"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this other human being, his wife, to whom he had come nearest, just as a dirty hand might soil and crumple a fine fabric. But she no longer reproached him, if she ever had; she understood the sad complexity of a fate that had brought into the hand the fabric to be tarnished. And what she could accept, others must, the world must, to whom the Prestons are but annoyances and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... peerages, before committees of privileges, in the House of Lords; appeals to the High Court of Parliament, from all the superior courts, both of law and equity, in the United Kingdom, involving questions of the greatest possible nicety and complexity—and that, too, in the law of Scotland, both mercantile and conveyancing, so dissimilar to that prevailing in other parts of the kingdom; appeals before the Privy Council, from the judicial decisions of courts in every quarter of the globe where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... and appreciate the development of the story. He begins with the simple tale of adventure and the simple story of character. As he advances he sees the story develop in plot, in character analysis, and in setting, until he ends with the psychological study of Markheim, remarkable for its complexity of motives and its great spiritual problem. Both the selection and the arrangement have been made with this further purpose in view— "to keep the heart warm, reinforcing all its good motives, preforming ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... India. There, mixing with the indigenous Lemurian population, they formed the Dravidian race. In later days this in its turn received an infusion of Aryan or Fifth Race blood, from which results the complexity of type found in India to-day. In fact we have here a very fair example of the extreme difficulty of deciding any question of race upon merely physical evidence, for it would be quite possible to have Fifth Race egos incarnate ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... can compare for complexity with any group of humans who have been collected into machine-like precision of operation. Take one time when an Ipplinger Cultural Contact Group was handed a Boswellister with V.I.P. connections and orders to put him to an ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... contents of the book, which contains in addition many subheadings, gives a sufficiently clear idea of its scope and of the pains which the author has taken to subdivide his subject matter to the last possible degree. Whether such a detailed classification has merit sufficient to justify its complexity must be left to the individual reader to determine. It may, however, with justice be said that the author has spared no pains to illustrate by case reports the various phases of traumatic disorder which he enumerates. He has a keen sense of the significance of psychiatric ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... teeth. No one, even though he be most ignorant of comparative anatomy, could mistake the rat or rabbit-like skull of a rodent for that of any other creature. The peculiar pincer-like form of the jaws, with their curved chisel-shaped teeth in front, mark the order at a glance. There is no complexity in their dentition. There are the cutters or incisors, and the grinders; and of the cutters there are never more than two in each jaw, that is to say efficient and visible teeth, for there are in some species rudimentary incisors, especially in the young, but these either disappear or take no ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... thought I, I can't open my mouth without digging up some new complexity. I wouldn't try to set my friend right in his etymology; and I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; so I ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... gives. It is true that some of the higher mental powers, as yet but little developed in the race, and congenitally possessed in any considerable degree only by the most advanced, are indisposed to the amount of exertion required of them. But these, in virtue of their very complexity, will, in a normal course of culture, come last into exercise; and will therefore have no demands made on them until the pupil has arrived at an age when ulterior motives can be brought into play, and an indirect ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... height, but as it drew nearer, the wall resolved itself into a wild array of columns, and eddies, and whirlpools, and great full-bosomed clouds, that rolled and swam and rose and fell with maddening complexity. Then came a breath of deadly chillness, and then a horror of great darkness—a darkness that could be felt. The skipper himself took to the fore rigging, and placed one of the watch handy to the wheel; finally he called all hands up very quietly, and the men hung on anyhow. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... weighed the importance of the diplomatic issues at stake, and have noted their warping influence on military affairs, have the right to accuse him of blindness and presumption. The problem before him was of unexampled complexity, and its solution could be effected only by a succession of experiments. That he put forth too many efforts at one time may be granted; and yet in each case, if the details are fully known, the reasons for making the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... success was to make the mountain country accessible. Only those who have had the fortune to travel through this country can realize how difficult this endeavor has been and must continue to be, chiefly because of the great local complexity of the mountain system, but also because of the severely destructive storms of this region, with consequent torrential violence of the streams affected. But little money, too, can be, or has been, spent for the necessary road-work. In spite of the difficulties involved, however, a system ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... laid it on the empty, worn old Bible on the wide arm of the rocker beside a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Then I hesitated. I had been so sure of finding Mother Spurlock at home and having her hunt up Martha for me that I found it difficult to adjust myself to my first complexity of plans. And while I hesitated a resolve came into my mind with the completeness of a ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... glaring eyes, etc., etc. Upon these things, which his discriminating admirers were glad to overlook as mere matters of temperament and constitution, and in spite of which they were charmed with his graceful and truly vigorous speech, his biographer loves to dwell. He has much to say of the length and complexity of the sentences, but nothing of the often exquisite elegance of their structure; much of the number and size of the words of which they consisted,—nothing of the extreme delicacy and dexterity of their use, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as we commit to memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters, Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of extreme complexity. