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Constructive   Listen
adjective
Constructive  adj.  
1.
Having ability to construct or form; employed in construction; as, to exhibit constructive power. "The constructive fingers of Watts."
2.
Derived from, or depending on, construction, inference, or interpretation; not directly expressed, but inferred.
3.
Helpful; promoting improvement; intended to help; as, constructive criticism; constructive suggestions. Contrasted with destructive.
Constructive crimes (Law), acts having effects analogous to those of some statutory or common law crimes; as, constructive treason. Constructive crimes are no longer recognized by the courts.
Constructive notice, notice imputed by construction of law.
Constructive trust, a trust which may be assumed to exist, though no actual mention of it be made.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Constructive" Quotes from Famous Books



... Guardian, the stable of Augeas there confronting him would perhaps have dismayed a less enthusiastic and a less determined man. Everything was at loose ends; under the shiftless hand of Gunterson even the fine insurance machine built up by Mr. Wintermuth in his best constructive days had suddenly grown to creak painfully in its joints. The heads of departments, seeing no inspiring or even efficient leadership above them, had become discouraged, and there had been no one to brace their ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... both instructive and destructive; but he is not so constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into which that conflict of dialects in the English language—a language which is grammarless and dependent upon usage—has left us. He tells us that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately throwing overboard ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... Laslett, in his work on timber, [149] says, in reference to Molave, "It can be recommended to notice as being fit to supplement any of the hardwoods in present use for constructive purposes." From the same work I have extracted the following record of experiments made by Mr. Laslett ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... with favor by the King himself, if the anecdote—which seems to rest on undeniable authority—be true, that he expressed satisfaction at the acquittal of some prisoners, on the ground that almost any evil would be more tolerable than that of putting men to death "for constructive treason." It must therefore, probably, be affirmed that these two acts, the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act, went beyond the necessity of the case; that they were not only violations ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... trouped success and happiness; and to balance them came gratitude, humility, and service. In the meantime, with every lengthening year, the friendship between Laurie and Ted toughened in fiber and became a closer bond. And it was not engineering or electricity that ultimately claimed the constructive interest of the two comrades but instead the Fernald mills, which upon Grandfather Fernald's retirement called for younger men at their helm. So after going forth into the great world and whetting the weapons of their intellect ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... I have ventured to give a hint—the view of Mr. Reinhart as an artist of immense capacity who yet somehow doesn't care. I must add that this aspect of him is modified, in the one case very gracefully, in the other by the operation of a sort of constructive humor, remarkably strong, in his illustrations of Spanish life and his sketches of the Berlin ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... mood of mind that I became a constructive microscopist. After another year passed in this new pursuit, experimenting on every imaginable substance—glass, gems, flints, crystals, artificial crystals formed of the alloy of various vitreous materials—in short, having constructed as many varieties of lenses ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien

... is perceived. The capacity of the will is strictly limited in this regard and the observer is as really subject to time conditions in his effortful construction as in his effortless apprehension. The rhythmically constructive attitude does not destroy the existence of limits to the rate at which the series must take place, but only ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... Or was it but a godless colour which the heart varnished with its own grief? Or if the human heart came from nothing and was sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from nothing and be sad too—wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of humanity? Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and its meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours the aspects of his mind; ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... as much constructive as destructive. He shows not only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,—science deals with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... at last, evidence that his brain came from his coyote mother, a brain that is capable of constructive reasoning, of taking two facts which the physical senses have verified and evolving a third ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... anticipated that the series will stimulate the study of the problems of delinquency, the State control of which commands as great expenditure of human toil and treasure as does the control of constructive public education. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... these forms, the constructive philosophy of our century has visibly fallen short of the immense volume of old and new truths which it has striven to mould and formulate. The characteristic genius of the time is shown more powerfully on the one hand in ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... Carving," "Leather Work," "Metal Work," "Drawing and Designing," "The Minor Arts," "Twelve Manuals in Art Work," "The Album of Repousse Work," "Industrial Art in Education," "Hints on Self Education," and many other works along the lines of Manual Training, etc., and the Development of the Constructive Faculties; "Kulsop the Master, and other Algonquin Poems and Legends," "The Alternate Sex," and many other works, some of which are now out of print, but a number of which may be purchased from, or through, any bookseller. There has been recently published a biographical work embodying ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... discover intelligently (or reflectively) just that underlying system of Analogy which the primitive Instinct was competent to appreciate unintelligently; and, by the greater clearness of this intelligent perception, be able to elevate the Science of Language, and found it upon a new and constructive, instead of upon this merely instinctual plane? To all these questions the Universologists return an affirmative answer. They go farther, and aver that this great intellectual undertaking is now fully achieved, and is only awaiting the opportunity ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and I give you my word, now and here, that I'll leave you every penny of my own. I haven't many, unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I want," Strether went on, "to have been at least to that extent constructive even expiatory. I've been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... is being established to stimulate the study of American literature and its development; more immediately, and as the direct means to that end, the purpose of the Foundation will be to afford a vehicle for the best constructive criticism, spoken and written, on the beginnings and development of our literature. In association with the faculty of English at one of the larger and older American universities, Yale, the Foundation ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... this book is a good one. The mechanic should receive his meed of appreciation. Our constructive heroes should not be forgotten, for the heroism of inventive labor has its own romance, and its results aid greatly the cause of human advancement. Most of the information embodied in this volume has heretofore existed only in the memories of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... "self-poised," the "well-balanced" man, of whom you can safely predict what he will do under given conditions; the man who never bitterly disappoints you and makes you weep for very pity of his weakness, will never appall you by exhibitions of his strength. He may possess constructive talent, but never that creative power which we call genius because it suggests the genii. "No man is a hero to his valet," says the adage. Carlyle assumes this to be the fault of the latter—due to sawdust or other cheap filling in the head of the menial. Yet, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... allow the times which Nicolas gives with minute exactness. For his actually joining the "Raisonnable" they give, loosely, the spring of 1771,—March or April. This is very possible, as rating back, for the sake of gaining constructive time needed to qualify for promotion, was tolerated by the practice of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so Abt Vogler interprets music on the other side—that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... a period of great constructive activity at the Tower. The new monarch was one of the foremost military engineers of the age; and when we consider the valuable experience in the art of war which he had already gained, in the decade prior to his ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... framing hypothesis points to another want in the Baconian doctrine. If that power form part of the true method, then the mind is not wholly passive or recipient; it anticipates nature, and moulds the experience received by it in accordance with its own constructive ideas or conceptions; and yet further, the minds of various investigators can never be reduced to the same dead mechanical level.[93] There will still be room for the scientific use of the imagination and for the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... is far more comradeship and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... the score as the antithesis of the "Counter-Charm" mentioned in the analysis of the prelude. It illustrates an ingenious constructive device. Desiring to send Gretel on an errand a moment later, the Witch disenchants ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... man. "I beg your pardon for troubling you, but you seem to be a mechanic, and that's just the sort of man I'm looking for. Are you open to an offer to do some inventive and constructive work?" ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... knowledge of the art of pottery. The making of pottery is the occupation peculiarly of a sedentary race, and hence of a race likely to be agriculturists. As it requires the building faculty to originate the mounds, so it requires the constructive faculty to make pottery. In constructive ability our Indians are singularly deficient, just as it is with greatest difficulty that they can be induced even on a small scale to practice agriculture. It has been ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce

... Brilliant apercus, gnomic sayings, flights of fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections—of these there is enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for the critic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theological writings—nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mere intelligence—suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation of posterity, the fact that ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... if we were to conduct this round table to get to discussing the different qualities or desirability or other aspects among varieties, and each fellow would be right, because I know there wouldn't be agreement. It would make an interesting round table, but I don't know how constructive it would be. So I have tried in these preliminary remarks to get you to thinking about this ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... in the garden, and Cherry was in that world of joy and something like inspiration known to spirits imbued with any of the constructive poetry of art, always endeavouring to fulfil an ideal, never indeed satisfying themselves, but never so at rest ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... effects of conscious art, yet one of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the pervading sense of it [25] as we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is one of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... Municipalities into Electoral Councils, was introduced in the House of Commons on the 15th of February. The Bill was opposed by the Conservatives, but passed the House of Commons. In the Lords an amendment of Lyndhurst's struck out the constructive clauses, and the Act became, on the 18th of May, an Act for the Abolition of Municipalities in Ireland. Lord John Russell brought forward a motion to reconstruct the Bill. But the Peers declined to pass it, and ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria

... the back of her mind. Suppose (so it ran in his constructive fancy) that instead of being a prosperous, protected young woman playing the wage-earner more or less as Marie Antoinette had played the milkmaid, she had been Mamie Riley across the hall, whose work was bitter earnest, whose earnings ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... The first is the unusual intensity and prevalence of the religious temperament. This has a double effect, both conservative and alterative: ancient customs receive an unreasonable respect: they are not abolished for their immorality or absurdity; but since real interest implies some measure of constructive power, there is a constant growth of new ideas and reinterpretations resulting in inconsistent combinations. The second is the absence of hierarchy and discipline. The guiding principle of the Brahmans has always been not so much that they ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... careful computation shows us that in England, where indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with them, even when ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... in his constructive policy, Borrow turned his attention to one of destruction. He had already announced to the Bible Society that the authority of the Pope was in a ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... sense of sound, so that a fair comparison is hard to make, except with other deaf-blind persons. Her dexterity is not notable either in comparison with the normal person, whose movements are guided by the eye, or, I am told, with other blind people. She has practised no single constructive craft which would call for the use of her hands. When she was twelve, her friend Mr. Albert H. Munsell, the artist, let her experiment with a wax tablet and a stylus. He says that she did pretty well and managed to make, after ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... necessarily subordinated to that of the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in South Africa. But during the second period of the war—that is to say, from November 29th, 1900, when Lord Kitchener succeeded Lord Roberts—the constructive statesmanship of the High Commissioner was called forth in an increasing degree as the area secured for peaceable occupation became widened, and the problems involved in the settlement and future administration of the new colonies emerged into increasing prominence and importance. But ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... social structure stand the trinity of Kami, mythologically called the Central Master (Naka-Nushi) and the two Constructive Chiefs (Musubi no Kami). The Central Master was the progenitor of the Imperial family; the Constructive Chiefs were the nobility, the official class. What was originally involved in the conception of official functions, we learn from incidents ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... fact of an efficient leadership during the war, and of constructive, progressive, economic service in peace, the Republican leaders developed a smoke screen, behind which they seek to gain their objective, the spoils of office. For years the best thought and the humanitarian impulses of civilized countries have been applied ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... the power of the purchaser; or there must be such acts and declarations of the parties as imply a change of ownership. When the right of property has been transferred to the buyer, whether by an actual or only a constructive delivery, he immediately assumes the risk of the goods; so that if they shall be afterward injured or destroyed, he must bear ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young

