edge of the shrubbery Mustard suddenly swerved and came directly toward ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... the Arabic philosophers into two schools. Maimonides naturally espoused the view permitting the most exalted conception of God, that is, the conception of God free from human attributes. He recognizes none but negative attributes; in other words, he defines God by means of negations only. For instance, asserting that the Supreme Being is omniscient or omnipotent, is not investing Him with a positive attribute, it is ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... which at times was very like imbecility. His income allowed him to do no good to the parish, whether in work, trade, or charity; and thus he had no moral weight with the parishioners beyond the example of his sinless life, and such negative effect as might be produced by his slumberous exhortations. Therefore his parishioners troubled him very little; and but for the influence which, in hours of Montfydget activity, Mrs. Leslie exercised ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... accordance with the dictates of their collective wisdom. [535:2] The bishop of after-times rather resembled a despotic sovereign in the midst of his counsellors. He might ask the advice of the presbyters, and condescend to defer to their recommendations; but he could also negative their united resolutions, and cause the refractory quickly to feel ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... a negative response from the first. 'Though they say she's a rosy-cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough,' she added; and as the milkmaid spoke she turned her face so that she could glance past her cow's tail to the other side of the barton, where a thin, fading ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... the paths through which learning and genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... Lady Audley's departure, the two young men (one of whom was disabled by that heart wound which he bore so quietly, from really taking pleasure in anything, and the other of whom looked upon almost all pleasure as a negative kind of trouble) began to grow weary of the shade of the willows overhanging the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... Ireland—a haughty boast, not quite so easily accomplished. His speech was repeated to the King of Leinster, who inquired "if the king, in his great threatening, had added, 'if it so please God'?" The reporter answered in the negative. "Then," said he, "seeing this king putteth his trust only in man, and not in God, I fear not his coming." When Dermod Mac Murrough was driven in disgrace from Ireland, he fled at once to Bristol. There he learned that Henry was still ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... that it "could legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual legislation," with power "to negative all laws passed by the several States contravening in the opinion of the national legislature the ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... and sometimes turtle, being all they procured. I inquired if they knew of any rivers or openings leading far inland, if they made charts of what they saw, or used any charts? To all which Pobassoo answered in the negative. There was a river at Timor, into which the ship could go; and he informed me of two turtle islands, one of them not far to the north-west of our situation in the road; the other would be seen from the mast head as we ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... being blown down by the hurricane, small fungi or other minute vegetation spring up in its rifts; every social shock of the day is promptly scened and 'tagged' at the minor theatres; and shall this war escape its novels? Mr. WOOD votes in the negative, and supplies us with a somewhat sensational yet not badly manufactured article, which, like the melo-dramas referred to, will be received with delight by a certain line of patrons, and, we presume, be also relished. It is a first-rate specimen of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... congratulating himself on the picture he was about to take of four Chinese women in their native costumes, and was just going to make the exposure, when four Chinamen who were watching him deliberately stepped in front of the camera, completely spoiling the negative. The younger generation, and especially the girls, will occasionally pose for you, and a truly picturesque group they make in their queer mannish dress of bright colors, as they laugh and chatter in their ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson

... however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he found himself practically alone at Fawns with his young friend; Amerigo and Maggie having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... alone, both red-faced, flurried, shuffling along the sidewalks of Bourges. That was enough. For me she will always wear that look, that frock, that clumsy gait. Recollections, my good uncle, are not unlike instantaneous photographs; and this one is a distinct negative ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... avowed fact, that the publishers of the day will purchase the copyrights of only such works as "the libraries will take;" which libraries, besotted by the mystic charm of three volumes, immutable as the sacred triad of the Graces or Destinies, would negative without a division such a work as the "Vicar of Wakefield" were it now to undergo probation. "Robinson Crusoe" or "Paul and Virginia" would be returned unread to their authors, with a civil note of "extremely sorry to decline," &c. "The Man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... was none too proud to take the food in any way it might be offered, and when my humble "Orcheh, orcheh tchuen mangbo terokchi" ("Please give me some more") met with the disapproval of the Lamas, and brought out the everlasting negative, "Middu, middu," I was still too hungry to waste any of the precious food: so the Tibetans revolved the wooden bowl round and round my mouth, and I licked it as clean as if ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... that he owed him any gratitude. The balance of favors was on the other side. He had done more for Jack than Jack for him. He asked himself if he wanted to go with Jack Morgan on this journey, and he answered his own question in the negative. It was better that he should leave him now forever. With him he could only look forward to a ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger