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... occurred not long ago near Boston will illustrate the complexity of these race relations. Three light-colored men, brothers, by the name, we will say, of Green, living in a Boston suburb, married respectively a white, a brown and a black woman. The children with the white mother became ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... tempted, indeed constrained, on such an occasion as this to ask what were the qualities which enabled a man called comparatively late in life to new duties of unexampled complexity—what were the qualities which in practice proved him so admirably fitted to the task, and have given him an enduring and illustrious record among the rulers and governors of the nations? I should be disposed to assign the first place to what ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... first state, we are absorbed by the idea of what we seem to others; while, in the second state, we are occupied with the idea of what we really are, without regard to the opinion of anybody, but guided strictly by the abstract law of right. In the first state, we are embarrassed by the complexity of our wishes and aims. We wish to please everybody, and we strive to ascertain what will be agreeable to the various tastes of those with whom we converse. Thus we have no constant landmark, no unvarying compass to guide us on our way; and we are drawn hither and thither, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... affiliation and maintenance in their integrity of the existing organisations. The Roman Church has never hesitated to utilise in this sort of manner new spiritual forces, and, without many alterations of the old, to make new additions to her ecclesiastical machinery at the risk of increasing its complexity. The Church of England might in this respect have followed the example of her old opponent to very great advantage. But neither in the plan of 1689, nor in any of those which preceded or followed it during the period which elapsed between the Act of Uniformity and the close of the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... have to contemplate social phenomena as susceptible of prevision, like all other classes, within the limits of exactness compatible with their higher complexity. Comprehending the three characteristics of political science which we have been examining, prevision of social phenomena supposes, first, that we have abandoned the region of metaphysical idealities, to assume the ground of observed realities by a systematic subordination of imagination to observation; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... talk—so profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for their real meetings—of the very happiest people. Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life. If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian. If the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, vainly reflected that Cocker's should have been one of ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... far from comprehending the complexity of her feelings. Ditmar had not apologized or feigned an altruism for which she would indeed have despised him. The ruthlessness of his laugh—the laugh of the red-blooded man who makes laws that he himself may be lawless shook her with a wild ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... found sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life, which, being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only tolerate compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate phenomena. When facts of extreme complexity have to be daily and hourly dealt with by people whose time is money, they must be simplified, and treated much as a painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important features, and neglecting ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... important factor that distinguished the vendors under consideration was their identification with the customer. The size and internal complexity of the company also was an important factor. POB was looking at large companies that had substantial resources. In the end, the process generated for Yale two competitive proposals, with Xerox's the clear winner. ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... inevitable under such conditions—conditions such as existed for me in the home of my attendant—can only aggravate the mental disturbance. Especially is this true of those laboring under delusions of persecution. Such delusions multiply with the complexity of the life led. It is the even-going routine of institutional life which affords the indispensable quieting effect—provided that routine is well ordered, and not defeated by annoyances imposed by ignorant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... laboratories—is the same sort of preposterous folly that Newton would have been guilty of, had he attempted to show that there was no such thing as "gravity" in the universe; that it was only some undiscovered correlative of a thermal limit,—some unknown molecular complexity or entanglement in cosmic ether—some spontaneously occurring affinity or antagonism of ethereal molecules in the interplanetary spaces—some "potentiated potentiality" of mere sky-mist,—conditions of which he could have had no experimental knowledge, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... from me to seek complexity in so simple a soul as was that of this young Hungarian peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her; she would never have dreamed of searching the deep-down emotions of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... made the great world small, while every part of it has grown insistent. As the earth has shrunk to come within our grasp, so has our own world expanded to receive it. "My mind to me a kingdom is," and to this kingdom all the other kingdoms of the earth now send their embassadors. The complexity of life is shown by the extension of the necessity of choice. Each of us has to render a decision, to say yes or no a hundred times when our grandfathers were called upon a single time. We must say yes or no to our neighbors' theories or plans or desires, and whoever has lived ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... of properties, and of the physical conditions of primitive volition, and traces in the evolution of mind and its organs, as in the evolution of other functions and their organs, a progressive specialization and increasing complexity." ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... the thoughts of a man so diplomatic, so astute, and at the same time so deeply religious and so credulous of all the miracles of faith. He did believe in Divine guidance. He was sincere in his submission to the "revelations" of the Prophet. But, in the complexity of the mind of man, even such a faith may be complicated with the strategies of foresight, and the priest who bows devoutly to the oracle may yet, even unconsciously, direct the oracle to the utterance of his desire. And if my father was—as ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... new, and from the beginning of civilization there have been the country-minded and the city-minded. In our modern life, however, there is much that increases the difference and much that stimulates the movement of the city-minded from the country. Present-day life with its complexity and its rapidity of change makes it difficult for one to get time to develop the active mind that makes appreciation possible. Our children precociously obtain adult experiences of quantitative character in an age of the automobile and ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... nor decays, the Mendelian cannot conceive its beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... progress had been made. Until very recent