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More "Speculative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Arnault. He was a man of the world, reported wealthy, established in a large but not very conservative business. He had the name of being a little fast and speculative, but she was accustomed to that style of man. He was an open suitor who would take no rebuff, and had laughingly told her so. After his refusal, instead of going away in despondency or in a half-tragic mood, he had good-naturedly declared his intentions, and spent the remainder of the evening ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... "Steed"—Jefferson rode on horseback to the Capitol to take his oath of office as President. Arrived there he dismounted and fastened his steed to an elm-tree, since known as Jefferson's tree. He did this to signalise his disapprobation of royalty, and his preference for democratic equality. "Speculative" were the celebrated "Madison Papers." "Doctrine"—the Monroe doctrine declared that no foreign power should acquire additional dominion in America. "Unlucky" was correctly applied to John Quincy Adams's administration. See Barnes's U. S. His., p. 175. "Unwhipped"—Jackson always came ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... of a very uncommon order; her habits of thought and reading were profoundly speculative; she delighted in metaphysical subjects of the greatest difficulty, and abstract questions of the most laborious solution. On such subjects she incessantly exercised her remarkably keen powers of analysis and investigation, and no doubt cultivated and strengthened her peculiar ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... happens, that the desire of preserving from reproach even the name that we leave behind us, or of procuring it honour, is one of the most powerful principles of action, among the inhabitants of the most speculative and enlightened nations. Posthumous reputation, upon every principle, must be acknowledged to have no influence upon the dead; yet the desire or obtaining and securing it, no force of reason, no habits of thinking can subdue, except in those ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... at last shouted by a successful winner, loto is abandoned, and cards, in which the gentlemen take the lead, are substituted. Don Benigno proposes the exciting and speculative game of monte, and all the ready cash of the company is forthwith exhibited on the table. Long after the children and ladies have retired, the males of our party continue to gamble ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... of the subject for a more fitting occasion, I would merely mention now that these questions constitute, in the opinion of our most eminent authorities, the two great standing enigmas of meteorology. Indeed it was the interest manifested in them by Sir John Herschel, in a letter of singular speculative power, addressed to myself, that caused me to enter upon the consideration of these questions ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... early hour, retired to bed, Vane and Du——-e fell into speculative conversation upon the nature of man. Vane's philosophy was of a quiet and passive scepticism; the physician dared more boldly, and rushed from doubt to negation. The attention of Trevylyan, as he sat apart and musing, was arrested in despite of himself. He listened to ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... must be defined. Some years before he had been known as a timber-cruiser—that is to say, a man who "locates," during his wanderings through forests primeval, belts of timber which will be likely to allure the speculative lumberman. Barker, therefore, had discovered the inlet which bore his name, and in consideration of his services, and with a due sense of his physical and mental qualifications, he had been appointed boss of the camp by the real owners—a ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... was singularly free from any turn for speculative thought. He intended to bring Bates to see the dead in the morning, and that would decide the matter. He saw no sense in debating a question ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... watch the effect of a shot, and the accuracy of their return fire does not betray much nervousness. We are inclined to believe, however, that the Boer losses from artillery fire have been greater than ours, partly because their shots have been widely distributed in a speculative way with no particular object in view, while ours have been aimed directly at the enemy's batteries, or at sangars, to which their gun-crews retire between the rounds; and partly, if not mainly, because our naval guns fire common ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... whatever relations hold between the elements of one assemblage must also hold between the corresponding elements of any assemblage in one-to-one correspondence with it. This false assumption is the basis of the so-called "proof by analogy" so much in vogue among speculative theorists. When it appears that certain relations existing between the points of a given point-row do not necessitate the same relations between the corresponding elements of another in one-to-one correspondence with it, we ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... at last have established some modus vivendi favourable to individual freedom, or whether despotism under some of its various forms would have been sanctioned by the acquiescence of its subjects, are matters of uncertain speculation. A conclusion which, though speculative, is far less uncertain is, that Ireland if left absolutely to herself would have arrived like every other country at some lasting settlement of her difficulties. To the establishment of such a reign of order the British ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... happiness. This notion, so much at variance with the goodness and mercy of God, who has not confined happiness to any particular class, she herself rejected; but, at the same time, the modest estimate which she formed of her own capacity to reason upon or analyze all speculative opinions, led her to suppose that she might be wrong, and her father right, in the inferences which they respectively drew. Perhaps she thought her reluctance to see this individual case through his medium, arose from some peculiar idiosyncrasy of intellect ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... friends never arrived at that close friendship which had been forming between Coleridge and Lamb ever since their school-days at Christ's Hospital. But they interchanged ideas on poetical and humorous topics, and did not perplex themselves with anything speculative or transcendental. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid compromises of the old Gnostics. "Gnosticism," says Uhlhorn, "combined Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy, thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object of displaying the world's development. From a pantheistic First Cause, Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of aeons—beings of Light. The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material world holds light in captivity. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Corbett is a philanthropist of the most practical kind. He does not distribute his means like milk spilled upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither does he take cognisance of merely speculative benevolence. Everything to which he has put his hand has prospered, and he has thus laid the foundations of a good name, which is better than all his riches—a name which the working men of his native city will be slow to forget. It is with the establishment of the Great Western Cooking Depot ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... manuscript has found such a publisher, and am sure that the issue of the story will honor the Publication Society. In the development of the book, I believe that the humane cause has stood above any speculative thought or interest. The book comes because it is called for; the times demand it. I think that the publishers have a right to ask for a little unselfish service on the part of the public in helping to give it a circulation commensurate with ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... San Francisco,—discharged sailors, broken-down miners, helpless newcomers, unemployed professional men, and ruined traders,—to assist in ploughing and planting certain broad leagues of rich alluvial soil for a speculative Joint Stock Company, at a weekly wage that would have made an European peasant independent for half a year. Yet there was no enthusiasm in their labor, although it was seldom marked by absolute laziness or evasion, and was more often hindered by ill-regulated "spurts" and excessive ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... time there was in that market-town one of those adventurous, speculative men, who are the more dangerous impostors because imposed upon by their own sanguine chimeras, who have a plausibility in their calculations, an earnestness in their arguments, which account for the dupes ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... decision taken, in the necessary interviews. They came of course - the interviews - and I explained what I was going to do at huge length, and stuck to my guns. I am glad to say the natives, with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice highly approved the step after reflection. Meanwhile off went S. and I with the three CORPORA DELICTI; and a good job I went! Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up; but we got them down ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time an arrival causes a great deal of interest in this out-of-the-way place; but an arrival of this sort—for the canoe was evidently an express—threw us into a fever of excitement, which was greatly increased when we found that it contained dispatches from headquarters; and many speculative remarks passed among us as we hurried up to our hall, there to wait in anxious expectation for a letter or an order to appear instanter before Mr Grave. Our patience was severely tried, however, and we began to think there ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... rationalistic and scientific—century the world has yet passed through. We can imagine him asking whether, in all the past history of the human race, so great a zeal for poetry, romantic, lyrical-descriptive, speculative, has ever been manifested at once in such force and width in England, Germany, France, America. And we can fancy him completely satisfied with that single phenomenon. We can also imagine him setting opinion against opinion, outweighing Macaulay with the greater name of Wordsworth ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... themselves into heaven, by saying, that they "have prophesied in his name," Matth. vii. 22. There is "a knowledge that puffeth up," 1 Cor. xiii. 2. Some there are whose knowledge seemeth to be operative and practical, and not merely speculative. Some may "escape the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," and yet again become entangled therein and overcome; so that "their latter end is worse than the beginning;" see 2 Peter ii. 20, 21, 22. Knowledge, I grant, is good, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... enormous speculative purchases are only subservient to the spirit of the times. If they are the purveyors, they are also the panders of public taste; and their vaunted patronage only extends to popular subjects; while their urgent demands are sure to produce hasty manufactures. A precious work on a recondite ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... liked it, but it did not seem to take as I had expected. Have been much meditating this week on many matters, Church especially: find myself unsettled, I fear, but I think I have the remedy, which is to keep my attention fixed rather on practical than on speculative points. We cannot agree on the one; on the other we may, and good men do." March 2, 1845: "I confess that the Romanising tendencies so openly avowed in the Church of England alarm me. The question occurs, Is not this a necessary, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... credits of everyday transactions, the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate dealings. Our banking laws must mobilize reserves; must not permit the concentration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary resources of the country or their use for speculative purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruitful uses.—From the President's Address to ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... Lord and Lady Holland to Spain and Portugal, and on his return he was sent by his father to Edinburgh University, the Duke having little confidence in the education then procurable at either Oxford or Cambridge. At Edinburgh he took part in the proceedings of the Speculative Society, read essays to them and debated; and he left the University still tending more towards literature than politics. There is no doubt that Edinburgh helped to form him. His mind was one naturally open ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... the addition of the name of John Blake to the roll of British Chivalry, a book on Mars came their way—it was one by a speculative astronomer which suggests that the red planet is the home of reasoning beings akin to humanity. Isobel read it and was not impressed. Indeed, in the vigorous language of youth, she opined that ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... of his pipe into a metal tray, refilled it, lighted it, and then puffed meditatively, gazing at Hugh with kind but speculative eyes. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... book called "Speculative and Moral Theology." In vol. 3, tract 23, disputation 8, sec. 5, no. 63, p. 448, are found the following sentences: "Licet procurare abortum, ne puella infametur." That doctrine is admitted, "to evade personal disgrace, and to conceal the infamy of Monks and Nuns." ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... that may be logic, old Dubersome, but it ain't sense, don't extremes meet? Now these Bluenoses have no motion in 'em, no enterprise, no spirit, and if any critter shows any symptoms of activity, they say he is a man of no judgment, he's speculative, he's a schemer, in short he's mad. They vegitate like a lettuce plant in sarse garden, they grow tall and, spindlin', run to seed right off, grow as bitter as ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the law: at once like and unlike the old Tannaitic Midrash; like in that they deal with difficulties in the literal text of the Bible; unlike in that the reply of Philo is Agadic more usually than Halakic, speculative rather than practical. In these books,[90] as has been pointed out, there are numerous interpretations which Philo shares with the Palestinian schools. A few specimens taken from the first book will illustrate Philo's plan, but it should be mentioned ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... To know which way he would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable mind—that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading," the Sun assured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... through the canvas sides of the tent, and overpowering the feeble glimmer of a small lamp which hung suspended from the pole. I remained motionless for some little time after I had opened my eyes, trying to remember where I was, and what had happened, and then wondering in a vague speculative sort of way who and what was the strange being who appeared to govern the reckless band of outlaws into whose hands I had fallen. I thought at first that I was alone in the tent, but a restless movement on ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... the curious and speculative of the other sex in this city, just now, is the grand exposition of Lincoln dresses at the office of Mr. Brady, on Broadway, a few doors south of Houston street. The publicity given to the articles on exhibition and for sale has excited the public curiosity, and hundreds of people, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... self, one should have nothing to' say of one's self. It is shameful, too, to send such a scrap by the post. I think I shall reserve it till Tuesday. If -I have then nothing to add, as is probable, you must content yourself with my good intentions, as you, I hope, will with this speculative campaign. Pray, for the future, remain at home and build bridges: I wish you were here to expedite ours to Richmond, which they tell me Will not be passable these two years. I have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Pantheism is "that speculative system which by absolutely identifying the Subject and Object of thought, reduces all existence, mental and material, to phenomenal modifications of one eternal, self-existent Substance which is called by the name of ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Vandeford, aware that Mrs. Farraday's keen eyes of the world were fixed upon him in a speculative way. "The rehearsals will begin at eleven on Monday, and you can be ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... not his office to remodel them; his role was simply to endure with patience the vagaries of an order of human beings, who after all, offered an interesting study to a man of speculative habit, apart from their usefulness as propagators ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... 2nd March 1869 he was proposed by George Melville, Esq., Advocate, as a member of the Speculative Society, and we know from Memories and Portraits how much he appreciated his membership of that Society, which has in its day included in the roll, on which his name stood No. 992, most of the men whose names are honoured in Scotland's capital, and many of whom ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... that in that world of speculative opinions and questionings, I have met the kindred spirits of many of my fellow beings, clad in the ideal personality with which my thought invests people, at the cross of those four great roads towards which, from all corners of the earth, the spirits of mankind come trooping. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... people; of purpose; of pluck; of promptness in meeting business engagements; of system. Late hours; living beyond one's income; leaving too much to one's employees; neglect of details; no inborn love for one's calling; over-confidence in the stability of existing conditions; procrastination; speculative mania; selfishness; self-indulgence in small vices; studying ease rather than vigilance; social demoralization; thoughtless marriages; trusting one's work to others; undesirable location; unwillingness to pay the price of success; unwillingness to bear early privations; waste; ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... though they were socially to the lowest level. Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... to consider inflammation at more length. The theory of inflammation has passed through various stages. At first heat was considered as its essential and dominant feature, then redness, then exudative swelling; while the speculative neuropathologists consider pain the fons et origo of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... have solemnly determined, in a full parliamentary convention representing the whole society. The reasons upon which they decided may be found at large in the parliamentary proceedings of the times; and may be matter of instructive amusement for us to contemplate, as a speculative point of history. But care must be taken not to carry this enquiry farther, than merely for instruction or amusement. The idea, that the consciences of posterity were concerned in the rectitude of their ancestors' decisions, gave ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... him wish he were back in America. His metaphysical studies determined the direction which his observation of life should take. He became a remarkable anatomist of the constitution of human nature in the abstract, viewing the motives of men's actions from a speculative plane. He excels in sharp etchings which bring the outline of a character into bold prominence. He is happy in defining isolated traits and in throwing a new light on much used words. "Cleverness," he writes, "is a certain knack or aptitude at doing certain things, which depend more ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... concern, from which I expected to derive a liberal interest for the money I had advanced, which was about eight thousand pounds, and at the same time afford a handsome income for my young friend. But such is the uncertainty and precarious state of all speculative concerns of this nature, and such the inconstancy of friendship, that, instead of ever receiving one shilling from this concern, I found it still continue to be a drain upon my purse. Bills were coming due, I was told, and they must ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... without being consecrated, and the first who has been consecrated in these islands." Having spent thirty years in that country, he has much knowledge of it and of its moral and social conditions, and much experience in ecclesiastical government. "He was very learned in theology, whether speculative or practical, moral or scholastic; and very expert in the despatch of business." He is aided in his duties by Fray Raymundo Berart, very learned in canon and civil law, who has left great opportunities of advancement in Espana "to come to this poor province, to serve in the ministry of souls—as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... conversation engaged him deeply. Vivaldi's familiarity with French speculative literature, and with its sources in the experiential philosophy of the English school, gave Odo his first clear conception of the origin and tendency of the new movement. This coordination of scattered ideas was aided by his readings in the Encyclopaedia, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the negations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip," as inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his speculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father's had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of it are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sir, quite; took with the public, especially the essay about the non-existence of anything. I don't exactly agree with you, though; I have my own peculiar ideas about matter—as you know, of course, from the book I have published. Nevertheless, a very pretty piece of speculative philosophy—no such thing as matter—impossible that there should be—ex nihilo—what is the Greek? I have ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... in fact, God was not Himself everything to her; and if, having loved Him when He had given her many things, she was not now ready to love Him, though she received nothing from Him. She, however, replying that such language was more speculative than practical, and easier to speak than to carry into effect, he wound up by saying, with St. Augustine: Too avaricious is that heart to which God does not suffice. "Assuredly, he who is not satisfied with God is covetous indeed." This word covetous produced a powerful effect upon the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... must be explained by it. My thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... demonstrating the doctrine of the Trinity as the source of all other knowledge. The curious question as to the constitution of the body of Jesus occupies only a subordinate place. The monk, as shown in the whole proceedings, was evidently more of a speculative dreamer than a heretic—a man fond of disputation about matters beyond his comprehension. It is mentioned by the three youthful zealots, in the récit bearing their signature, that as they were about to part with him, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... defect of his history. Important and novel as are Hume's doctrines, his method was also deductive, and, like Adam Smith, he rests little on experience. After these two, Reid was the most eminent among the purely speculative thinkers of Scotland, but he stands far below them both. To Hume the spirit of inquiry and scepticism is essential; to Reid it is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... at the scientific, speculative ethic, and the actual practice of our remote ancestry (for to that end is the student of mythology and folk-lore aiming) is not therefore easy. Nor is the record perfect, though it is not so poor in most cases as was once believed. The Brothers ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... way he derived a certain speculative excitement from this practice. If the doorway was empty he regarded himself as a winner, if some one stood sheltered in the deep recess which is a feature of the old Georgian houses in this historic thoroughfare, he would lose to the extent ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... his heart, till reason at length was stifled. When Remonencq computed that the commission paid by himself and Elie Magus amounted to about forty thousand francs, he determined to have La Cibot for his legitimate spouse, and his thoughts turned from a misdemeanor to a crime. A romantic purely speculative dream, persistently followed through a tobacco-smoker's long musings as he lounged in the doorway, had brought him to the point of wishing that the little tailor were dead. At a stroke he beheld his capital trebled; and then he thought of La Cibot. What a good saleswoman she would be! ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... made the attempt in his Metaphysics of Ethics to overcome the speculative difficulty in question, it is evident that he is not satisfied with his own solution of it, since he has repeatedly declared, that the practical reason furnishes the only ground on which it can be surmounted. "This view of Kant," says Knapp, "implying that freedom, while it ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and contradictions, he compares the scores of constitutions that have been engulfed in the convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England, and points out that the latter has only been very slowly changed part by part, under the influence of immediate necessities and never of speculative reasoning. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... under his style. The Northern Review, after publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not Burton's Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred dollars each for five essays. He wrote back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay. He remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now clamoring for ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... her mouth, red lips about very white teeth, was smiling softly, confidently; and yet that the brown-flecked grey of her eyes was as unsmiling, as gravely speculative as his own eyes were. He saw that her skin was a golden brown from life in the open outdoors, that she had upon the heels of her boots a pair of tiny, sharp rowelled spurs, that a riding quirt hung from her right wrist by its rawhide thong, that her cheeks were a little ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three degrees of saintship. Characteristics of it are the preponderance of active moral asceticism, and the absence of speculative mysticism and quietism." E. H., pp. 151-2, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... contrariwise to big business practices. They took virtually their first step in "trust-busting" when they tried to break up the Northern Securities Company, which had been concocted to handle the celebrated Northern Pacific case. Labor troubles supervened. Many great speculative stock campaigns collapsed. The banks yielded to the imperative need to reduce credits. The year 1902 had almost experienced a widespread panic: but the marshaling of great private resources had restored confidence temporarily, and ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... darkened her sky; but she would not see the gathering gloom; shut her eyes resolutely to the coming storm. As the cool October wind stirred the leaves at her feet, and the scarlet and gold cloud-flakes faded in the west, she rose and walked slowly homeward. She was too deeply pondering her speculative doubts to notice Dr. Hartwell's buggy whirling along the street; did not see his head extended, and his cold, searching glance; and of course he believed the blindness intentional and credited it to pique or anger. On reaching home she endeavored by singing a favorite hymn to divert the current ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... twos till at length all the other stalls were filled, everybody instinctively avoiding the stall where a tablecloth gleamed its white warning. When some men, having eaten, began smoking their clays, Lady Thiselton's sharp ear detected some speculative remarks about herself and Morgan, tinged with facetiousness and gore. She thereupon suggested she was pining for something mystic and spiritualistic, being quite tired of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... these rejoicings over the new reign, and of speculative dreams of universal freedom, there was wafted across the Atlantic news of a handful of patriots arrayed against the tyranny of the British Crown. Here were the theories of the new philosophy translated into the reality of actual experience. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Mrs. Gray was talking about to Professor Morton, Miss Wilder and our fairy godfather?" she remarked in a speculative tone to Miriam as they prepared for sleep late that night. "Fairy godfather is a good name for Mr. Redfield, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... We know who our neighbors are to be, the sort of houses and other improvements that will affect the sightliness and value of our own property, and the surroundings that should in some degree govern the style of our abode. There is little of the speculative in such a choice, but we shall have to pay ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... may fairly be said, is very speculative, but the fact remains that celestial bodies appear to be the only places in which the complex elements may be in actual process of formation from their known source—hydrogen. At least we may see what a vast variety of physical conditions these cosmic crucibles afford. At one end of ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... minds, one simple and practical, the other sensitive and speculative, did not move in the same atmosphere, and could not understand one another. Ambrose was in the condition of excitement and bewilderment produced by the first stirrings of the Reformation upon enthusiastic minds. He had studied the Vulgate, made out something ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... all this, and if the cold hearts of speculative men could be warmed and softened into an unfolding life, he would not constantly do battle with the wrong; but truth is mightier than error. God's love must at last be felt, and when the delay is over, how many hearts, ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... swiftly disposing of the incident by asking in a peremptory voice what he could do for them. The other, lean and languid, looked up from a newspaper, in which he had been scanning a flaming circus advertisement, as he stood smoking a cigar. He said nothing, but concentrated an intent speculative gaze on the face of Valeria, who had pulled off her faint green sunbonnet and in a flush of eager hopefulness ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... sentiment which opposes the cumulus of violence and usurpation, which in a great degree constitutes historic international law and corrects the deductions made from purely speculative theories,—a sentiment we accept without demur, and which is asserted like the axioms that serve as the basis and foundation of all reasoning and as a rule ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... air of interest altered indefinably. Inspecting his chafing prisoner now with narrowed, speculative eyes which glinted keenly, he fell presently to whistling softly, laughed and with tantalizing abruptness fell silent again. Immobile and subtle now as his silent companion, he stared curiously at the other's fastidiously pointed beard, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... nice-judging part of his congregation objected to this dramatic art and declamatory style, as tending to draw the attention from the doctrine to the preacher, and to obtain admiration from man more than to do honour to God. This, however, might have passed, as a matter of speculative opinion or difference of taste; provided the preacher is believed to be in earnest, the style of his preaching is of little comparative consequence. But the moment he is suspected of being insincere, the moment it is found that he does not practise what he preaches, his ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... law" is, to consider "the reason and spirit of it, or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it." Now, we must look for the origin of the law requiring physical perfection, not to the formerly operative character of the institution, (for there never was a time when it was not speculative as well as operative,) but to its symbolic nature. In the ancient temple, every stone was required to be perfect, for a perfect stone was the symbol of truth. In our mystic association, every Mason represents a stone in that spiritual ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... after its speculative builder, has been but briefly alluded to; it is to many the most attractive part of the great town, rising at the east end to a respectable height above the sea and with fine views of the Channel. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... concept two kinds of order which are alike only in the facility they give to our action on things. We bring together the two terms in virtue of a quite external likeness, which justifies no doubt their designation by the same word for practice, but which does not authorize us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... by the little table, gazing intently on the picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until Esther played the last number ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of my career as a banker was of a criminal nature. Nearly everything I had touched was a speculative venture. The cursed practice of watering stocks to three and four times their actual value was the common work of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... and they are 'ourn!' I think the cabal of obstructionists 'am busted.' I feel certain that, if I live, I am going to be re-elected. Whether I deserve to be or not, it is not for me to say; but on the score even of remunerative chances for speculative service, I now am inspired with the hope that our disturbed country further requires the valuable services of your humble servant. 'Jordan has been a hard road to travel,' but I feel now that, notwithstanding the enemies I have made and the faults I have committed, I'll be dumped ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... of the Tyee Lumber Company she went, her appearance outside the railing in the general office being the signal for many a curious and speculative glance from the girls and young men at work therein. One of the former, with whom Nan had attended high school, came over to the railing and, without extending a greeting, either of word or smile, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... laws which govern this most intricate question the author has boldly defined and authoritatively arranged. The chapters which he has written on the more involved features of the subject, as sex and the relative influence of parents, should go far toward setting at rest the wildly speculative views cherished with reference to these questions. The striking originality in the treatment of the subject is no less conspicuous than the superb order and regular sequence of thought from the beginning to the end of the book. The ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect was trained to the highest point which it could reach, and on the great subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... situated on the south side of the Kansas River, upon as inconvenient and inappropriate a site for a town as any in the Territory. It was chosen simply for speculative purposes. It contained, at the time of Gov. Geary's arrival, some twenty or more houses, the majority of which were employed as groggeries of the lowest description. It was the residence of the celebrated Sheriff Jones, who is one of the leading members of this town association, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Mrs. Sallie; and then, as this was a mood far too speculative for her, she recalled herself to practical life suddenly. "If we should have to adopt ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the understanding speculative there are some general maxims and notions in the mind of man, which are the rules of discourse and the basis ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... along with us in all things.—Of Chartism I have nothing farther to say, except that Fraser is striking off another One Thousand copies to be called Second Edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative Sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a Tory,—thank Heaven. The Miscellanies are at press; at two presses; to be out, as Hope asseverates, in March: five volumes, without Chartism; with ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of that Presidential fist-shaking had soaked into the souls of men, speculative New York went nervous to the frontiers of hysteria. Tuesday night, speculative New York couldn't sleep; it sat up till morning, for, like cattle, it could smell in the breeze the coming storm. Wednesday heard the crash; and the crashing continued unabated ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... upon meager data. The legal processes attending its entrance into the Union have been the occasion of much comment. This comment has invariably lent itself to a discussion of the effect of judicial decision upon our home institutions. It has been largely a speculative concern. In some cases it has become a political concern in the narrowest partizan sense. The effect of all this upon the people of Puerto Rico has not been considered. Their rights and their needs have not come to us. We have not taken President McKinley's ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a pretence of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that nobody understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a res integra, to Dr. Alison, the capital argument that legal and adequate provision for the poor, whether ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... it is a man's soul and not a child's, so the Gospel of Jesus continues the soul of all human culture. It continually drops its old forms and takes new ones. It passed out of its Jewish body under the guidance of Paul. In a speculative age it unfolded into creeds and systems. In a worshipping age it developed ceremonies and a ritual. When the fall of Rome left Europe without unity or centre, it gave it an organization and order through the Papacy. When the Papacy became a tyranny, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... twenty-five years and more. And as the boy-world is the big world, the life of too many being but another and less attractive phase of boyhood, it supplied a gloss to the book of daily observation, which I could on no account part with. The inconceivable indifference of most men to considerations of speculative truth became conceivable. The way in which the axioms of sages slip off from multitudes, as mere vague "glittering generalities," good enough for cherishers of the "intuitions" to lisp of by moonlight, but sheer fiddle-dee-dee to firmly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... on the whole prosper, in spite of every drawback, is known to all men. He came out of it a man of clear and ever-improving intelligence; equipped with knowledge, true in essentials, if not punctiliously exact, upon all manner of practical and speculative things, to a degree not only unexampled among modern Sovereign Princes so called, but such as to distinguish him even among the studious class. Nay many "Men-of-Letters" have made a reputation for themselves with but a fraction ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... "The financial position of the company depends entirely upon the value of a large quantity of speculative bonds, but as there was only one clerk employed, it was impossible to get at any figures. Hilditch declared that Jordan had only a small share in the business, from which he had drawn a considerable income for years, and that he had not the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... remarked that the girl's not being there showed her complete want of breeding and that she was really very good to have put herself out for her so; she was a common creature and that was the end of it. I could see that Mrs. Nettlepoint's advent quickened the speculative activity of the other ladies; they watched her from the opposite side of the deck, keeping their eyes fixed on her very much as the man at the wheel kept his on the course of the ship. Mrs. Peck plainly meditated an approach, and it was from this danger that Mrs. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... pounds five shillings, in the shape of licence and fees. He too has deprived himself of the sunniest portions of his wardrobe, and has softened the glare of his white ducks, and the gloss of his blue coat, by the application of a drab waistcoat. But why indulge in speculative dreams when we have realities ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the railroad, Philip had made up his mind that it was merely kept on foot for speculative purposes in Wall street, and he was about to quit it. Would Ruth be glad to hear, he wondered, that he was coming East? For he was coming, in spite of a letter from Harry in New York, advising him to hold on until he had made some arrangements in regard to contracts, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic of the historic records ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... possible the temporal and the accidental; and in particular the especial appeal it may have to your own private craving—for each of us has his soft spot where the pen can pierce. On the contrary, if the highly speculative business of guessing the probable circulation of a novel ever becomes yours, then you must doubly emphasize the importance of these very qualities; search for them, analyze them out of the narrative, equate them with the tendencies of the times, the new emotions stirring, the new interests, new thoughts ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... operations; as moral science is concerned with human acts, and architecture with buildings. But sacred doctrine is chiefly concerned with God, whose handiwork is especially man. Therefore it is not a practical but a speculative science. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... add that the hickory pumpkin idea is not to be taken seriously. That is a highly speculative proposition. I have found some times that, in a very scientific audience, men who were trained in methods of science, had very little selvage of humor,—little margin for any pleasantry, but this highly speculative suggestion, curiously enough, is not in fact more speculative ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... observant and speculative faculties were thus active, his voice was busily engaged. With the accumulated artistry of years he was developing his pose. He did it almost subconsciously. He flung out hint and impulsive confidence and casual ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... fellowship with the immortals, eating the bread of philosophy, doctrinaire, drinking the wine of poetry—how good would it be to live with such men if only there were nothing else to do in this old world of ours. Dreamers of dreams; watchers of the stars; spinners of speculative webs, in which they love to find themselves gloriously entangled; Rip Van Winkles asleep to the actual, so wise among books; so deliciously foolish among men and affairs—we know the type, and we do ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... within the reach of all the enterprising, industrious, and honest pioneer citizens of the country. It was soon, however, found that the object of the laws was perverted, under the system of cash sales, from a distribution of land among the people to an accumulation of land capital by wealthy and speculative persons. To check this tendency a preference right of purchase was given to settlers on the land, a plan which culminated in the general preemption act of 1841. The foundation of this system was actual residence and cultivation. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... the study of it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules; and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less importance than it does to most ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... eccentricity is madness; but in the case of unhappy Chatterton, that madness which arises from "hope deferred," was unquestionably endured. Three days before his death, pursuing, with a friend, the melancholy and speculative employment of reading epitaphs in the churchyard of St. Pancras, absorbed by his own reflections, he fell into a new-made grave. There was something akin to the raven's croak, the death-fetch, the fading spectre, in this foreboding accident: he smiled at it, and told his friend he felt the sting ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Clyde rejoined Miss Berry, she noticed that he seemed ill at ease, gazing down the bay with a worried, speculative look ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Secretary of State, Jefferson, and of his friends. At the close of a long interview Jefferson tells him that "The secresy with which the Senate covers its deliberations serves to veil personal interest, which reigns therein in all its strength." Otto explains this as referring to the speculative operations of Senators, and to the commercial connections some of them have with England, making them unfriendly to ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in a country where the offices are really insufficient to the purposes of Government. And at the same time, the confidence which had been given to the Volunteers, by the attention paid to them at every meeting, had drawn them into the discussion of every speculative question which could embarrass the ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... tragically bound up with those of Huss, who should share with him in the same fiery doom, was his junior by several years; his superior in eloquence, in talents, in gifts—for certainly Huss was not a theologian of the first order; speculative theologian he was not at all—but notably his inferior in moderation and practical good-sense. Huss never shared in his friend's indiscriminate admiration of Wycliffe. When, in 1403, some forty-five theses, which either were or professed to be drawn ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of the failing pulse of the Old Year, throbbed slowly and heavily away, the baby took upon its wan visage a strange expression—the solemn expression of worn-out and suffering age. Its blue eyes grew more solemnly speculative and dreamy, and after a while it seemed to lose all taste for the petty things of this world and the low desires of mere humanity. It lay very quiet in Liz's arms; it never cried, and was no longer fretful, and it seemed to listen with a sort of mild approval ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... between us on the speculative question lies in the conception of the primitive protoplasm. I conceive it as a mechanism set going by heat—as a sort of active crystal with the capacity of giving rise to a great number of pseudomorphs; and I conceive that ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... startlingly sufficient. From five years of painful experience, Mrs. Landis knew how Lem did it. And so on this evening, as she stood beside him in a corner of the ballroom after their first greetings, and looked as he did with eager speculative eyes about the wide room, seeking, seeking, she felt a curious sympathy and harmony between herself and her husband. She knew without turning her head when the sudden brightening in his eyes came; and then he slowly made his way to ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... and Carteret were both of them most abominably given to fable, and both of them often, unnecessarily and consequently indiscreetly so; "for whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom." Lord Scarborough had understanding, with judgment and without wit; Lord Chesterfield a speculative head, with wit and without judgment. Lord Scarborough had honor and principle, while Chesterfield and Carteret treated all principles of honesty and integrity with such open contempt that they seemed to think the appearance ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the Southern Hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contain another continent, as speculative geography seemed to suggest, was a question which had long engaged the attention, not only of learned men, but of most of the maritime powers ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... civilisation is the tiny post-office, which is also a provision store; but Cornwall has acquaintance with a kind of glorified hawking or peddling with which dwellers in town have no concern. A shop on wheels may occasionally be seen in the heart of some quiet hamlet, surrounded by speculative housewives and wondering children. But Crantock has its charm of the present, as well as a delightful association with the past. Close to its undulating slopes lies the grandeur of a glorious coast, meeting the deep blues and greens of the Atlantic. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... expedition would require great expense, my dear Colombo—great expense. And, of course, you know, Colombo, that when investors can buy Inquisition 4 1/4's for 89 it would be extremely difficult to raise the money for such a speculative project—oh, extremely difficult. And then you must consider the present depression—tell me now, Colombo", said King Ferdinand, "how long do you think this depression will last, for I seek, above all things, a return to ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... altogether "blind," ([Greek: tuphlas d eu autois eloidas katokioa)] but only blinking. Don't court, therefore, if you would philosophize wisely, too intimate an acquaintance with your brute brother, the baboon—a creature, whose nature speculative naturalists have most cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a parody which the devil, in a fit of ill humour, made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... paid a small fee to defray the expense of surveying. This they took care not to pay, or only to pay as fast as they could sell tracts to some purchasers, on which occasions they paid the surveying fee and obtained deeds for the portion they sold. In this way they have held millions of acres for speculative purposes, waiting for a rise in prices, without taxation, while the farmers in adjacent lands paid taxes." [Footnote: "Labor, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... evidently a little puffed up with a feeling of satisfaction at the clever way in which he had got out of the difficulty, without displaying his ignorance of astronomy, and was even venturing, in the pride of his heart, to make some speculative and startling assertions in regard to the "'eavenly bodies" generally, when Buzzby put ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... off with him. This was at half past eight o'clock in the evening. Smith makes this astounding guess; the woman instead of being the person expected, was in reality his wife, who had by some means intercepted a letter. Our speculative friend Smith is not prepared to suggest an arrest on these flimsy claims, but he believes it to be worth Mrs. Wrandall's while to have the case permanently closed, rather than allow these nasty conclusions to get abroad. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... empirical observation, or the establishment of critical rules on a false basis. I know but of one exception to this sweeping censure, and that is the essay on the Philosophy of Style, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, [Spencer's ESSAYS: SCIENTIFIC, POLITICAL, AND SPECULATIVE. First Series. 1858]. where for the first time, I believe, the right method was pursued of seeking in psychological conditions for the true ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... point of these two great systems, but still not more than 4000 feet above the level of the sea, and 1000 feet lower than the top of the western ridge we had already crossed; yet, instead of lofty snow-clad mountains appearing to verify the conjectures of the speculative, we had extensive plains, over which one may travel a month without seeing any thing higher than an ant-hill or a tree. I was not then aware that any one else had discovered the elevated trough form of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... SPECULATIVE, THE, that which we think and which as such goes no deeper than the intellect, which is but the eye of the soul, not the heart of it. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that something was coming, though of what nature lay beyond her speculative power. She wondered if he could have fallen in love with her at first sight, realizing a favorite dream she often had in the subway. Hundreds of times she had beguiled the minutes by selecting one or another of the wealthy lawyers and bankers, whom she supposed to be her fellow-travelers there, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... social condition of the time would be one-sided. There are to be referred to that period many legislative enactments in the highest degree conducive to civil and religious liberty. The foundation of the Royal Society marked the inauguration of a new interest in speculative enquiry, of a great activity in scientific research, and of a broader and more liberal habit of thought on questions connected with government and education. These advantages were attained in spite of a worthless king, of corrupt ministers, and a licentious ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... magic and the devil to help him, and walk through the fire after all?" said Spini, with a grimace intended to hide a certain shyness in trenching on this speculative ground. "How do you know there's nothing in those things? Plenty of scholars believe in them, and this Frate is bad ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... were impressively modern. Of late it had seemed as if the man of open air, checked in his natural courses, thrown back upon his meditations, turned to the student, with hope of guidance in new paths, of counsel amid unfamiliar obstacles. To the observant Rolfe, his friend's position abounded in speculative interest. With the course of years, each had lost many a harsher characteristic, whilst the inner man matured. That their former relations were gradually being reversed, neither perhaps had consciously noted; ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... branch to be constituted a Court, as there may be occasion, to try and determine upon impeachments, we may be secured against impartiality in the fountain, and corruption in the streams of justice. The Legislative will examine all the machinery by which the Government acts: TOO frequent speculative experiments may tend to render the motions unsteady, and to annex insecurity to property. Where there are no radical defects, a long exercise of Judicial Authority, in any particular mode, brings the feelings of the ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... me to look back from a distance both in time and space on these bygone adventures of our youth, it must be stranger for you who tread the same streets—who may to-morrow open the door of the old Speculative, where we begin to rank with Scott and Robert Emmet and the beloved and inglorious Macbean—or may pass the corner of the close where that great society, the L. J. R., held its meetings and drank its beer, sitting in the seats ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pursued with the view of acquiring a sounder judgment, and quicker and more accurate perceptions of the every-day details of business and duty. That knowledge is worse than useless which does not lead to wisdom. To women, more especially, as their lives can never be so entirely speculative as those of a few learned men may justifiably be, the great object in study is the manner in which they can best bring to bear each acquisition of knowledge upon the improvement of their own character or that of others. The manner in which they may most effectually promote the ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... passage of the Abbe. It means nothing or it means ill; and in any case it shows the great difference between speculative and practical knowledge. A treaty according to the Abbe's language would have neither duration nor affection; it might have lasted to the end of the war, and then expired with it.