... of governing still remaining in the hands of the king, he will have a negative over the whole legislation of this continent. And as he hath shewn himself such an inveterate enemy to liberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power; is he, or is he not, a proper man to say to these colonies, "YOU SHALL ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine

... rejection of ideas is necessary. But there are many works that have been tried for ages and found undoubtedly excellent. There are many men, also, who are acknowledged authorities in their specialties. In the case of such books and men, where little if any negative criticism is to be expected, cannot the student set out merely to enjoy the merits and not bother about the defects? Can he not, therefore, abandon the critical attitude and accept ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... all this calling a man a muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man who throws such words as these knows in his heart that he is also facing a wall." This remark seems to me both dignified and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was some justice in the negative responses to his later work. For what characterized it was not so much "groping" as the imitation of "groping," the self-caricature of a writer who feels driven back upon an earlier self that is, alas, no ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... view to a final return to it. Let me know soon, in a post or two, if possible, as well as the circuit you mean to go on.... Now as I have gone on with this scheme, I find myself grow warm on it, so do not throw cold water upon it by a negative. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... us as it is to answer the majority of our invitations in either the affirmative or negative, there are degrees of necessity even here, for, sin as we may in all other particulars, there is an unwritten code like unto the laws of the Medes and Persians which declareth that the invitations to a dinner are not to be lightly set aside. First, an invitation to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... expressed during this time referred to a few topics only, namely, marriage, wealth, and State prison. The remarkable fact was that all the ideas about marriage and wealth were spoken of, often immediately, again after some interval, now in the positive and again in the negative sense. Thus she said she was "Mrs. S.," again "You kept me from marrying Mattie S.," or "I am not supposed to be here—I am a married person," but also "You kept me from getting married." Or, "Take off that black dress, I am a bride," again "You have taken my bridal crown off my ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... askit for the pipes?" old Donald whispered mysteriously; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, he looked reproachfully at the speaker. "She's waiting and retty," he would say; "and a good lilt on ta pipes would do her all ta petter ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... and calculations, they could at least whisper that Mr. Montague was very cunning, that it was not easy to track him, but that it might be taken for granted that for whatever he did he had some sinister motive, and that the safest course was to negative whatever he proposed. Though that House of Commons was economical even to a vice, the majority preferred paying high interest to paying low interest, solely because the plan for raising money at low interest had been framed by him. In a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... not offer that reasonable chance of reconciliation with the mass of the Irish people which might be a compensation for a repeal of the Union, and is as much opposed to the interests of Great Britain as would be the national independence of Ireland. This conclusion is a purely negative one, but it is, as far as English statesmen are concerned, the reductio ad impossibile of the case in favour of Home Rule in so far as Home Rule takes the form ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... draught, draft; pencil &c. drawing, water color drawing, etching, charcoal, pen-and-ink; sketch, outline, study. photograph, color photograph, black-and-white photograph, holograph, heliograph; daguerreotype, talbotype[obs3], calotype[obs3], heliotype[obs3]; negative, positive; print, glossy print, matte print; enlargement, reduction, life-size print; instant photo, Polaroid photo. technicolor, Kodachrome, Ektachrome; Polaroid. portrait &c. (representation) 554; whole length, full length, half length; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... danger for him in her presence? If he asked himself this question nowadays, he was able to answer boldly in the negative. There might have been a time of peril, just one perilous interval when he was in some danger of stumbling; but he had pulled himself up in time, with an admirable discretion, he thought, and now felt as bold as a lion. After that morning with Lady Geraldine ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... the social system and attempt to put it right. This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,—what did they do? Menaced by this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of modernity, they fled, or drowned ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... plants have risen almost overnight, and on every hand there are miracles of rapid construction. The business is overshadowing all other activities. A leading merchant of Detroit asked a contractor the other day if he could do some work for him. On receiving a negative reply, he asked the reason, whereupon the man said: "These automobile people keep me so busy that I can't do anything else. I have a year's work ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... translated "noble" in Noble Path, Noble Truth, is ariya, which also means Aryan.[5] The negative, un-Aryan, is used of each of the two low aims. It is possible that this rendering should have been introduced into the translation; but the ethical meaning, though still associated with the tribal meaning, had probably already become predominant in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... labelled her as the Scarlet Woman, the Martyred Saint, the Jolly Bohemian, or the Bold Adventuress, my task would have been easy. But I had an uncomfortable feeling that Lola Brandt was not to be classified in so simple a fashion. I took refuge in a negative. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... my aunt Hervey, to supplicate her interest in my behalf, for my clothes, books, and money; signifying to her, 'That, if I may be restored to the favour of my family, and allowed a negative only, as to any man who may be proposed to me, and be used like a daughter, a niece, and a sister, I will stand by my offer to live single, and submit, as I ought, to a negative from my father.' Intimating, nevertheless, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... the Lady of the Mantle, I will lay a wager that the sun so bedazzled thine eyes on that memorable morning, that everything thou didst look upon seemed green; and notwithstanding James Wilkinson's experience in the Fusileers, as well as his negative whistle, I will venture to hold a crown that she is but a what-shall-call-'um after all. Let not even the gold persuade you to the contrary. She may make a shift to cause you to disgorge that, and (immense spoil!) a session's fees to boot, if you look not all the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... other, with a negative shake of his head. "I myself haf also read ze signs pret well, but zey do not tell vat it ees zey haf do to cage us. Zere, you see ze smoke ett haf done. I zink zey must be put ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson

... offered to teach you," said Hardy, "and you replied in the negative so decidedly that I did not like to refer ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary

... "it will be impossible for me to make a good negative of you unless you quit being ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey

... wonderfully knowing creatures, who, with their masters, look upon every visitor, as in duty bound, to engage their services. To say them nay, and to suggest that your legs are quite capable of bearing you to the town, is only provocative of an incredulous smile, or a negative shake of the head. Never was seen such patience and importunity as that displayed by boy and beast. The most striking thing about them is their names—shared in common—which furnish one with a running commentary on current events in Europe. For example, there were the "Prince of Wales" ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... existence. Eleventhly, that wisdom, justice, goodness, &c. are qualities peculiar to matter combined and modified, as it is found in some beings of the human species; that the idea of perfection is an abstract, negative, metaphysical idea, or mode of considering objects, which supposes nothing real to be exterior to itself. Twelfthly, that matter is the principle of motion, which it contains within itself: since ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... was but negative evidence. The real solution of the problem was first positively suggested by the discovery of vaults in place, in the drains and water channels, and in the city gates. The bas-reliefs in which towns or fortresses are represented ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... of the 2nd line is a negative interrogative, implying,—'I hope the Kurus did not ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... possessors of a great historic name or should occupy in their own country a position out of the reach of ordinary mortals. This careful exclusion of all originality and diversity has, by degrees, communicated to the club a complexion somewhat negative and colorless, but at the same time, it must be admitted, of the most perfect distinction. The most influential members, although generally very wealthy, live in Paris with but few of the external signs of luxury, and devote their incomes to home comforts and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... circumstances in which he found himself, and also that there was no exceptional fact or excuse present which took the case out of the general rule. It is an averment of a conclusion of law which is permitted to abridge the facts (positive and negative) ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... mainly owing to the centrifugal action of the screw, which interposes a film or wedge of water between the screw itself and the water on which the screw reacts. This negative slip, as it is called, chiefly occurs when the pitch of the screw is less than its diameter, and when, consequently, the velocity of rotation is greater than if a coarser pitch had been employed. There is, moreover, in all vessels passing through the water ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... from the invisible blent these two hitherto widely separated souls into one, even as the positive electricity leaps through the spaces to find the negative, and when met, dissolves the separateness into a harmonious oneness which can never be sundered. The unsophisticated Indian maiden went her way, thrilling with the thought that her heart is in his bosom, and his in hers, useless one without ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... she called it, "right and tight;" for abroad the only system in vogue was one of fluctuation and uncertainty. Mr. Rossitur's Irishman, Donohan, staid his year out, doing as little good, and as much, at least, negative harm, as he well could; and then went, leaving them a good deal poorer than he found them. Dr. Gregory's generosity had added to Mr. Rossitur's own small stock of ready money, giving him the means to make some needed outlays on the farm. But the outlay, ill-applied, had been greater ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... head with a vehement negative, beckoned Cecily impatiently, and said earnestly, 'Is it the contagion? Is she sick? ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was eager to meet Gade, and an opportunity soon occurred. Gade expressed a willingness to look at some of his compositions, and asked if he had anything to show him. Edward modestly answered in the negative. "Go home and write a symphony," was the retort. This the young composer started obediently to do, but the work was never finished in this form. It became later Two Symphonic Pieces ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... cross over to a mill and exchange her corn for meal. This, of course, I had to reluctantly deny, however gallantly disposed I might otherwise have been. The lass asked me, with some feeling of scorn, "Is the boat yours?" to which I was forced to answer in the negative. She protested that she would not go back and get a permit or pass from anyone on earth; that the boat was not mine, and she had as much right to its use as anyone, and that no one should prevent her from getting ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... to direct the course of their caravans across the desert. For this purpose a figure, placed in a waggon which led the caravan, was so constructed that the arm and hand moved with perfect freedom, the magnetic needle being attached to it; the hand, however, pointed to the south, the negative end being fixed in it. The Chinese also used a needle which was freely suspended in the air, attached to a silken thread, and by this means they were able to determine the amount of the western variation of the needle. It is possible that both the Chinese and Arabs discovered the magnetic ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... my shop, running yet if it hasn't been frightened by the airship smash," replied the lad, somewhat proudly. "It's an oxide of nickel battery, with steel and oxide of iron negative electrodes." ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... 'Eternal Fire,' or 'Eternal Punishment,' it seems to me, may mean simply, that long continued suffering, both negative and positive, which wilful imperfection brings. It does not seem to me that the time can ever come when the Everlasting Father will abandon His child that He has created. No; it is infinitely less likely that He would do this than an earthly parent. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... of Ireland,' he wrote, 'are willing to give a direct negative power to his Majesty's Government with respect to the nomination of their titular bishoprics, in such manner that when they have among themselves resolved who is the fittest person for the vacant see, they will transmit his name to his Majesty's Ministers; and if the latter should object to that ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... light for snapshots," she went on coolly. "I went out with my kodak and was lucky enough to get a good negative. I have brought you up a proof. I thought you would be ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... otherwise would. The matrons, instead of their tongues, had other instruments to convey their ideas: each of them had three quizzes, one quiz pendent from the string that sewed up her mouth, and another quiz in either hand. When she wished to express her negative, she darted and recoiled the quizzes in her right and left hand; and when she desired to express her affirmative, she, nodding, made the quiz pendent from her mouth flow down and recoil again. The trial proceeded in this manner for a long time, to the admiration of the whole empire, when at length ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... "I mean, between Honor and Jimsy?" He was visibly expecting a negative answer. "I know that Mrs. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... a loud chuckle, and a full display of his magnificent teeth, which Frank understood to signify a decided negative. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... silent. Her husband thought she was wavering in her decision, but on that point he was entirely mistaken. She was doing what Nehemiah did when he "prayed to the God of heaven" between the King's question and his answer. Well she knew that to reply in the negative might lead to reproach, prison, torture, even death. Yet that was the path of God's commandments, and no flowery By-path Meadow must tempt her to stray from it. In her heart she said to ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt









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