years, Canada had been more anxious to get new railways than to control old ones, and, besides, the worse forms of discrimination which stirred indignation in the United States had not been widely practised in Canada. But with the growing complexity of the industrial organization, and the recognition that competition could not solve the difficulties, a demand rose for more efficient regulation. The Dominion government, acting upon an able and thorough report by Dr S. J. M'Lean, established in 1904 a Railway Commission, ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... cherished superstition of feminine passivity in love, and the origin of the chastity taboo on women with its waste of life and love. She even has a sane and humane chapter on prostitution, recognising the complexity of its causes, and the kindness and generosity of these scapegoat women to one another, as well as their erotic insensibility. The book should be read by all educated men and women. It will probably ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... to the highest animal—to man himself. You might define the life of every one in exactly the same terms as those which I have now used; the difference between the highest and the lowest being simply in the complexity of the developmental changes, the variety of the structural forms, the diversity of the physiological functions which are exerted ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... them!—it is impossible to say any thing better; but it is possible to say something more. Such in fact is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character, that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is as if while hanging-over a half-blown ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... circumstanced that I see the same party at once a civil litigant against me in a point of right and a culprit before me, while I sit as criminal judge on acts of his whose moral quality is to be decided upon the merits of that very litigation. Men are every now and then put, by the complexity of human affairs, into strange situations; but justice is the same, let the judge be in what situation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The complexity of our life appears in the number of our material needs. It is a fact universally conceded, that our needs have grown with our resources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth of certain needs is often a mark of progress. To feel the necessity of bathing, of wearing fresh linen, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... final movement, Allegro eroico, opens with a bold, heroic theme in spread chords, followed by a quieter subject. The music goes triumphantly on with increasing brilliance, complexity and heroic ardour. At length a great final version of the heroic theme is heard, Maestoso, and soon we come to the dramatic moment of the whole sonata. At the very height of exaltation we are overwhelmed by a shattering descent of double octaves, precipitate. The heroism and ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... although endowing the States with sufficient power for self-protection. The Executive was to be held personally responsible for official misconduct, both he and the senators subject to impeachment and to removal from office. The whole scheme was wrought out with the mathematical complexity and precision ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... of such a complexity points more and more to the plantation of Malta as an occasion of special importance; its insular position and the unity of its geological structure both tend to simplify the question. There are certain points about the existing climate, moreover, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... practise religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west, a cluster of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the Far East ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... more adhesiveness than is commonly imagined. The diversity and complexity of its interests form a network that will be found, like the web of the spider, to possess a power of resistance far exceeding its gossamer appearance—one strong enough to hold all that it was ever ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of existence? ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... manifestations; but when "the Lord came to his temple," and made "the place of his feet glorious," darkness vanished, truth shone with effulgent brightness, and simplicity rose to the dominion which ceremony and complexity had assumed: at his presence the new creation smiled, and the Lord of the universe again descended to pronounce upon another series of wonderful works, that "all was ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... Keith: "Only eighty years have come and gone since the anatomist obtained his first glimpse of the structural complexity of the human brain; it will take him eight thousand years and more to find out the exact part played by every departmental unit of this colossal system of government which carries on the mental life of a human being. We have no reason ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... degrees of divergence from geometric precision, all degrees of variety, ranging from the visual perfectness of the Parthenon to the sublime and triumphant inconsequence of the sky-line of New York city. It may manifest all degrees of complexity from a cup to a cathedral or from "Home, Sweet Home" to Tschaikowski's "Pathetic Symphony." Whatever the elements and the incidents, our sense of order in the parts and of singleness of impression endows the object with its form. The form ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... currencies in Kosovo. While maintaining ultimate oversight, UNMIK continues to work with the European Union and Kosovo's local provisional government to accelerate economic growth, lower unemployment, and attract foreign investment to help Kosovo integrate into regional economic structures. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, legal uncertainty over property rights, scarcity of foreign-investment and a substantial foreign trade deficit are holding back the economy. Arrangements with the IMF, especially ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... rule of the majority as expressed in the voting of the National Assembly must be taken as a fundamental thing; China is no exception to the rule—the rule of the majority must be decisive. But here another complexity of the new Chinese political life enters into the problem. The existence of a responsible Cabinet, which is not yet linked to the Legislative body in any well-understood way, and which furthermore has frequently ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... of ours—space and all it contains—is a thing of five dimensions, a continuum we have never begun to contemplate in its true complexity and immensity. There are three of its dimensions with which we are familiar. Our normal senses perceive and understand them—length, breadth and thickness. The fourth dimension, time, or, more properly, the ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... stars from which the solar system was receding would seem to be approaching each other. If the stars, instead of being quite at rest, as just supposed, had motions proper to themselves, then we should have a double complexity. They would still appear to an observer in the solar system to have motions, and part of these motions would be truly