... does render it unnecessary and indeed absurd that they should be abundant or gigantic. The danger which always impends over the sea-power of any country is that, after being long unused, it may lose touch of the sea. The revolution in the constructive arts during the last half-century, which has also been a period of but little-interrupted naval peace, and the universal adoption of mechanical appliances, both for ship-propulsion and for many minor services—mere materiel ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge

... to the author none is more helpful than the mass of written criticism handed in by the audience, and representing some two or three hundred frank and widely varying views of the work in question. I am especially grateful for this constructive criticism, much of which has been of real service in the subsequent ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden

... through all the ages, and the prophecy of our text is yet unfulfilled. Its fulfilment is the meaning and end of all history. For the present, there has to be much destructive as well as constructive work done. Many a wretched hovel, the abode of sorrow and want, many a den of infamy, many a palace of pride, many a temple of idols, will have to be pulled down yet, and men's eyes will be blinded by the dust, and their hearts will ache as they look at the ruins. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... his neighbours, and not caring to remove it, Mr. Wylder betook himself to the exercise of certain constructive faculties, not unfrequently developed in circumstances in which a man has to be his own Jack-of-all-trades: finding a certain old manor-house which he had haunted as a boy, chiefly for the sake of its attendant goose-berries and apples, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... French ideas was strong in shaping constructive work in American politics, as the colonies passed into States; but aside from the separation of the judicial department from the executive and legislative it had little effect upon the courts until the opening of ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD

... thank you for your invaluable assistance. I have not felt the blow [Hooker's criticisms] so much of late, as I have been beyond measure interested on the constructive instinct of the hive-bee. Adios, you terrible worrier ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... view will continually be shifting. We are largely orthodox in our teaching. If brought up on the laboratory method of instruction it may seem the best one for us, but others may prefer another way which they have inherited. Let us appeal, then, for a constructive orthodoxy. Let us be as teachers of a subject to which we are devoted, truly and sincerely open-minded, quick to recognize and sincere in our efforts to adopt what is better wherever we meet it: waiting not to meet it, either, but going out to seek it. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... of God in the gospel. He not only taught that Christ is the Saviour of sinners, but pressed upon every sinner the offer of the Saviour. Instead of requiring those whom he addressed, to accept of salvation, by the discovery of convictions, or feelings, or any thing else in themselves, constructive of an initial work of grace, he simply and unreservedly taught them that sinners, as such, are addressed in the gospel, and that all who are sinners have an equal warrant to accept freely that which is thus so freely ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain the attention of the future historian, simply because it was ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... familiarity with the Elizabethan school, and indeed with the whole range of English poetry, seems to point to a more constant study of our national literature. Byron was his chief master in those early poetic days. He never ceased to honour him as the one poet who combined a constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... She implored a space, however brief, of reconciliation and reunion before the supreme farewell was said. But it had become natural to Katherine's mind, so unsparingly self-trained in humble obedience to the divine ordering, not to stay in the destructive, but pass on to the constructive stage. She would not indulge herself in rebellion, but rather fashion her thought without delay to that which should make for inward peace. And so now, turning her eyes, in thought, from the present, she went back on the baby-love, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... public opinion, once created in the ranks of our Catholic laity, will make the Extension Society a live-wire, a dynamic force of the Church in Canada. Let us not forget, vision—and public opinion is the vision of the multitude—is the first and primary of constructive forces. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... weekly journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little for constructive progress. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... exponent, of a bad and remorseless heart. The expression of his mouth was at the same time both hard and wanton, and his eyes, though full of a lively lustre, resembled in their brightness those of a serpent or hyena. His forehead was constructive but low, and, we may say, rather unintellectual than otherwise. He was without whiskers, a circumstance which caused a wound on the back part of his jaw to be visible, and one-half of the left-hand little finger had been shot off in defence of his church and country, according to his own account. ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... whose will be the central and prominent figure. You know that Mr. Gladstone will stand out before posterity as the greatest man of his time—remarkable not only for his extraordinary eloquence, for his great ability, for his stedfastness of purpose, for his constructive skill, but more, perhaps, than all these, for his personal character, and for the high tone that he has introduced into our polities and public fife. I sometimes think that great men are like great mountains, and that we do not appreciate their magnitude while we are close to them. You have to ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser

... rest noted the change and became the father of ceramics. We use the word in its widest, in its etymological sense. Ceramics is the art of fashioning clay and burning it in the fire so as to obtain constructive materials, domestic utensils, or objects of luxury ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... anger stops digestion and poisons the secretions of the body. Worry does the same. It takes the mind from constructive thoughts and deeds and centers it upon ourselves. An effective mind must be tranquil, otherwise it upsets the body and fails to give proper ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... which maintains justice. Thus it may be said that the prophets, because they operated in terms of the reorganization of the whole of society and not of the incidental correction of piecemeal evils, were humanists. Their program was constructive and aimed at the enfranchisement of manhood. The rabbis, on the other hand, were (relatively only) philanthropists. Their program was remedial, and they aimed rather at the relief of suffering than the realization and ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... described as having eagerness, self-control, mastery of words, gentle persuasiveness, prodigious activity, capacity for work, extreme seriousness, range of experience, constructive power, mastery of detail, and deep concentration. "So vast and so well ordered was the arsenal of his mind, that he could both instruct and persuade, stimulate his friends and demolish his opponents, and do all these things at an ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human life before the ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... overwork or slavery, or that excessive specialization that industrialism has brought about, but will be merely a pleasant activity for certain hours of the day, giving a man an outlet for his spontaneous constructive impulses. There is to be no compulsion, no law, no government exercising force; there will still be acts of the community, but these are to spring from universal consent, not from any enforced submission of even the smallest minority. ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... province of thought and speculation. Many a sleepless night in these years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy—English, German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a quality possessed by few professed philosophers—a large knowledge of the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the laboratory ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... particular; but the moment is at hand when it will be necessary to reduce it to a definite and feasible scheme of domestic government and policy. When that moment comes, will the prince of obstructionists in St. Stephen's prove himself equally capable as a constructive statesman on College Green? Should Mr. Gladstone find himself in a position soon after the opening of Parliament (he is not in a position now) to enter into practical negotiation with Mr. Parnell, may not the latter discover, as many an able and successful ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... come images of dainty beauty, where they glow and grow radiant. With lavish unrestraint the life of this French woman pours itself into her sons. The third child died in infancy. The eldest survived his mother by some thirteen years. The youngest is a constructive mechanical engineer. The second ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright

... gipsies and the discovery of the spring seemed to them little less than supernatural. Besides which, in innumerable little ways Felix's superior knowledge had told upon them. His very manners spoke of high training. His persuasive voice won them. His constructive skill and power of planning, as shown in the palisades and enclosure, showed a grasp of circumstances new to them. This was a man such as they ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... cumulative: it is distributive. When different arguments are each necessary to a conclusion, the evidence is cumulative; when any one will do, even though they strengthen each other, it is distributive. The word "cumulative" is a synonym of the law word "constructive"; a whole which will do made out of parts which separately will not. Lord Strafford [552] opens his defence with the use of both words: "They have invented a kind of accumulated or constructive evidence; by ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... something of its prosperity, while Louis spent his life in crushing its institutions and in destroying its elements of independence. A great and terrible prince, Louis XI. failed in having little or no constructive power; he was strong to throw down the older society, he built little in its room. Most serious of all was his action with respect to the district of the River Somme, at that time the northern frontier of France. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... of the Genius.—The directions in which the genius actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact. He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great "constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason for excluding him from society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts, thoughts which ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... connection when one knows all the facts," he said at length, "but it seems to me that you have the materials from which to form a conjecture. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think, when you have had more experience, you will find yourself able to work out a problem of this kind. What is required is constructive imagination and a rigorous exactness in reasoning. Now, you are a good reasoner, and you have recently shown me that you have the necessary imagination; you merely lack experience in the use of your faculties. When you learn my purpose in having these things made—as you will before ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... of his spectroscopic examinations. He says, "Such being the relations between the organs of reproduction and the foliage, it is to some extent possible to understand the connection between parasitic plants like fungi, which do not derive their support from the constructive energy of their fronds, and those which are self-supporting and possess true fronds. In the highest classes of plants the flowers are connected with the leaves, more especially by means of xanthophyll and yellow xanthophyll, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... inadmissible latitude of construction and a reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson

... spoken of as a genius. It is now only a little while since we began to add to this list the scientific, the commercial and the political genius. The military genius has held a place for ages, but his specialty is losing standing as a social asset, and we can foresee a time when he must learn constructive rather than destructive methods of action in order to qualify ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 1762. It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief after the purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire; and besides the superiority which every constructive effort will always enjoy over one that is merely destructive, it possessed the immense advantage of appearing amid an all but universal scepticism as to the soundness of all foregone knowledge in matters speculative. Now, in all the speculations of Rousseau, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... "from Fries, Gallatin, or Duane, nor was he at the time of his capture accompanied by any United Irishman." "He, however, acknowledges that there are others concerned, and that he is not the principal instigator." All Federalists agreed that the Southern Democratic talk was constructive insurrection,—which it certainly was,—and they painted graphic pictures of noisy "Jacobins" over their wine, and eager, dusky listeners behind their chairs. "It is evident that the French principles of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... tools of the scraps of iron and steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the thrill there is in ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... producing decomposition, it is primarily because of the products of their action that they are of value. Wherever bacteria seize hold of organic matter and feed upon it, there are certain to be developed new chemical compounds, resulting largely from decomposition, but partly also from constructive processes. These new compounds are of great variety. Different species of bacteria do not by any means produce the same compounds even when growing in and decomposing the same food material. Moreover, the same species of bacteria may give rise to different products when growing in ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn

... so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider this idea of the decision of a majority as if it were a law of our original nature. But such constructive whole, residing in a part only, is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out of civil society Nature knows nothing of it; nor are men, even when arranged according ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of the present volume and of its predecessor is to lay the basis of a natural philosophy which is the necessary presupposition of a reorganised speculative physics. The general assimilation of space and time which dominates the constructive thought can claim the independent support of Minkowski from the side of science and also of succeeding relativists, while on the side of philosophers it was, I believe, one theme of Prof. Alexander's Gifford lectures delivered some few years ago but not yet published. He also summarised his ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... schools. In consequence, teachers from different quarters may be using quite different processes and methods in laundry work, cooking, or housekeeping. It is time some fundamental things were agreed upon, and although standardising must not be allowed to become stereotyping, at present constructive generalisation is needed, as well as the upsetting of out-grown traditions. In this context it would be well to discuss a question more properly to be taken at the end of this paper—the connection between the teaching in elementary ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... cruelty had not then appealed to me. (I except the original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different texture and color was subtle and pleasurable. I think the note of constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and snatched about by the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... with Gail, flying over the range, visiting Hickock's herd camps and slaughtering crews. It was a pleasant day and I managed to make it constructive ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... character and force of the weapons employed. With or without design, they are, each in their way, assailing one or other of the principles upon which we rest our demonstration of the being of God. As we proceed, we shall find that Mill and the Constructive Idealists are really engaged in undermining "the principle of substance;" their doctrine is a virtual denial of all objective realities answering to our subjective ideas of matter, mind, and God. The ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... few problems in present-day constructive social economics which are more important than the development of a State-wide and a nation-wide policy for the compulsory official identification and registration of feeble-minded children, particularly all those who come from homes ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews

... is in what followed. There were features in which the campaigns of the Mexican and South American insurgent leaders resembled at least the partisan warfare so often waged by American Revolutionary generals; but with the deeds of the great constructive statesman of the United States there is nothing in the career of any Spanish-American community to compare. It was the power to build a solid and permanent Union, the power to construct a mighty nation out of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... so presently she rose, and in the sharp chill of the room, bathed and dressed, though what had once been her savage satisfaction in braving the cold had long since become mere undramatic ability to endure it without thinking. With Mary, life and all its constructive rites had won what the sacrificial has never been able to achieve—the soul of the casual, of, so to say, second nature, which is ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale

... had been able to keep a united party behind him, his Administration could scarcely have been marked by constructive legislation. His party had lost control of the House of Representatives in the election of 1874. The Forty-fifth Congress, chosen with Hayes in 1876, and the Forty-sixth, in 1878, were Democratic, and delighted to embarrass the Administration. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... Social Democratic party was, at the beginning, so far from anything like Bolshevism, so thoroughly constructive and opportunistic in its policies, that its official organ, Pravda—not yet captured by the Bolsheviki—put forward a program which might easily have been made the basis for an effective coalition. It was in some respects disappointingly moderate: like the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... is one phase of what should be a comprehensive and far-reaching scheme of constructive statesmanship for the purpose of broadening our markets, securing our business interests on a safe basis, and making firm our new position in the international industrial world; while scrupulously safeguarding the rights of wage-worker and capitalist, of investor and private ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... that the talk was not always sustained at this constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high adventure ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... away such thoughts, and with a certain effort replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South once more. It was a very simple idea. Siner was returning to his native village in Tennessee to teach school. He planned to begin his work with the ordinary public school at Hooker's Bend, but, in the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... literature in Timbuctoo. Her scholars with the University of Sankore as a center had so generously contributed to the world's thought that they had brought to that country no less fame than its statesmen and warriors by their constructive work and daring deeds. The country, however, was finally invaded by the Moors and the scattering of the talented class resulting thereby led to the inevitable decline of culture. "Yet," says Felix DuBois, "the greatest work of all literature of the Sudan was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... the individual, must have intelligent organization and live in harmony with the laws of nature in order to survive. Opposition to them means destruction Cooperation is constructive. ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... long period of unparalleled expansion, during which the workers became afflicted with many illusions about the possibilities of prosperity under capitalism. Now, however, American capitalism, like the world capitalist system of which it is a part, has exhausted its constructive role of building the industries. It is now obsolete and gradually sinking into decay. Industrial crises follow each other with increasing severity and the masses are becoming more and more pauperized. The growth of fascism and war ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio

... and odds and ends of stuff are sent to the Beehive from all parts of the country by sympathising friends. These are heaped together in one corner of the room where the poor old things work. Down before this mass of stuff are set certain of the company who have large constructive powers. These skilfully contrive, cut out, alter, and piece together all kinds of clothing, including the house slippers and Glengarry caps worn by the little rescued boys. Even handkerchiefs and babies' ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... developed far earlier and in a far wider manner. Its present scope, which has grown and developed under Russian rule, embraces all sides, not only of the economic, but of the civil, life of the land. Russian autocracy has thus given irrefragable proof of its constructive powers in the sphere of civic development. The historian of the future will have to note its ethical importance in a far wider sphere as well: the greatest of social problems have found a peaceable solution in Russia, thanks to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... of material for this work, a marked distinction has been made between games, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unorganized play and constructive activities included in many books of children's games. While the term "play" includes games, so that we "play games," it applies also to informal play activities, such as a child's "playing horse," "playing house," or playing in the sand. In such unorganized play there are ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... talked, his size and even the thin boyish voice were negated by the intelligence of his words, the size of his vocabulary, the clarity of his statements. Now that he was silent, he became no more than an eight-year-old lad who could not possibly be doing anything constructive with this mad array of equipment. The messiness of the place merely made the madness of ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... phase of the revolution is over and all the energy of the Government is turned to constructive work. The terror has ceased. All power of judgment has been taken away from the extraordinary commission for suppression of the counter-revolution, which now merely accuses suspected counter-revolutionaries, who are tried by the regular, established, ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt

... He passed away silently and the world did not know Him. 'He shall not strive nor cry, nor cause His voice to be heard in the streets.' And as the Christ so His Church, and so His Gospel, and so all good movements that begin from Him. Destructive preparations may be noisy; they generally are. Constructive beginnings are silent and small. If a thing is launched with a great beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, you may be pretty sure there is very little in it. Drums are hollow, or they would not make such a noise. Trumpets only catch and give forth wind. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... April 27th, the debate began on Sir William Harcourt's Budget; and it found Mr. Goschen in an unusually playful mood. He had a task for which his talents eminently fitted him. Irresolute, timid, changeable, he is the very worst man in the world for constructive legislation; but give him the opportunity of criticising what somebody else has proposed, and he is in his real element, and is, perhaps, the very best man in the House of Commons. There wasn't much to criticise in the Budget of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... West. And in his case it came to pass that the stimulus evoked the latent potentialities of his race for evolving modes of expression demanded by the period of transition in which he was placed. They found expression in great constructive work, in the restoration of quiet amidst disorder, in the earliest effort to spread education both among men and women, in questions of social welfare, in industrial efforts, in the establishment of people's bank and in the foundation of industrial and technical ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... style; and one is struck by the delicacy and self-restraint of, say, the Tuscan ones among the Scaliger tombs compared with the more picturesque looseness of genuine Veronese and Venetian Gothic sculpture. But the constructive, and, so to speak, space enclosing, principles of the great art of mediaeval France were even less understood by the Tuscan than by any other Italian builders; and, as the finest work of Tuscan facade ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... the universe, and, when formed in nature's laboratory, at once seek quiet and loving companionship with kindred molecules, and retain it forever afterwards. The idea that they should break away from their loving molecular embrace, and, by any process of differentiation or constructive agency of their own, seek an alliance with some living dog-germ in order to be built up into living dog-tissue, presents about as perverse and wayward an impulse on the part of matter as can well be imagined by ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... genuine community life; in so far as what are called school discipline, government, order, etc., are the expressions of this inherent social spirit; in so far as the methods used are those that appeal to the active and constructive powers, permitting the child to give out and thus to serve; in so far as the curriculum is so selected and organized as to provide the material for affording the child a consciousness of the world in which he has to play a part, and the demands he has to meet; so far as these ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey

... the new and vigorous forces in American life I cannot agree with your apprehensions; but there is one thing which you said with which I heartily agree. You said that you wished we might settle down to sound and constructive work, and get rid of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... the main constructive conclusion to be drawn. Somewhat akin to it is another conclusion of ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... popular stage when he turned to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... proportionate rise in the lower elevations; but the fact remains that the exterior and interior do not correspond. A greater authority than this critic has thus defined good architecture: "The essence of good architecture of any kind is that its constructive system should be put boldly forward, that its decorative system should be such as in no way conceals or masks the construction, but makes the constructive features themselves ornamental."[81] And at his uncle's cathedral of Ely, Wren might ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive imagination. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. Now of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom I have briefly studied in this book, this is especially and pleasingly true, that they do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. There is nothing merely sceptically progressive about Mr. Rudyard Kipling. There is nothing in the least broad minded about Mr. Bernard Shaw. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger. The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work," "discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... contract on my part. (Laughter). In the first place, the problem of growing and marketing chestnuts, I think, is one that I could hardly be expected fairly to discuss. I am here rather to explain the attitude and action of the Federal Horticultural Board than to try to give any constructive advice to the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various