—But France, by acting in a style superior ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... my colored brother Ahmah-de-Bellah, and his kinsman Abdulmomen, lost no chance of lecturing me about my soul! We kidnapped the Africans all day and spouted Islamism all night! Our religion, however, was more speculative than practical. It was much more important, they thought, that we should embrace the faith of their peculiar theology, than that we should trouble ourselves about human rights that interfered with profits and pockets. We spared ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Ronald condescended to approach the speculative side of the subject, with the assistance of his subordinate. "If what you said just now means anything," he resumed, "it means that you suspect the reason why Farnaby has left my service. ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... deploring the risks of their present speculative mode of life, was far from imagining that signs of the foul future so much dreaded were actually apparent to Ethelberta at the time the lament was spoken. Hence the daughter's uncommon sensitiveness to prophecy. It was as if a dead-reckoner poring over ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... good, he was able to go away and read, and think about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... digestive faculty of the liver, and he divides it into four species, to-wit, leucoflantia, yposarcha, alchitis and tympanitis, each of which has its special and appropriate treatment. In the dreary waste of speculative discussion it is cheering, however, to observe Gilbert's positive recognition of the sphere of percussion indicated ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... the inlet must be defined. Some years before he had been known as a timber-cruiser—that is to say, a man who "locates," during his wanderings through forests primeval, belts of timber which will be likely to allure the speculative lumberman. Barker, therefore, had discovered the inlet which bore his name, and in consideration of his services, and with a due sense of his physical and mental qualifications, he had been appointed boss of the camp by the real owners—a syndicate of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... exchange rate policies if it wants to keep inflation under control. Some foreign investors remain concerned about the viability of Brazil's exchange rate policy because of the country's fiscal and current account deficits. The government thus has to contend with the possibility of capital flight or a speculative attack that could draw down foreign reserves to a critical level ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... faith of Islam. But science and free thought then, as now, in Islam, depended almost solely on the tastes of the wealthy and the favour of the monarch. The ignorant fanaticism of the multitude viewed speculative studies with deep dislike and distrust, and deemed any one a Zendik (infidel) who did not rest content with the natural science of the Koran. These smouldering hatreds burst into open flame about the year 1195. Averroes was accused of heretical opinions and pursuits, stripped of his honours, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... too extensive to be fully comprehended by speculative reason, experience is the guide which a wise man will follow with the least distrust, and it is no trivial recommendation of the present method, that it has been so long pursued without any formidable inconvenience ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... used to lament that certain writers of the first class, who were capable of exalting virtue, and of putting vice out of countenance, too generally employed themselves in works of imagination only, upon subjects merely speculative, disinteresting and unedifying, from which no useful moral ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... suggested by a visit to Haddon Hall," is very pleasing. The style here is suggestive, and judiciously so; he generalizes, and we are pleased to imagine. We see elegant figures walking under shade of trees, clear refreshing green shade; the composition is graceful, and fit for the speculative or enamoured loiterers. Perhaps the foreground is too ambitious—too much worked to effect. If this be done for the sake of contrast, it is a mistake of the proper effect of, and proper place for, contrast. In such a scene of ease and gentleness, all contrast is far better avoided; it always ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... three times wearing around, providing they didn't come to mending before that," mused the "Pet," with a speculative look in her blue eyes, but with a quiver of the dimples that evoked another paroxysm of laughter from her audience. "But I say, Sadie," she went on with the next breath, "Miss Minturn is a downright sweet-looking girl, and I'll wager a- -a darning ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... would make it all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually turned on ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... claimed, at once satisfies and transcends the operations of the human intellect. Most non-theological modern minds are, however, somewhat suspicious of the doctrine of the Trinity; it seems rather too speculative and too remote from ordinary ways of thinking to possess much real value. But this is quite a mistake. We cannot dispense with the doctrine of the Trinity, for it, or something like it, is implied in the very structure of the mind. It belongs ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business, and rose, still thinking of this ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... they'll thin out these cheeky brutes. Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end!—You know it mortifies me, Kathleen—it certainly does. One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!" He grew madder at the speculative indignity. "By ginger! I'm going to have a shooting party before the snow flies," he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister. "Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right. And if we do, let him ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... inherent that even before this war speculative minds had pointed out the direction to which these inventions pointed, but now, after more than three-quarters of a year of war, it is possible to approach this question, no longer as something as yet fantastically outside ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... constantly secured from day to day under the immediate supervision of the Government. Besides, the only effect of such a discrimination would be to drive such banks to Georgetown, Alexandria, or some other speculative site outside the city or District. This city has just been consecrated to freedom by Congress, and it is hoped that, in commencing its new career, no discrimination will be made against it. Indeed, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sets a man on a level with lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to the lowest level. Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... all sorts of rumors are in circulation, and Free Gold stock, which has been sold during the past week as high as a dollar forty, found few takers at par when Change closed. There has been a considerable speculative movement in the stock, and the speculators are beginning to wonder if there is a screw loose in the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... earnest persons, I would only say, that a question of this kind is not to be shelved upon theoretical or speculative grounds. You may remember the story of the Sophist who demonstrated to Diogenes in the most complete and satisfactory manner that he could not walk; that, in fact, all motion was an impossibility; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner, which he attempted to put into practice. Walter Pater in his essay on The School of Giorgione has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative John Addington Symonds said some pertinent things on this subject. Camille Mauclair in his Idees Vivantes proposes in all seriousness a scheme for the fusion of the seven arts, though he deplored Wagner's efforts to reach a solution. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... yesterday. Therefore neither lapse of time nor multiplicity of trials could ever quench in Athanasius the pure spirit of hope which glows in his youthful work. Slight as our sketch of it has been, it will be enough to show his combination of religious intensity with a speculative insight and a breadth of view reminding us of Origen. If he fails to reach the mystery of sinlessness in man, and is therefore not quite free from a Sabellianising view of the Lord's humanity as a mere vesture of his divinity, he at least rises far above the barren logic of the Arians. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... production of that aristocratic atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But [9] in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... production of the end, nay using such as are of a directly opposite nature, these men presume to talk to us of impossibilities! We may rather contend that they furnish a fresh proof of the soundness of our reasonings. We lay it down as a fundamental position, that speculative knowledge alone, that mere superficial cursory considerations, will be of no avail. Nothing is to be done without the diligent continued use of the appointed method. They themselves afford an instance of the truth of our assertions; and while they supply no argument against the efficacy of the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Absurdities in speculative opinion are commonly considered as innocent things; and we are told every day that they are not worth refuting. So far as opinions are sure to rest merely in speculation, and cannot in any degree ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... think, that there's a better living, for the really successful artist, in varieties than there is on the stage. There's more certainty—less of a speculative, dubious element, such as ye canna escape when there's a play involved. The best and most famous actors in the world canna keep a play frae being a failure if the public does not tak' to it. But in the halls a good turn's a good turn, and it can be used longer ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... men ever saw,—has gained greater victories on sea and land than any power in the world,—has erected the smallest spot to the most imperial ascendency recorded in history. The administrative triumphs of her intellect are as conspicuous as her imaginative and her speculative triumphs. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the mass of mankind will answer these questions without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous overmuch' who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the grandeur of the ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... and Billy, slowly, thoughtfully, mounted his wheel and rode around the station, with the air of one who enjoys the scenery. The third time he rounded the curve by the freight agent the man looked up with a speculative squint and eyed the boy. The fourth time he called out, straightening up and laying down ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... of a speculative frame of mind and chose to take as the basis for a calculation the increase in tourists between 1855, when the ten pioneers started for Paris, and the number "personally conducted" over land and sea to-day, and then glance forward at what the future will be if this ratio ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... two men had just seated themselves, one an elderly person who seemed somewhat feeble, and the other a tall, sharp-faced individual who eyed his companion in a shrewd, speculative manner. ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... which were often as speculative and suggestive as he claimed, the late John Addington Symonds called attention to three successive phases of criticism, pointing out that the critics had first set up as judges, delivering opinions from the bench and never hesitating ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... did it? Well, anyway, I should worry about you and your clothes," stated the other. He took a step onward, then halted; and now the gleam of speculative gain was in his eye. "Say, if I was willin' to sell—not sayin' I would be, but if I was—wot would you be willin' to give for an overcoat like ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... I murmured, recalling my dear mother's lessons; "all at one fell swoop; not to mention five hundred yoke of oxen, carried off by the Sabeans, then a leading firm of speculative cattle-dealers!" ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... mind, in order to become conscious of the truth, which (to quote Spinoza) "remoto errore nuda remanet." He has still much to learn, and he should learn it as a man from man. I should like to propose to him first to go to Bonn. He would there find that most deeply thoughtful and most original of speculative minds among our living theologians, the Hamann of this century, my dear friend R. Rothe; also a noble philosopher and teacher of ethics, Brandis; an honest master of exegesis, Bleek; and young minds would soon attach themselves to him. In ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... simple and practical, the other sensitive and speculative, did not move in the same atmosphere, and could not understand one another. Ambrose was in the condition of excitement and bewilderment produced by the first stirrings of the Reformation upon enthusiastic minds. He had studied the Vulgate, made out something of the Greek Testament, read all fragments ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... designated as "Disciples of Christ," or "Christians." I procured their literature and made a thorough study of their position. I naturally found myself in harmony with their teaching. I had myself come to see the folly of enforcing upon all believers the speculative theology of the creeds, and the weakness and waste that result from a divided church. My experience revealed to me the relative value of human wisdom and God's wisdom as found in his Book. The thought of preaching Christ rather than theology, and of restoring the apostolic church ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... at least an indication that the public had not forgotten that Browning was a poet. Here in Florence, although the hermit life was happy, new friends—the gift of England—added to its happiness. Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate's brother, and himself a true poet in his degree, "a dreamy, shy, speculative man," simple withal and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a time in Florence. To him Browning became attached with genuine affection. Mrs Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... which are alone adequate to shape character and fit man for the highest conceivable destiny—fellowship with, and likeness to, the Divine Being in whose image he has been made. This, of course, may be said to be the aim of all theology. The theologian must not be content to discuss merely speculative problems about God and man. He must seek above {2} all things to bring the truths of revelation to bear upon human practice. All knowledge has its practical implicate. The dogma which cannot be translated into duty is apt ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... satisfied were they with their present situation, that they refused an offer which was made them of being conveyed to their native country. A very important instruction may be derived from the preceding narrative. It will serve to explain, better than a thousand conjectures of speculative reasoners, how the detached parts of the earth, and, in particular, how the islands of the South Sea, though lying remote from any inhabited continent, or from each other, may have originally been peopled. Similar adventures have occurred ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Sutra-Pitaka. It means a group or collection and hence can be used to denote either a body of men or a collection of treatises. These Nikayas are also not the same as the four schools (Vaibhashikas, etc.), mentioned above, which were speculative. Similarly in Europe a Presbyterian may be a Calvinist, but Presbyterianism has reference to Church government ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... this speculative man felt in the mood for fancies, for presently he was staring at one of the constellations, and saying to himself, "Why not? Well, why not? Granted force can travel through ether,—whatever ether is—why ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the wildest and most unstable character, and the early eighteenth century saw many losses and constant fluctuations in the realm of finance. The most famous instance of this was the "South Sea Bubble," a speculative scheme by which a regulated company, the South Sea Company, was chartered in 1719 to carry on the slave-trade to the West Indies and whale-fishing, and incidentally to loan money to the government. ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... awaiting Baker's return, her gaze fell upon a solitary figure, trudging along the white, snake-like road, far down among the foothills—the figure of a priest in his long black robe. He was the first man she had seen on the road, and she watched him with curious, speculative eyes. ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... editors. It had been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat under his style. The Northern Review, after publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not Burton's Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred dollars each for five essays. He wrote back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay. He remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... psychologists that prepared the outline of a course for this purpose deserves attention as a contribution to the pedagogy of the subject. They proposed a course on "Human Action," to be free from questions of a speculative or theoretical nature and concentrated on matters relevant to military practice and the military uses of psychology. The aim was to enlist the student's practical concern at the very outset, and to give him the psychological ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... representative of the race in the way of practical executive intellect. It is poor praise to put him into another order of men, with Plato or with Paul. Their greatness was of another kind. We cannot speak of degrees. He is the exponent of creative force in political history—not of speculative ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Fairfield, however, Mallston may not have seen his desperate position, especially with summer and harvest wages coming. Just now he was out of a job, having finished a ditching contract, and his black, speculative eyes looked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... driven the only profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the republic always the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... speculative English, who were out of his reach, made a judicious estimate of the weak points of his system, and found the Russians ready to act upon their suggestions. They it was who had been endeavouring for the last three years to ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... also sold to Horace Fairchild, who had been associated with it as partner since 1831, and a Mr. Toucey, who formed a partnership under the name of Fairchild & Co. Barnum had lost considerable money in this store; he was too speculative for ordinary trade, too ready, also to give credit, and his ledger was full of unpaid accounts when he ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... combines the faculty of acute and searching criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact. His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he has given to the history of English opinions and controversies, speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he published his work on English Thought ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... they got the hypership built soon enough, it would start a second, sound boom that would cushion the crash of the present speculative market when it ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... but still not more than 4000 feet above the level of the sea, and 1000 feet lower than the top of the western ridge we had already crossed; yet, instead of lofty snow-clad mountains appearing to verify the conjectures of the speculative, we had extensive plains, over which one may travel a month without seeing any thing higher than an ant-hill or a tree. I was not then aware that any one else had discovered the elevated trough form of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... but the simple form of the adjective."—Wright's Gram., p. 49. "But when I talk of Reasoning, I do not intend any other, but such as is suited to the Child's Capacity."—Locke, on Ed., p. 129. "Pronouns have no other use in language, but to represent nouns."—Jamieson's Rhet., p 83. "The speculative relied no farther on their own judgment, but to choose a leader, whom they implicitly followed."—Kames, El. of Crit., Vol. i, p. xxv. "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."—Beaut. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... exactitude which leads one to suppose Donatello reproduced all the peculiarities of his model. It has been said that Michelozzo helped Donatello on the ground that certain details reappear on the Aragazzi monument. The argument is speculative, and would perhaps gain by being inverted,—by pointing out that when making the Aragazzi figures, Michelozzo, the lesser man, was influenced by ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... favourable opportunity presented itself, he felt desirous of having a peep at the snowy Kilimandjaro Mountain, of which the Rev. Mr Rebmann, who first discovered it, had sent home reports, and which had excited such angry and unseemly contests amongst our usually sedate though speculative carpet-geographers in England as rendered ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... limits, and these were not imposed by time or necessity, but by the unyielding will of his own prejudices. As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous. He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive. He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... When he piled us all in with our grips, he put me in the seat beside him, whether I liked it or not. I was fool enough to tell him I loved to travel fast. What do you think he said? Well, he eyed me in a rather cool and speculative way and said, with a smile, 'Miss, I reckon anything you love an' want bad will be coming to you out here!' I didn't know whether it was delightful candor or impudence. Then he said to all of us: 'Shore you had ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... industry and commerce and amassed wealth. "Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades [in the first and second centuries of the Christian era], from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale."[787] "The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from the occupations which are ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... He disliked much all speculative desponding considerations, which tended to discourage men from diligence and exertion. He was in this like Dr. Shaw, the great traveller[361], who Mr. Daines Barrington[362] told me, used to say, 'I hate a cui bono man.' Upon being asked by a friend[363] what he should think of a man who ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... council, or decide causes, or are in some command, the last more especially, for to command is peculiar to magistrates. But to speak truth, this question is of no great consequence, nor is it the province of the judges to decide between those who dispute about words; it may indeed be an object of speculative inquiry; but to inquire what officers are necessary in a state, and how many, and what, though not most necessary, may yet be advantageous in a well-established government, is a much more useful employment, and this with respect to all states ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... spectacular: a 10% average in the 1960s, a 5% average in the 1970s, and a 4% average in the 1980s. Growth slowed markedly in the 1990s largely because of the aftereffects of overinvestment during the late 1980s and contractionary domestic policies intended to wring speculative excesses from the stock and real estate markets. Government efforts to revive economic growth have met little success and were further hampered in late 2000 by the slowing of the US and Asian economies. The crowding of habitable land area and the aging of the population are two major long-run ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the benefits of the rotation of crops, Liebig propounded a very ingenious theory, but one which was largely of a speculative nature, and which has since been shown to be unfounded on any scientific basis. It was to the effect that one kind of crop excreted matters which were especially favourable to another kind of crop. He did not say whether he considered such ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... should go too, and hurried into my boots so as to show decision taken, in the necessary interviews. They came of course - the interviews - and I explained what I was going to do at huge length, and stuck to my guns. I am glad to say the natives, with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice highly approved the step after reflection. Meanwhile off went S. and I with the three CORPORA DELICTI; and a good job I went! Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up; but we got them down all sound in wind ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a child is not known to be a human being till some time after its birth. And this is not uttered by some speculative philosopher in his closet, but by a medical practitioner on his daily rounds, tools in hand, as it were, to carry out his theory and break the skulls of any and all luckless babes that may come in his way in the exercise ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa.[236] The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became evident to my appalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to others). Yet in the Ignatian letters there is not the faintest aquaintance with the man or his teaching. Valentinus also taught at Rome (c. A. D. 140-60), and his strange theories about AEons and Ogdoads, about spiritual, psychical, and material men, or any other fantasy of his speculative mythology, were not thought beneath the criticism of an Irenaeus, a Clement of Alexandria and a Tertullian. Yet no hint is there in the Seven Epistles that these thoughts were familiar to the writer. At ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Co. was the name of the brokerage firm that always handled Jadwin's rare speculative ventures. Converse was dead long since, but the firm still retained its original name. The house was as old and as well established as any on the Board of Trade. It had a reputation for conservatism, and was known more as a Bear than a Bull concern. It was immensely wealthy and immensely important. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... philosopher could give himself up to the study of causes and their finality, that faculty being allotted to the mental activity; he could even, without giving the scientist cause for complaint, make, or admit, speculative theories regarding the end and aim of art, provided that the scientific part of the system was neither ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae, but, as Professor Osborn points out (op. cit. page 87.), "it is a very striking fact, that the basis of our modern methods of studying the Evolution ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... man of quiet tastes. It was a marvellous discovery, of course, quite marvellous—but—He had already become the proprietor of several acres of scorched, discredited property near Hickleybrow, at a price of nearly 90 an acre, and at times he was disposed to think this as serious a consequence of speculative chemistry as any unambitious man, could wish. Of course he was Famous—terribly Famous. More than satisfying, altogether more than satisfying, was the ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... quality, as well as in quantity, unparalleled since the days of Colbert and Seignelay, near a century before. Concomitant with this had been a singular progress in the theory of naval evolutions, and of their handmaid, naval signalling, among French officers; an advance to which the lucid, speculative, character of the national genius greatly contributed. Although they as yet lacked practice, and were numerically too few, the French officers were well equipped by mental resources, by instruction and reflection, to handle large ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... scholar has been protected by his definitely directed life from the temptations of this speculative equity; and I believe his writings to contain the truest expression yet given in England of the feelings with which a Christian gentleman of sense and learning should regard the art produced in ancient days, by the dawn of the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... subjected to it Perhaps it will be discovered to hold universally, that wherever the appearance of revenge characterizes an act of retributive justice, a feeling of the same principle hardens the breast of the culprit, besides influencing the speculative judgments of those who witness it But it were foolish to expect, that either one or other will avow the existence of so dangerous a motive. The only excuse that offers itself in. behalf of Captain Cook's conduct on this occasion, is stated in what he immediately mentions ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... confided the fact that he had put all his savings into the stock of the present company at its greatly depressed present value. The company was not paying dividends; he had bought at forty. His air of financial success, of shrewd speculative insight impressed them all. Miss M'Gann evidently knew all about this; she smiled as if the world were a pretty ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of children filed out, every head turning for a last unpleasingly speculative look at the outlaw. Then Miss Spence closed the door into the cloakroom and that into the big hall, and came and sat at her desk, near Penrod. The tramping of feet outside, the shrill calls and shouting and the changing voices of the older boys ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... self-seeking man, the beautiful simplicity and clear transparency of Truth remains unaltered and undimmed, and the unselfish heart enters into and partakes of its shining radiance. Not by weaving complex theories, not by building up speculative philosophies is Truth realized; but by weaving the web of inward purity, by building up the Temple of a ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... province both indulgences and dispensations, as they in their discretion should think proper and reasonable; and no person, to whom such liberty should be granted, was to be molested, punished, or called in question for any differences in speculative opinions with respect to religion; so that all persons, of what denomination soever, had liberty to enjoy their own judgments and consciences in religious concerns, provided they disturbed not the civil order and peace of ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... perfect the bird comparison, Mr. Taggett, after keeping the public in suspense for six days and nights, abruptly flew away, with all the little shreds and straws of evidence he had picked up, to build his speculative ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... themselves Republicans, was Alexander Hamilton. I believe I may say that all the political sympathies of George Washington were with the same school. Washington, however, was rather a man of feeling and of action than of theoretical policy or speculative opinion. When the Constitution was written Jefferson was in France, having been sent thither as minister from the United States, and he therefore was debarred from concerning himself personally in the matter. His views, however, were represented by Madison; and it is now ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... of the school [12] to which he belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make them, in ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... custom in the opportunities of his leisure to take some friends with him into the country, where, instead of amusing themselves with idle sports or feasts, their diversions were wholly speculative, tending to improve the mind and enlarge the understanding. In this manner he now spent five days at his Tusculan villa in discussing with his friends the several questions just mentioned. For, after employing the mornings in declaiming and rhetorical exercises, they used to retire ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities. The colony was promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks, representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize credulity and European ignorance of the West. The Company had, in fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were unsuited. Of the colonists ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... govern this most intricate question the author has boldly defined and authoritatively arranged. The chapters which he has written on the more involved features of the subject, as sex and the relative influence of parents, should go far toward setting at rest the wildly speculative views cherished with reference to these questions. The striking originality in the treatment of the subject is no less conspicuous than the superb order and regular sequence of thought from the beginning to the end of the book. The book is intended to meet ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... to a discussion of the speculative value of Confederate money; but in a little while the conversation returned to ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... nature discussed, I have ever read. You know how I admired your former essays, but this seems to me far grander. I like all the part after page xxvi better than the first part, probably because newer to me. I dare say you will demur to this, for I think every author likes the most speculative parts of his own productions. How superior your essay is to the famous one of Brown (here will be sneer 1st from you). You have made all your conclusions so admirably clear, that it would be no use at all to be a botanist (sneer No. 2). By ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... bursts upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Jackson with speculative ardor. Saunderson narrowed his eyes, as he looked judiciously at the broker. He flicked the ash from ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... not my intention to dwell long upon speculative theory, but I must observe, that if any tradition is to be received with confidence it must proceed from nations, or tribes, who have long been stationary. That the northern continent of America was first peopled from ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Evolution." It is but an instrument to help out the confusion of the senses, and it is conditioned by the accuracy of the sense-perceptions with which it deals. There is no appeal from experience to reason, for reason is powerless to act save on the facts of human experience. Speculative philosophy can teach us nothing. The senses and the reason are intensely practical and all, our faculties are primarily adapted to immediate purposes. Instruments such as these cannot serve to probe the nature of the infinite. But no other instruments lie within reach ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... that its apparent divinity supposes. Now, such is the task that we solemnly inaugurated when, starting at once with human reality and the divine hypothesis, we began to unroll the history of society in its economic institutions and speculative thoughts. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... nothing of this kind had come into his life before. He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the speculative innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled. They soon came to two great poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either side of an unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a house painted dull pink, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of her father's life. Again she heard him telling her of the one man to whom he had entrusted her, who would make it his sole business to save her, who would protect her life with his own, heard his speculative question as to whether she knew whom he meant, recalled her own quick reply, and his answer—and ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... conception that play is not serious. Children are allowed to do just as they please. This is a mistake. Froebel has taught the true spirit and importance of play. Some people consider his explanations as being purely speculative, if not insane; but the great majority of those who have really studied child ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... phenomenon of the time than the shifting of large masses of population from the East to the West, while the war was in progress. This fact begins to indicate why there was no shortage in the agricultural output. The North suffered acutely from inflation of prices and from a speculative wildness that accompanied the inflation, but it did not suffer from a lack of those things that are produced by the soil—food, timber, metals, and coal. In addition to the reason just mentioned—the search for new occupation by Eastern ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... witch; 2. The astrologian, star-gazing, planetary, prognosticating witch; 3. The chanting, canting, or calculating witch, who works by signs and numbers; 4. The venefical, or poisoning witch; 5. The exorcist, or conjuring witch; 6. The gastronomic witch; 7. The magical, speculative, sciential, or arted witch; ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... doubt, as much worth in himself, independently of the circumstances of time or place, as another; but he is not of so much value to us and our affections. Could our imagination take wing (with our speculative faculties) to the other side of the globe or to the ends of the universe, could our eyes behold whatever our reason teaches us to be possible, could our hands reach as far as our thoughts or wishes, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... administrative unity, and while a fervid national spirit had been developed among the people. The contrast was one which fructified in many serious results, and among them we must rank the effect which it produced on the minds of the French lawyers. Their speculative opinions and their intellectual bias were in the strongest opposition to their interests and professional habits. With the keenest sense and the fullest recognition of those perfections of jurisprudence which consist in simplicity and uniformity, they believed, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... matters respecting the Church, where heresy, which the Emperor held, or affected to hold, in great horror, appeared to him to lurk. Nor do we discover in his treatment of the Manichaeans, or Paulicians, that pity for their speculative errors, which modern times might think had been well purchased by the extent of the temporal services of these unfortunate sectaries. Alexius knew no indulgence for those who misinterpreted the mysteries of the Church, or of its doctrines; ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... then, for the political side of the 'philosophy of the century,' if we are to use this too comprehensive expression for all the products of a very complex and many-sided outburst of speculative energy. Apart from its political side, we find M. Taine's formula no less unsatisfactory for its other phases. He seems to us not to go back nearly far enough in his search for the intellectual origins, any more than for ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... enterprise; with it as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, the same energies exercised, and in almost any proper field he would before this have been a rich man and an honored one. By his twisted code of ethics and unmorals, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... within safe limits is surely a dangerous assumption. The principle of a fixed limit, to be broken in case of real need, but only after some ceremony has been gone through giving notice of the fact that a crisis has been reached, seems rather to be required by the psychology of speculative mankind. But even if Sir Edward's preference for bills of exchange as backing for notes has all the merits that he claims that is no reason for urging the repeal of the Bank Act to secure their use. Because the Bank Act does not forbid it: ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... you!" It was the cure of the surgeon's knife, ruthless, radical; it was, in fact, kill or cure; she knew that. "Of course it's a gamble," she admitted, and paused, nibbling at her finger; "a gamble. But I've got to take it." She spoke of it as she might of some speculative business decision. She looked at him as if imploring comprehension, but she had to speak as she thought, with sledgehammer directness. "It takes brains to make money—I know because I've made it; but any fool can inherit it, just as any fool can accept it. I'm going to give you a ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... salmon," or "the melted butter," or "that glass of sherry," which are recognized as the causes for so many morning reflections. This curious circumstance suggests an interesting source of inquiry for the speculative. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... "diggings" he was soon to desert forever. Poor, wretched, little old "diggings"! As he passed the Plaza, the St. Regis and the Gotham, he favoured the great hostelries with contemplative, calculating eyes; he even looked with speculative envy upon the mansions of the Astors, the Vanderbilts and the Huntingtons. She was born and reared in a house of vast dimensions. Even the Vanderbilt places were puny in comparison. His reflections carried him back ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... the world rather as a spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy[10], business, ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... early part of the eighteenth century the South Sea Company was formed in England. Britain became a speculative crowd. Stock in the South Sea Company rose from 128-1/2 points in January to 550 in May, and scored 1,000 in July. Five million shares were sold at this premium. Speculation ran riot. Hundreds of companies were ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... a book called "Speculative and Moral Theology." In vol. 3, tract 23, disputation 8, sec. 5, no. 63, p. 448, are found the following sentences: "Licet procurare abortum, ne puella infametur." That doctrine is admitted, "to evade personal ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... Works, near Glasgow, at a time when the Company had only two blast-furnaces at work. The office of accountant, which he held, precluded him from taking any part in the manufacturing operations of the concern. But being of a speculative and ingenious turn of mind, the remarkable conversions which iron underwent in the process of manufacture very shortly began to occupy his attention. The subject was much discussed by the young men about the works, and they frequently had occasion ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... brethren, and this resemblance is made still more striking by the oratorical flights or prayers with which she interrupts her argument to address her Creator. Moreover, the book is throughout, as Leslie Stephen says, "rhetorical rather than speculative." It is unmistakably the creation of a zealous partisan, and not of a calm advocate. It reads more like an extempore declamation than a deliberately written essay. Godwin says, as if in praise, that it was begun and finished within six weeks. It would have been ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... termed the positive value, and can be approximately determined by sampling or test-treatment runs. The second and the third may be termed the speculative values, and are largely a matter of judgment based on geological evidence and the industrial outlook. The fourth is a question of development, equipment, and engineering method adapted to the prospects of the enterprise, ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Indeed, for the nations of the world to spring, commercially speaking, at one another's throats would be suicidal even if it were possible. Mr. Sidney Webb has thrown a flood of light upon the conditions likely to prevail. For example, speculative export trade is being replaced by collective importing, bringing business more directly under the control of the consumer. This has been done by co-operative societies, by municipalities and states, in Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and in Germany. The Co-operative ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cursory study of such texts as Dana's "Manual of Geology" will reveal that the development of the plants and animals through the "ages" of speculative geology does not move forward like a steadily rising flood. There is rather a series of great waves, each rising abruptly, new forms often appearing suddenly and together. The very simplest known fossils, the trilobites, of which nearly a hundred species are known in America alone, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... compares the scores of constitutions that have been engulfed in the convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England, and points out that the latter has only been very slowly changed part by part, under the influence of immediate necessities and never of speculative reasoning. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... This is no speculative dream. The progress of science is daily proving it to be an actual truth; proving to us that a large proportion of diseases—how large a proportion, no man yet dare say— are preventible by science under the direction of that common justice and ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... Lover Pretty Woman, A Rabbi Ben Ezra Red Cotton Nightcap Country Return of the Druses, The Reverie Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli St. Martin's Summer Saisiaz, La Saul Serenade at the Villa, A Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, A Solomon and Balkis Sordello Soul's Tragedy, A Speculative Strafford Summum Bonum Time's Revenges Toccata of Galuppi's, A Too Late Transcendentalism Two in the Campagna Two Poets of Croisic Up in a Villa—Down in the City Waring Worst of it, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Power, which, by its success, may invite and authorize still further encroachments,—all these are dangers to which the alleged doctrine of Toryism, whenever brought into practice, exposes its idol; and more particularly in enlightened and speculative times, when the minds of men are in quest of the right and the useful, and when a superfluity of power is one of those abuses, which they are least likely to overlook or tolerate. In such seasons, the experiment of the Tory might lead to all that he most deprecates, and the branches ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... say," Francis replied. "The financial position of the company depends entirely upon the value of a large quantity of speculative bonds, but as there was only one clerk employed, it was impossible to get at any figures. Hilditch declared that Jordan had only a small share in the business, from which he had drawn a considerable income for years, and that ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pretend to say that the Bibliotheca of Gesner is any thing like perfect, even as far as it goes: but, considering that the author had to work with his own materials alone, and that the degree of fame and profit attached to such a publication was purely speculative, he undoubtedly merits the thanks of posterity for having completed it even in the manner in which it has come down to us. Consider Gesner as the father of bibliography; and if, at the sale of Malvolio's busts, there be one of this great man, purchase it, good Lisardo, and place it ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... clear. It was the familiar story of wealth grasping at yet more wealth, of the man whose judgment and common sense begin to play him false, when once the intoxication of money has gone beyond a certain point. Dazzled by some first speculative successes, Sir Arthur had become before long a gambler over half the world, in Canada, the States, Egypt, Argentina. One doubtful venture supported another, and the City, no less than the gambler himself, was for a time taken in. But the downfall ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... much that is promulgated by his followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope. Romantic, indeed, as was Lord Byron's sacrifice of himself to the cause of Greece, there was in the views he took of the means of serving her not a tinge of the unsubstantial or speculative. The grand practical task of freeing her from her tyrants was his first and main object. He knew that slavery was the great bar to knowledge, and must be broken through before her light could come; that the work of the sword must ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... attitude of Canada. German propaganda had been busy, and certain sections of the Canadian public had been heard to say that they had no part with England—but that was before the war. The speculative neutral had a shock and a disappointment. Not a Canadian, man or woman, but remembered that England was "home," and home was threatened. As one man they answered ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... system. Late hours; living beyond one's income; leaving too much to one's employees; neglect of details; no inborn love for one's calling; over-confidence in the stability of existing conditions; procrastination; speculative mania; selfishness; self-indulgence in small vices; studying ease rather than vigilance; social demoralization; thoughtless marriages; trusting one's work to others; undesirable location; unwillingness to pay the price ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... her complete want of breeding and that she was really very good to have put herself out for her so; she was a common creature and that was the end of it. I could see that Mrs. Nettlepoint's advent quickened the speculative activity of the other ladies; they watched her from the opposite side of the deck, keeping their eyes fixed on her very much as the man at the wheel kept his on the course of the ship. Mrs. Peck plainly meditated an approach, and it was from this danger ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... walks. His habit of morbid introspection had grown and become a fixed feature of his life. Even while occupied with business his secret self stood invisible at his elbow whispering, ever whispering things alien from material holdings or profit—matters unrelated to speculative ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... miles, was not going to last many hours; meantime, I set myself to work out scientifically its genesis, operation, and hidden purpose. The first and second considerations were merely matters of research and calculation; the third was largely speculative, admitting of no more definite conclusion than that the time had come when hygienic necessities required a thorough rousing and ridding-out of microbes, bacteria, and other pests too minute to be worth particularising. But I was better enlightened ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... on the bed and tucked her feet under her, and the thoughtful forefinger began to slowly trace the pattern on the bedspread, while Jane Rowland studied her with speculative spectacles. ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... such inquiries made on a more wholesale and systematic scale. They are no longer of a merely speculative character. We no longer regard children as the "gifts of God," flung into our helpless hands; we are beginning to realise that the responsibility is ours to see that they come into the world under the best conditions, and at the moments when their ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... relation of the origin and development of the South Sea Company, of the forming and collapse of the "bubble," and of the spread of the speculative mania which manifested itself in so many other extravagant projects, makes a fitting counterpart to this historian's narrative of the rise and fall of the contemporary scheme in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the defendant buying this land, packing up, bidding adieu to the dear down-country home, and his toilsome journey into the woods, arrival, and purchase, and poor, hard life of toil and deprivation: here was his all. He sketched the plaintiff as a well or ill-to-do gentleman, of a speculative turn of mind, whose eye coveted the rich bottom-lands of the defendant; and finding him helpless and poor, searched out the weak place in his title, hunted up obscure relatives, and procured for a song sung by themselves, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... more utterly alone than Glenveigh Castle. The utter silence which Mr. Adair has created seems to wrap the place in an invisible cloak of awfulness that can be felt. Except a speculative rook or a solitary crane sailing solemnly toward the mountain top, I saw no sign of life in all the glen. Owing to the windings of the road it seemed quite a while after we sighted the top of the tower before we entered the avenue which ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... assured. Yet even in that a subtle danger lurks. Certain contingencies have become involved in the recital of your admittedly ingenious stories which the future unfolding of events may not always justify. For instance, the very speculative Shan Tien, casting his usual moderate limit to the skies, has accepted the Luminous Insect as a beckoning omen, and immersed himself deeply in the chances of every candidate bearing the name of Lao, Ting, Li, Tzu, Sung, Chu, Wang or Chin. Should all these fail incapably at the trials ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... elevates and exalts us in our esteem, tinging our hearts with heroism and our souls with pride, in the love and attachment of some fair and beautiful girl, there is something equally humiliating in being the object of cold and speculative calculation to a match-making family: your character studied; your pursuits watched; your tastes conned over; your very temperament inquired into; surrounded by snares; environed by practised attentions; one eye ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... proportionate to the increase of the population, viz. 6,900,000, we shall find that the average yearly income of a working- class family comes to about L94, or a weekly earnings of about 36s. This figure is of necessity a speculative one, and is probably in excess of the actual average income of a ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... the men and women who have at heart the interests of rural life and the rural school. I have tried to avoid deeply speculative theories on the one hand, and distressingly practical details on the other; and have addressed myself chiefly to the intelligent individual everywhere—to the farmer and his wife, to the teachers of rural schools, to the public spirited school boards, individually and collectively, ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... political situation of Europe seems to be less threatening among its leading powers, still the uncertainty prevalent among those who are generally considered the arbiters of public affairs has had its influence in contracting the limits of speculative adventure, thereby circumscribing the general course of trade ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... in all ages and countries of the world of which there is record, woman's dress signalized itself by extravagant and very often tasteless conceptions. In a country where, before the doctrine of popular sovereignty had been broached in any part of the world by the most speculative theorists, very vigorous and practical examples of democracy had been afforded to Europe; in a country where, ages before the science of political economy had been dreamed of, lessons of free trade on the largest scale had been taught ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
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