proper to the stars, and part would be due to the advance of the sun itself ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... gilbuper. It differs radically from any form known in other parts of the world and is supposed to have been invented by an ancient chief of the race, named Natas, who was for many centuries after his death worshiped as a god, and whose memory is still held in veneration. The government is of infinite complexity, its various functions distributed among as many officers as possible, multiplication of places being regarded as of the greatest importance, and not so much a means as an end. The Tamtonians seem to think that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... things, but leaving them for the rest to their own inherent tendencies. As distinguished from them it was, he conceived, the one thing which was absolutely pure and unmixed. All things else had intermixture with every other, the mixtures increasing in complexity towards the centre of things. On the outmost verge were distributed the finest and least complex forms of things—the sun, the moon, the stars; the more dense gathering together, to form as it were in the centre of the vortex, the earth and its manifold existences. By the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life—all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... unless it is large and powerful enough to enforce its demands. The attempt on the part of a small class to acquire a constitutional right of this character must of necessity fail. This is why the system which theoretically tends toward a high degree of complexity has not in practice resulted in ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... is not so leisurely as it once was, I often think it such a pity. But you, too, are paying the penalty of complexity." She smiled at him sympathetically. "How is Mr. Parr? I haven't seen him ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to trace the convolutions of America's street railway and public lighting finance would involve a puzzling array of statistics and an inextricable complexity of stocks, bonds, leases, holding companies, operating companies, construction companies, reorganizations, and the like. Difficult and apparently impenetrable as is this financial morass, the essential facts still stand out plainly enough. As already indicated, the fundamental basis upon which the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... settled country which is rich in natural resources there may be no great danger in pursuing a laissez-faire policy in governmental affairs, but as the population of a commonwealth becomes denser, the quickened strife for property and the growing complexity of social and industrial interests make an extension of the functions of the state absolutely necessary to secure protection to property and freedom to ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... come at Christmas, and she would take long walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question and all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she thought, drawing her feet up on to the fender, life was full of complexity; life was a thing one must love to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... are not simple to me, Rita," he said, softly, "nor are your affairs. They concern me very much. You are so important to me. I have told you that. Don't you see how true it is? You are a strange complexity to me—wonderful. I'm mad over you. Ever since I saw you last I have been thinking, thinking. If you have troubles let me share them. You are so much to me—my only trouble. I can fix your life. Join it with mine. I need you, and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Strasburg with the utmost expedition, from whence it was transmitted by telegraph to Paris. The Emperor, surprised but not disconcerted by this intelligence, received it at St. Cloud on the 11th of April, and two hours after he was on the road to Germany. The complexity of affairs in which he was then involved seemed to give a new impulse to his activity. When he reached the army neither his troops nor his Guard had been able to come up, and under those circumstances he placed himself at the head of the Bavarian troops, and, as it were, adopted the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to my camp, full of anxious anticipations for the morrow; while the novelty of the scene, and its striking character, the complexity of the phenomena, the lake-bed, the stupendous ice-deposited moraine, and its remoteness from any existing ice, the broad valley and open character of the country, were all marked out as so many problems suddenly conjured up for my unaided solution, and kept ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... brothers Weber, laborious German experimenters and observers, had carefully worked out on the bony frame, are illustrated by the various individuals comprising this moving throng. But what a wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement! Hundreds of objects in this picture could be identified in a court of law by their owners. There stands Car No. 33 of the Astor House and Twenty-Seventh Street Fourth Avenue line. The old woman would miss an apple ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Post-mortem appearances.—Owing to the complexity of the structure of the lung tissue, its ramifications of bronchial tubes and blood vessels, and its abundant supply of lymphatics, the pathological changes in pleuropneumonia are interpreted with great difficulty. Furthermore, there are certain kinds of pneumonia which present some ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... April of the year 1886 a study was made of the surface of Mars by W.F. Denning in England. Mr. Denning's drawings corroborated the charts of Green, Schiaparelli, Knobel, Terby and Baeddicker. He found the surface of Mars one of extreme complexity, a multitude of bright spots in places, but with a general fixity of character which led him to believe that the appearances were not atmospheric. He indeed attributed to Mars an attenuated atmosphere and thought that some of the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity—a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism which teaches slavery. In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the inspiration of ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... given shape, he began its elaboration. Pattern after pattern of graceful foliation emerged till the design assumed the intricate complexity ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured. He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and sumptuous ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... said that the complexity of the individual during adolescence is due to the fact that at this time the brain and the whole body become at last awakened to their manifold capacities, and that the child now is not only capable of doing everything ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... musician winces when harsh, grating dissonance strikes his ear, he gingerly probed deeper and deeper, exploring this strange and fascinating structure that was unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was an extraordinary complexity that spread before him—a maze, a labyrinth, a magnificent corruption of order ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... another and another, and they stood enchanted as the beautiful circles widened away from their centers and crossed each other in ever-increasing complexity of curve. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... most thoughtful Partner he had ever met. In her, the finely bred pedigree mind of a Persian cat had reached one of its highest peaks of development. She was more complex than any human woman, but the complexity was all one of emotions, memory, hope and discriminated experience—experience sorted ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What other distinction from prose," he asks, "would we have?" We may answer that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., an appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the actual sound of the words used,—a music whose complexity may be indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then (a), that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... "Subject the complexity of life to a thought harmonious and clear, a constant mark of the Latin genus, for a group of trees as well as an entire nation, an entire religion—Catholicism. It is the contrary in the races of the North. Significance of the word: the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Rose's ambition, and Ethel's clandestine romance, and little Millicent's complicity in that romance, and John's sinister secrets, and her own ineffectual repining—as she thought of these five antagonistic preoccupied souls and their different affairs, the pathos and the complexity of human things surged over her ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... conjunction with the general law before stated (114.), suggested an experiment of extreme simplicity, which yet, on trial, was found to answer perfectly. The exclusion of all extraneous circumstances and complexity of arrangement, and the distinct character of the indications afforded, render this single experiment an epitome of nearly all the ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... on earth he could have been so blind and so stupid as not to see what now he sees; when the new vision is veiled by new disappointments and narrowed by continual reservations; when he is overwhelmed by the complexity of his undertaking—then let him unhearten himself, for he is succeeding. The history of success in any art—and machine-tending is an art—is a history of recommencements, of the dispersal and reforming of doubts, of an ever-increasing conception of the extent ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... competent to form an opinion on the subject, very readily allows that political economy, so infinite and subtile are the forces that enter into its shifting phenomena, is a science of no slight complexity, and that the successful unveiling of its disordered tissue demands, in the first instance, the highest intellectual acuteness and profundity. We here encounter the same obstacles as in metaphysics, except that in the one case the phenomena ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ideals which mankind has set before itself, the infinitely larger enlightenment and education of the masses, the desperate struggle which every civilised people is waging against all forms of social suffering and vice within itself, the mere complexity of modern commerce with its all-absorbing interest—these things all cry aloud for peace. War does not belong to this phase of civilisation. Least of all can it have any appeal to the two peoples in whom the spirit of the Twentieth Century is most manifest. Of all peoples, Great Britain and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... not yet grown beyond national communities too small and simple to overtax Man's limited political capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage of international organization. Man's political capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced on him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looks upward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. He will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... cruisers (Chester and Canterbury). The diagram on p. 388 shows the complete formation of the Battle Fleet and Cruiser Squadrons, under Admiral Jellicoe's personal command. It is interesting as an example of the extreme complexity of fleet formation under modern conditions, especially when it is realized that the whole fleet was proceeding on ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... increasing degree among all thinking Christians, and also could not but influence the ecclesiastical teachers.[461] The theological labours, thus initiated, accordingly bear the impress of great uniqueness and complexity. In the first place, the old Catholic Fathers, Melito,[462] Rhodon,[463] Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian were in every case convinced that all their expositions contained the universal Church faith itself and nothing else. Though the faith is identical with the baptismal confession, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... helplessness, without the chance of extricating himself by all his efforts. He is lost in unintelligible embarrassment. It is a delightful and a ravishing sight, to observe another man come after him, and tell, without complexity, and in the simplicity of self-possession, unconscious that there was any difficulty, all that his predecessor had ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... mud-loving ancestor, the lung-fish (who was probably "one of three brothers" who came over in the Mayflower—the records have not been kept) began to crawl out on the tide-flats, he had every organ that he needed for land-life in excellent working condition and a fair degree of complexity: brain, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys; but he had to manufacture a lung, which he proceeded to do out of an old swim-bladder. This, of course, was several years ago. But the lung has not quite caught up yet. The two or three million year lead of the other organs was too much to be overcome ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... her knee over which for many minutes the suspended pen merely hovered. She had fancied that her resolve, once fairly taken, would not stumble over a simple matter of detail. But when she had tried a dozen times to begin the letter to Mr. Galbraith, the simplicities vanished and complexity ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... First comes the external type, the novel of plot; then the internal type, the novel of character; then the social type, the novel of problem and purpose. The development proceeds from outward to inward, from objective to subjective, from simplicity to complexity." ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any portion. The imagination was staggered at thought of the infinite skill and labor required ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... A complexity of instincts checked Elfride's conventional smiles of complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less comfortable, Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them together to seek her husband. Mr. Knight, however, did not seem ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... man. When, in the pride of his anatomical skill, he has essayed to make her his study, thinking to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the why of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... by negroes, such as Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep a promise he ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of mamma's first husband. Then I'm not a Callingham at all!" I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity. ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... note had come into his voice. It indicated a complexity of understanding: chiefly that she would by nature resist what he had to say, and then resume her customary acquiescence. But for a moment she forgot that he was Mr. Dill, and that she had ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... highest belief has only produced in the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel, and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power, the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... approved by the clergy, the political leaders, and the masses of the people "The killing of the language," writes Dr. Douglas Hyde, "took place under the eye of O'Connell and the Parliamentarians, and, of course, under the eye and with the sanction of the Catholic priesthood and prelates ... From a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and racial."[*] Their attitude is easily understood. Irish had long ceased to be used for literary purposes. ...