... building, what have we done? Of the greater part of all that skill and strength, NO vestige is left, but fallen stones, that encumber the fields and impede the streams. But, from this waste of disorder, and of time, and of rage, what IS left to us? Constructive and progressive creatures, that we are, with ruling brains, and forming hands, capable of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of the sea? The white surf rages in vain against the ramparts ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... be used to create turmoil. The population of the continent was confined to the staffs of research-bases established during the International Geophysical Year. In theory the bases were an object-lesson in co-operation for a constructive purpose, which splendid spirit of mutual trust and confidence must spread through the world and some day lead to an era of blissful and ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... end of the progressive process. One sought refuge in Toryism, modified by benevolence; the other in metaphysical moonshine and esoteric theology. Byron, on the other hand, while not in the least constructive, or enamored of the more advanced ideas in religion, politics, and sociology, was filled with a bitter hatred and satiric contempt for the old order of things, with its lies, hypocrisies, and oppressions. He embodied what Mr. Brooke calls "the destroying ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... roses and honeysuckles to bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so much better than all ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... be prepared substantially to accept, for it is the condition of that fundamental belief in established institutions which alone can make it worth while to adapt and to improve them. It was, accordingly, the conception tacitly, at least, accepted in Greece, during the period of her constructive vigour. But it is a conception constantly open to attack. For law, at any given moment, even under the most favourable conditions, cannot do more than approximate to its own ideal. It is, at best, but a rough attempt at that reconciliation ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... constructive dialogue and consultation on political and security issues of common interest ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the springs of Greek success achieved and maintained by the great men of Hellas on the field of scientific inquiry to a remarkable conjunction of natural gifts and conditions. There was the teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless critical spirit which shrank from no test of audacity; there was the most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest faculty for descrying and distinguishing the finest ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... the political world rallied to the new man; and the new man did not disappoint the faith placed in him. Through the next two years he stood in every eye as the embodiment of constructive statesmanship. His Government had strength enough in the country to dispense with "graft." The result was a thorough overhauling of the State machinery. Self-distrust founded on past failures vanished. Greece seemed like an invalid healed and ready ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... effect of war on sentiment and the imagination, 28. Real power is constructive, not destructive or repressive, 29. Moral heroism, 31. The saving or provident character of morality, 32. Morality and the consummation of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... several bills, and sent back others unsigned, suggesting alterations. Among them is the Conscript and Exemption bills, which he has detained ten days, as Senators say, on a point of constructive etiquette, insisting that the President and Secretary ought to make certain details and exemptions instead of Congress, etc. It is precious time lost, but perhaps in view of the great calamities immediately threatening the country, Congress may ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... other forms of permissiveness have led to practices that circumscribe and hamper life. Their declared objective is the liberation and enlargement of human life and well being. Where they have been tested out they have proved themselves to be obstructive and destructive rather than creative and constructive. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... he carried through was the famous "Crimes Act," perhaps the best monument that there is of his legislative and constructive ability. The criminal law of the United States had scarcely been touched since the days of the first Congress, and was very defective and unsatisfactory. Mr. Webster's first task, in which he received most essential and valuable though unacknowledged ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... carried the writer to a region so little seductive as Africa, and kept him there so long. He now offers them to the public, after some labor bestowed in correction and amendment, but retaining their original form, that of a daily Journal, which better suited his lack of literary practice and constructive skill, and was in fitter keeping with the humble pretensions of the work, than a re-arrangement on artistic principles. At various points of the narrative, however, he has introduced observations or disquisitions from two or three common-place books, which he kept simultaneously with the ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered. France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most important of all, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... Escot. I contend that the original unsophisticated man was by no means constructive. He lived in the open air, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... text is made public of a letter written by Theodore Roosevelt to Mrs. George Rublee of Washington, in opposition to the principles advanced by the Woman's Party for Constructive Peace, in which he says the platform is "both silly and base"; at a meeting in New York of the Central Federated Union a resolution is passed in favor of a general strike in those industries employed in producing munitions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... again. The new astronomical conception of the world and the growing objective experimental science gradually began to command confidence, and from being a destroyer of excessively dogmatic notions, science began to rise to its modern constructive and creative position. But the problem of mind remained on a wrong basis and still does so even with most scientists. Too much had been claimed for the psyche, and because of the singling out of a great world of spirit, the world of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... by Assistant Secretary McCloy.[2-71] The Army staff amplified and improved the services of the Bureau of Public Relations by appointing Negroes to the bureau and by releasing more news items of special interest to black journalists. The result was a considerable increase in constructive and accurate stories on (p. 043) black participation in the war, although articles and editorials continued to be severely critical of the Army's ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... pliant saplings are strapped and sewn on. Across the bow and the stern are stays of cane, with generally a stronger thwart midships. When new, and the stitches of yellow cane regular and bright, the canoe represents about the neatest and nattiest of the few constructive efforts of the blacks, and is as buoyant as a duck. The seams are caulked with a resinous gum, "Tambarang," of the jungle tree known as "Arral" (EVODIA ACCEDENS), and is prepared by being powdered on a flat stone previously moistened with water. The powdered resin is melted by ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed. Social ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... not given to serious conversation; indeed, he was rather casual, as a rule, but Harding, who was shrewd, saw beneath the surface a love of order, and what he thought of as constructive ability. ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss

... read Pengowan's report," returned Barrant impatiently, "and I am assuming that Robert Turold's daughter knew where it was kept. This is a purely constructive theory of her guilt, and we have to assume many things. We must further assume that when she left the room she locked the door behind her and brought away the key in order to suggest suicide. When she got downstairs she told Thalassa the truth, and begged him to shield her. He promised to do so, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... exercise a decision in favour of peace." There is a military council of all the able-bodied men of the tribe, with a military chief chosen by the council.[57] This seems a very wise adjustment of civic duties; the constructive social work and the maintaining of peace directed by the women; the destructive work of war in ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... Midi, and this ancient city of the Turones he wished to make the capital of the France that he had strengthened and unified. However we may abhor the despicable characteristics of this wily old politician and despot, we cannot afford to underestimate his constructive ability and his zeal for ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... This plan of constructive symbolism affects not only the fabric of the church as a whole, but each separate part of the church has ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester

... speech as they fell from the lips of the common man, and wove them into her tales. Besides their pictures of Andalusian rural life, these stories reveal a wealth of popular songs, ballads, legends, and fairy tales, invaluable alike to the student of manners and of folk-lore. She has little constructive skill, but much genius for detail. As a painter of manners and of nature she is unrivaled. In a few bold strokes she brings a whole village before our eyes. Nor is the brute creation forgotten. In her sympathy for animals she shows her foreign ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... to deal with circumstances which none of their British progenitors had to face, and they showed a masterly spirit in adapting the ideas of which they were the heirs to a new country and new conditions. The result is one of the greatest pieces of constructive statesmanship ever accomplished. We, who belong to the British Empire, are at this moment engaged, under very different circumstances, in welding slowly and gradually the scattered fragments of the British Empire into an organic whole, which must, from ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... be played with in still another way. Children should dig in it; for all pass through the digging stage and this should be given free swing. It develops their muscles and keeps them busy at helpful and constructive work. They may dig a well, make a cave, or a pond, or burrow underground and make tunnels like a mole. Give them spades and a piece of ground they can do with as they like, dress them in overalls, and it ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... we have definite standards to help our imagination. But music has worked out its own laws which are those of pure fancy, having little to do with other forms of thought; and unless we know something of the constructive principles, instead of recreating the work before us, we are simply lost—"drowned in a sea of sound"—often rudely shaken up by the rhythms, but far from understanding what the music is really saying. As the well-known critic, Santayana, wittily says, "To most people music is a drowsy ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... what boneless dispersion, ever began to injure a book so much as even the very scantest claim put in for form and substance." This wisdom had always been in one's ears; but it had at the same time been equally in one's eyes that really constructive dialogue, dialogue organic and dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and form, is among us an uncanny and abhorrent thing, not to be dealt with on any terms. A comedy or a tragedy may run for a thousand nights without prompting ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... At night when I was totally still I felt a whole crew of pixies and brownies with picks and shovels at work in the joint doing major repair work. This activity was not entirely comfortable, but I knew it was constructive work, not destructive, so I joined the work crew with my mind's eye ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... gifts, a strong and powerful individuality, a facile pen, rich imagination, and constructive ability of a high order. This volume ought to find a ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... to time thereafter be repeated in full view of its own interest, which can never be separated from the wise and beneficent operation of this Government, and yet Congress may by virtue of the last proviso overrule its law, and upon grounds which to such State will appear to rest on a constructive necessity and propriety and nothing more. I regard the bill as asserting for Congress the right to incorporate a United States bank with power and right to establish offices of discount and deposit in the several States of this Union with or without ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... Revolution. There is this condition to be made here: that Bismarck undoubtedly leaned as far in one direction as the old-line French Revolutionists did in another; Bismarck was an extremist no less than Danton, Marat, Robespierre. But there is also this distinction, in Bismarck's favor: He was a great constructive statesman and the French agitators turned out to be but assassins and ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... for the individual, yet a large part of the national income if taken for the mass, goes back to strengthen the system they protest against through purchases of domestic requirements. The creation of co-operative stores ought to be the first constructive policy adopted by Irish labor. It ought to be as much a matter of class honor with them to be members of stores as to be in the trade union of their craft. The store may be regarded as the commissariat department of the army of labor. Many a strike has failed of its object, and the workers ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... compensations that are apt to be overlooked. To realize appreciably the compensatory effects in connexion with this conflict, it is necessary that we turn from the purely sordid and sad aspect to its spiritual and constructive side. The question, Has this war produced anything that would approximately counterbalance the arrest of industry and progress, waste of life at its prime, the desolation of hearts and homes, the devastation of property, ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss

... over the ridges of the Hindoo Kush and Paghman, which afford easy passage to men on foot and frequently also to "Kuchi" camels. These passes (so far as we can learn) could, any of them, be readily made available for mountain artillery with a very small expenditure of constructive labor and engineering skill. In Koh Dahman nearly every village of importance lying at the foot of the eastern slopes of the Paghman (such as Beratse, Farza, Istalif, etc.) covers a practicable pass over the Paghman, which has its continuation ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough

... the direction of powerful men working single-handed, or of small groups of men pooling their capital for one or more undertakings, had not advanced far before there appeared upon the scene still mightier leaders of even greater imagination. New constructive genius now brought together and combined under one management hundreds of concerns or thousands of miles of railways, revealing the magic strength of cooeperation on a national scale. Price-cutting in oil, threatening ruin to those engaged in the industry, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... philosophy and history, and with the love of his neighbor in his heart, will discover, amid the horrors of the time and its moral chaos, three hopeful leadings for humanitarian effort, each involving a great constructive invention. He will see that humanity needs supremely a sanction for international law, rescue from alcoholism, and a sound basis for just and unselfish human relations in the great industries, and particularly in the machinery industries. The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... Iago's character—"the very pulse of the machine." He describes his Circe de la Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have written a Hamlet. Neither could Iago have written an Othello. (From this theorem, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne



Words linked to "Constructive" :   constructive possession, rehabilitative, constructive trust, constructive breach, constructive fraud, inferential, creative, shaping, plastic, constructive eviction, reconstructive, destructive, constructive metabolism, positive, constructiveness, structural



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