— Ireland and Poland - A Comparison • Thomas William Rolleston
... of apparent exceptions, the tendency of the transition from heroic to democratic ages is to transfer both in war and in politics the decisive influence from the individual to the mass, from the protagonist to the private; and modern warfare, with its complexity and its science, has become mainly a matter of mechanics. Its hero is the mob, and its generals fight far away in the rear of the line of battle; even the telescope has given place to the telephone. Individual valour counts for little compared with accurate range-tests and spotting ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... poor hamlet still standing where the valley ends, was seen by Olaf, and tacitly by the Bonders as well, to be the natural place for offering battle. There Olaf issued out from the hills one morning: drew himself up according to the best rules of Norse tactics, rules of little complexity, but perspicuously true to the facts. I think he had a clear open ground still rather raised above the plain in front; he could see how the Bonder army had not yet quite arrived, but was pouring forward, in spontaneous rows or groups, copiously ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in illegitimate circumstance, and in himself—an old man without family, without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... human life. For one thing, the process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention of any other female. And for another ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!"[2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the training of the boy and girl, presents a complexity of problems before which parents and teachers alike are often ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... where a weight should be applied or a nut loosened. With the civil engineer, more properly so called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the obligation starts with the beginning. He is always the practical man. The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of nature, are always before him. He has to deal with the unpredictable, with those forces (in Smeaton's phrase) that 'are subject to no calculation'; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at his peril. His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amazing rental, one of the more desirable places which was to let on account of the purpose of its owners to spend the summer abroad. It was one of the newer houses, large and commodious; yet its facilities were severely taxed by the Anderson establishment, which fairly bristled with complexity. Horses by the score, vehicles manifold, a steam yacht, and three automobiles were the more striking symbols of a manifest design to curry favor by force ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... icy cold in contrast to that of heat. [This would be amply sufficient in itself, for these ideas are not grains to pick up one after the other, but sublime psychical facts of great complexity, and, consequently, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... dipped down into the canyon. But we knew every step of the winding trail and followed them in fancy through that fairy scene of mystic wonderland. We knew how the great elms and the poplars and the birches clinging to the snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs weighted down with heavy white mantles of snow, and how every stump and fallen log and rotting stick was made a thing of beauty by the snow that had fallen so gently on them in that quiet spot. And we could see the ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... time which may be required for the due execution of all the foregoing objects cannot be foreseen. It may exceed that for which your supplies are calculated, or, on the other hand, a less degree of the supposed complexity in the ground you will have traversed, along with the energy and diligence with which we rely on you for conducting these important services, may enable you to complete them within that period. In this latter case you will return to the Northern coast ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... peculiar literary quality into Malay myth,—whether it is to be traced solely to the influence exerted by Hindoo religion and Hindoo literature during ages of domination in the Malay archipelago, or whether we must reconsider the hypothesis of an Indonesian migration,—this is a problem of great complexity, for which no satisfactory ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... in no fitting mood to write a letter. Too many emotions were in conflict in him at once. They were having their way with him; and, perhaps, in this very complexity of his feelings he came nearer to being really and acutely himself than he had ever been in his life. Indeed, there was a moment when he was almost ready to consign the Duke and all that appertained to the devil or the deep sea, and to take his fate as it came. But one of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... feature was the institution of an international gendarmerie, the whole of Macedonia being divided up into five districts to be apportioned among the several great powers. Owing to the procrastination of the Porte and to the extreme complexity of the financial measures which had to be elaborated in connexion with this scheme of reforms, the last of the negotiations was not completed, nor the whole series ratified, until April 1907, though the gendarmerie officers had arrived ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... a young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly iridescence, like threads ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... practice of delegated legislation is inevitably and inextricably involved with the whole idea of governmental intervention in the economic field, where the conditions to be regulated are of infinite complexity and are constantly undergoing change. Granted such intervention, it is simply out of the question to demand that Congress should attempt to impose upon the shifting and complex scene the relatively permanent molds ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance, would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this half-natural changeling, was ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... The complexity of young Sir Gilbert did not, in Miss Liston's opinion, appear less on further acquaintance; and indeed, I must admit that she was not altogether wrong in considering him worthy of attention. As I came to know him better, I discerned in him a smothered self-appreciation, which came to light in response ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with the first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical equation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however, would be honest scepticism enough were it made with no arriere pensee, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and the extreme simplicity of the mechanical hypothesis. In such a situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and the human passion for system and simplification. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... lobster are gradually evolved, to all appearance the same—the same microscopic atom of homogeneous matter, undistinguishable by any known test from an animalcule almost at the bottom of the organic scale! Above all, that the courses by which animals of all degrees of complexity are gradually developed from apparently equally simple germs should, whenever traceable, be found to consist of progressive ramifications, so that every higher animal, before arriving at maturity, passes through several stages at the end of each of which lower animals ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to point out that as when food is better enjoyed it is better digested, therefore art, environment, mental disposition, indirectly affect the digestive processes. We should, therefore, remembering that simplicity, not complexity, is the essence of beauty, ornament our food and table, and be as cheerful, sociable, and even as ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... get.) He is one of that most efficient body, the French liaison officers, who act as connecting-link between the Allied Forces, and naturally is an accomplished linguist. He is an ardent admirer of British institutions, but is occasionally not a little puzzled by their complexity. So he very sensibly comes to people like Captain Wagstaffe for enlightenment, and ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to [36] fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognized, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... had passed, almost to the week, since a brash youngster named Alan Donnell had crossed the bridge from the Spacer's Enclave and hesitantly entered the bewildering complexity of ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... announced. "It stuck and broke ve dish to get it out. Good-bye. Vis is where I live." And he clattered up the steps and vanished, hoop and all, through the front doorway, leaving the stranger to marvel at the precocity of western children and at the complexity of their vocabularies. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton Night-cap Country and The Inn Album; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge. A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. Not that his high ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... distinctly, except in the case of the particular tree in front of which the Dyaks were encamped, the roots of which were strongly illuminated by their camp fire. We say roots advisedly, for this singular and gigantic tree started its branches from a complexity of aerial roots which themselves formed a pyramid some sixty feet high, before the branches proper of the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... assertions that Christ has done all for us, and that we have nothing to do, and can do nothing? To answer this question, we have to remember that that scriptural expression, 'salvation,' is used with considerable width and complexity of signification. It sometimes means the whole of the process, from the beginning to the end, by which we are delivered from sin in all its aspects, and are set safe and stable at the right hand of God. It sometimes means one or other of three different ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the further statement that "AB is a straight line between A and B," and conclude that the line AB represents the shortest distance between two points A and B. In a manner similar to this Euclid built his whole mathematical system upon the basis of definitions and postulates, a system the complexity and thoroughness of which has caused all students of mathematics at one time or another to marvel and admire. But, of course, a definition is little more than assigning a definite term to a definite thing. It is when we begin to consider the premises that are necessary for arriving ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... speech,—the work of generations upon generations, each striving to express itself, its feelings, its thoughts, its needs, its sufferings, its joys, its inexpressible desires. Wonderful is human speech, for its complexity, its delicacy, its power. But the pine-tree, under the visitations of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say,—things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... with the EU and Kosovo's local provisional government to accelerate economic growth, lower unemployment, and attract foreign investment to help Kosovo integrate into regional economic structures. The complexity of Serbia and Kosovo's political and legal relationships has created uncertainty over property rights and hindered the privatization of state-owned assets in Kosovo. Most of Kosovo's population lives ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be the next word—the word that follows the last, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... product. Everything in that old world would appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... unity in human affairs, and particularly just now, when the supreme unity seems to some to be nationalism, and to others the negation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rather complex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity was confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2] Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as a peculiarly delicate test of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... distributed with greater regularity, and the perturbations of climate would be comparatively small and regular; though even under such circumstances there would still exist a tendency to discontinuity and complexity of movements from that influence of rain, the peculiar character of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... far as my knowledge goes, all the ingenuity and all the learning of hostile critics have not enabled them to adduce a solitary fact, of which it can be said, this is irreconcilable with the Darwinian theory. In the prodigious variety and complexity of organic nature, there are multitudes of phenomena which are not deducible from any generalisations we have yet reached. But the same may be said of every other class of natural objects. I believe that astronomers cannot yet ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... extensively experimental. Several thousand years, during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared, have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which differs widely ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... or three days passed, and the campaign deepened and popular interest increased. Not since the eve of the Civil War had there been such complexity and intensity of interests, and never before had the personal factor been so strong. Out of the vast turmoil quickly emerged James Grayson as the most picturesque figure that ever appeared upon the stage of national politics in America. His powerful ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of the population are not mediaevally simplified—they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... into account that they are observed phenomena. While the physicist withdraws from consideration the part of the observer in the verification of physical phenomena, our role is to renounce this abstraction, to re-establish things in their original complexity, and to ascertain in what the conception of matter consists when it is borne in mind that all material phenomena are known only in their relation to ourselves, to our bodies, our nerves, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has not manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart saw Ann slowly ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... logical definitions than their critics and expositors of the twentieth century. Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of their very simplicity highly improbable. Recognition must ever be given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines of a particular cult, which embraced the accumulated ideas of centuries, were invariably confusing and vague, and full of inconsistencies; they were mystical in the sense that the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... these two practices, but only because of the large number of abstentions—merely 29 per cent. voted in Rome, 38 per cent. in Naples, and in Turin scarcely more. The people were tired of the excessive complexity and dissimulation of Italian politics. There was a good deal of violence—in Milan, Florence, Bologna and Sicily the riots were sometimes fatal—and with such an electorate, more extensive than heretofore, so that symbols had often to ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the— the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... proclaiming the omnipotence of natural selection, Weismann found he was forced to the admission that: "as a rule we cannot furnish the proof that a definite adaptation has originated through natural selection," in other words: We know nothing in reality of the complexity of causes which has produced the given phenomenon. So we may on the contrary, with Spencer, speak of ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... retreats differ from encounter groups. First, encounter groups are composed of individuals, while our groups are confined to, and led by, married couples. This distinction calls for different approaches. There is a greater complexity in the leadership, and a greater complexity in the group itself. The encounter group is confined to interactions between separate individuals and usually these individuals have not known each other before joining the group and probably will ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... dazedly, recalling himself to a complexity he had all but forgotten. "So they do. I dare say she will ask me. But I don't—Nan, to tell the truth, I haven't ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... There was complexity of element enough in the thing she was on her way to do, Bettina was thinking, as she was driven over the white ribbon of country road that unrolled over rise and hollow, between the sheep-dotted greenness of fields and the scented hedges. The soft ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... again on Dr. Richards' trees when budded by the "Twin-T" method, but Carr and other Chinese varieties were budded successfully. The graft-compatibility problem in chestnuts is one of considerable complexity. Thus Carr, which has presented incompatibility with certain stocks of C. mollissima at other places, grew on these trees, and Colossal, compatible on another C. mollissima tree, failed on trees which are apparently compatible with Carr. The Chinese ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just then to send a mail or two which was in danger of going straight to its destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways; with all affability conveying to Mr and Mrs Meagles that general assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a sacrifice for Mr and Mrs Meagles's good, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... man sees that the drama of his time has gradually passed from one phase to another of complexity in thought coupled with simplicity of incident, and it occurs to him that just one further step is needed to make something final in British art. We seem to be just on the threshold of something which would ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... therein, such as the stomach, the liver, the bowels, etc., could not be entered by the surgeon without the certain result of death. To do so at the present time is the daily experience in almost every great hospital. The complexity of civilization has inflicted all manner of hurts on the human body, and the malignity of disease has spared no part. It was supposed that the cranial cavity could not be entered or repaired without producing ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... partially filled with oxide of iron and agate: the curvilinear lines show the course of the innumerable, concentric, concretionary zones of different shades of colour and of coarseness in the particles of tuff. The symmetry and complexity of the arrangement gave the surface an elegant appearance. It may be seen how obviously the fissures determine (or have been determined by) the shape, sometimes of the whole concretion, and sometimes only of its central parts. The fissures also determine ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... della Stella is the picture which was stolen in 1911, but quickly recovered. It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery: nominally custodians of the museum. To repeat one of Vasari's sentences: ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... being, I confess, somewhat bewildered by the variety and complexity of these ingenious projects, I felt disposed to take my leave; but Vindar insisted on conducting us into an inner apartment, to see his poetry box. This was a large piece of furniture, profusely decorated with metals of various colours, curiously ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the sum total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type in the history of the successive vertebral periods of the geologist, symbolical of the history of every individual man. It is not difficult to conceive how, on a subject of such complexity, especially if approached in an irreverent spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions should take place. Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to misapply, in his Pollio, to his great patron Octavius, those ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Medea—of Ariadne; not less old and not less imperishably beautiful. Neither spoke of her idyll turned to a crowder's song. Knowing that there were no words which she could bear, he waited, his mind filled with deep pity, hers with God knows what complexity, what singleness of feeling, until at last a low sound—no intelligible word—came from her throat. The plumed fan dropped the length of its silken cord, and her hands went out for help that should yet be voiceless, assuming ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were furiously ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells |
