"Fixity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most of his attention to colonial and economic subjects. Consciously or unconsciously, he had imbibed many of Wakefield's ideas, and in that period of triumphant free trade, he came to office resolute to administer the colonies on free-trade principles. It said much for the fixity and consistency of his ideas of colonial administration that, unlike Russell, Buller, and others, he had not been misled by the Metcalfe incident. "The truth is," he said of Metcalfe, "he did not comprehend responsible government at all, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... olive of her cheek was turned to the hue of wax, the soft shadows beneath her velvet eyes were deepened and hardened, her expression, once yielding and changing under the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... from the wrong and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters full of their "earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special care," as it were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of the fascination ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Feraud crouched and bounded with a fierce tigerish agility fit to trouble the stoutest heart. But what was more appalling than the fury of a wild beast, accomplishing in all innocence of heart a natural function, was the fixity of savage purpose man alone is capable of displaying. Lieut. D 'Hubert in the midst of his worldly preoccupations perceived it at last. It was an absurd and damaging affair to be drawn into, but ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... firm, consolidated society that was Brodrick's family. These faces proclaimed by their resemblance the material link. Mr. John Brodrick was a more thick-set, an older, graver-lined, and grizzled Hugh, a Hugh who had lost his sombre fixity of gaze. Dr. Henry Brodrick was a tall, attenuated John, with a slightly, ever so slightly receding chin. Mrs. Heron was Hugh again made feminine and slender. She had Hugh's features, refined and diminished. She had Hugh's eyes, filled ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... in Central Asia. The tribes are known as the Ersari Goklan, Sarik, Tekke, and Yomud, and most of these rugs have some points in common, although they vary a good deal in detail. Generally speaking, the Turkoman takes the greatest care to have his work perfectly done. In order to give fixity to the color the dyer steeps the wool in a mordant of alum and water. The dye is almost invariably brought from Bokhara. At Ashkabad the Turkomans dye the wool themselves when it is intended to be yellow, but when ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... eternity by a mere thread." Katherine leaned across the desk and her eyes gazed with an even greater fixity into his. "If the thread snaps, do you know who ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... opening the picket gate, she stepped forth with a fair renewal of her chosen manner toward the public, though just at that moment no public was in sight. Miss Atwater's underlip resumed the position for which her mother had predicted that regal Spanish fixity, and her eyebrows and nose were all three perceptibly elevated. At the same time, her eyelids were half lowered, while the corners of her mouth somewhat deepened, as by a veiled mirth, so that this well-dressed child strolled down the shady sidewalk wearing an expression ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram—"he ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read "Don Juan." He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and evening engaged his thoughts. He dwelt lovingly on the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of the movement of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still. The Scriptures not being capable of lying or erring, it followeth that the position of those is erroneous and heretical who maintain that the sun is ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... beauty in the world." He asked her to leave him alone. In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself. He would have liked to sleep—not to die; he held death in horror—but to sleep and never to wake again. Yet, before him, as desirable as formerly, despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more mysterious than ever, he saw her. His ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... errors of opposite sorts. Many writers of treatises on Equity, struck with the completeness of the system in its present state, commit themselves expressly or implicitly to the paradoxical assertion that the founders of the chancery jurisprudence contemplated its present fixity of form when they were settling its first bases. Others, again, complain—and this is a grievance frequently observed upon in forensic arguments—that the moral rules enforced by the Court of Chancery fall short of the ethical standard of the present day. They would have ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... recognise him as a master and originator of true scientific methods when his influence on jurisprudence was on the wane. On the same track, Drey, in 1819, defended the theory of development as the vital prerogative of Rome over the fixity of other churches. Moehler was the pupil of Drey, and they made Tuebingen the seat of a positive theology, broader and more progressive than ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and fixity of names, a lessening of procedures that would lead to confusion and error if adequately supported or widely adopted, and a provision ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... marched across the lawn the dangerous whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man. His lips were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in one corner. And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker. Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach before Caleb spoke. And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half to see the two men who ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... the spot until her granddaughter should have fallen asleep. From this forth she did not take her eyes off Clotilde, and it filled her with a sort of fear to remark that the girl scarcely moved her eyelids, looking with that inconsolable fixity which defies sleep. Then she herself began to feel sleep stealing over her. Exasperated, trembling with nervous impatience, she could remain where she was no longer. And she went to rejoin the servant, who was watching in ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... understood it: "To create a new nature in a given body or to produce new natures and to introduce them ... he who is acquainted with the forms and modes of super-inducing yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and the rest, with their gradations and methods, will see and take care that these properties be united in some body, whence its transformation into gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with scientific methods highly analogous to those ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Having assumed fixity as a code, the Mishna in turn became what the Bible had been for centuries—a text, the basis of all legal development and scientific discussion. So it was used by the epigones, the Amoraim, or Speakers, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... rail and watched them come, still fatalistic, but gallant, bent on a dramatic finish, stooping and 'cutting' their horses. The first man was on her side of the course. She stared at him in amazed consternation as he came towards her. His strong blue eyes, caught by the fixity of her glance or by her bright hair, saw her, and became triumphant. He pulled the horse in sharply, and within a few yards of the winning-post wheeled and went back, amid the jeers and howls of the crowd, who thought ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... critters!" commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... of today, then, are variants of the primitive racial types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant, servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him. But this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of homogeneity or of stability. The ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... early years of the nineteenth century, when ideas on this subject were in a state of uncertainty rather than of transition, and more than half a century before Darwin gave an entirely new direction to thought by publishing his great hypothesis. Cuvier at this time believed in the fixity of species—constancy in the type with modification in the form of individuals; but his opinions underwent some amount of change in the latter part of his career. The point argued with such gravity, and the conclusion which ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... omit many matters of which the explanation would not, I flatter myself, be without interest for my Readers: as for example, our method of propelling and stopping ourselves, although destitute of feet; the means by which we give fixity to structures of wood, stone, or brick, although of course we have no hands, nor can we lay foundations as you can, nor avail ourselves of the lateral pressure of the earth; the manner in which the rain ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... prescribed for you. By another century, England had fought out the issues of creed and government with expense of blood and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of 1688. In Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... of the normal attitude of a Christian soul; but that attitude is hard to keep up in one's own strength, because of the distractions of time and sense which are ever tending to disturb the continuity and fixity of that onward look, and to lead us rather to be satisfied with the gross, dull present. That redemption of the body, with all which it implies and includes, ought to be the supreme object to which each Christian heart should ever be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... if we suppose B (say) fixed and the rod shifted by moving the end A horizontally round B. Further, as this is true whatever the length of the rod, it is clear that the same fixity of the plane of swing will be observed if the rod be shifted horizontally as though forming part of a radial line from a point E in its length. In these cases the plane of the pendulum's swing will indeed be shifted bodily, but the direction of swing will still ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... upon him with the fixity and the lustre of those of a child who is entertained and absorbed by an elder's jovial wiles. A flash of laughter broke over her face, and the low, gurgling, half-dreamy sound was pleasant to hear. She was evidently no more than a child to these bereft old people, and by them cherished ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... lavishing a greater amount of capital and labor on it, and, as a rule, by extending the circle of agricultural operations by means of combinations more and more artificial. Hence, the progress of civilization demands an ever increasing fixity, and a more pronounced shaping of landed property (the specification of jurists), in the interests of all who share in this progress, and even of those who own no landed property themselves. Were there no property in land, every one would find it ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco. Their boundaries ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... had left his buckets when he went to help his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child's who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of quivering ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man, not mere flesh; in other words, the Lord was perfect man as well as perfect God. But in that case, how can God and man form one person? In particular, the freedom of his human will is inconsistent with the fixity of the divine. Without free-will he was not truly man; yet free-will always leads to sin. If all men are sinners, and the Lord was not a sinner, it seemed to follow that he was not true man like other men. Yet in that case ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... the statues as this fact was made known, and each began to wonder how the elegant aristocrat would behave. To say that he stared, feebly expresses the fixity of his noble gaze, as it rested in turn upon the three faces opposite. When satisfied, he also produced a paper and began to read. But Matilda caught a big, black eye peering over the sheet more than once, as she peered over the top ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... conclusions of both these investigators; and as the result of his own observations declares that algae, so far from being as polymorphic as they have been described, vary only within relatively narrow limits, and present on the whole as great fixity as the higher plants. It certainly supports his view to discover, on subjecting to a careful investigation Botrydium granulatum, a siphonaceous alga whose varied forms had been described by J. Rostafinski and M. Woronin, that these authors had included in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... said just now that Mr. Hurst was contemplating some action of the kind. No doubt you had your information from a reliable quarter." This answer Mr. Jellicoe delivered without moving a muscle, regarding me with the fixity of a ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... doubts about you when you first came to us. Let me see, it was nearly two years ago, wasn't it? How time flies! Yes, I had my doubts about you. But I was wrong. You seem to possess a real fixity of purpose. I remember that you told me then that you were not sure you wanted to be a monk. Rare candour! I could have professed a hundred monks, had I been willing to profess them within ten minutes of their ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... none perfect. At their feasts I tasted ever the same food, and none that made an end of hunger. In their talk I heard ever the same words, and none that went to the depth of thought. The very quietude and fixity of their being perplexed and estranged me. What to them was permanent, to me was transient. They were ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket. It covered her very feet. And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight up, in a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... answered to the much less typical name of Chapatin—the general outlines of the character were already visible in all their distinctness from the beginning, as all those who have read the introductory chapters will readily admit. And the same lines were to be followed with an undeviating fixity of artistic purpose and with unfailing verve and spirit to the last. 'The Prodigious Adventures of Tartarin,' 'Tartarin on the Alps,' and 'Port-Tarascon,' form a trilogy; and I know of no other example in modern French literature of so long and so well sustained a joke. How is it ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... more pressing matters, and he never noticed the awful whiteness of Merryon's face or the deadly fixity of ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... action, for belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation, often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... outcome of the Act of 1870, it cannot in strictness be called a mere development or completion of it, being in many respects based upon entirely new principles. The most salient of these are what are known as the "three Fs," namely—Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, to be decided by a Land Court, and Free Sale. As regards the last two, it has been pointed out with some force that the one practically does away with the other, the only person ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... hands loosely clasped between his knees, appeared to be engrossed in watching the progress of the boat as she drifted gently on the rising tide. His face was utterly blank of expression, unless a certain grim fixity ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... upon the table, and rising slowly from the chair in which I had been seated, stared fixedly at my companion, who was staring with equal fixity at me. I could see that I had not been deluded; Nayland Smith had heard the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... (S603) now succeeded in carrying through a second Irish Land Law (1881) (S603), which he hoped might be more effective in relieving the Irish peasants than the first had been. This measure was familiarly known as the "Three F's,"—meaning Fair rent, Fixity of tenure, and Free sale. By the provisions of this act the tenant could appeal to a board of land commissioners appointed to fix the rate of his rent in case the demands made by the landlord seemed ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Gourlay, leaping to her feet. With a hunted cry young Gourlay sprang to the door. So great had been the fixity of Gourlay's wrath, so tense had he been in one direction, as he moved slowly on his prey, that he could not leap to prevent him. As John plunged into the cool, soft darkness, his mother's "Thank God!" rang ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... time with all my strength, when it flew from its hinges, and I fell forward into a room so stifling, chill, and dark that I paused for a moment to collect my scattered senses before venturing to look around me. It was well I did so. In another moment, the pallor and fixity of the pretty Irish face staring upon me from amidst the tumbled clothes of a bed, drawn up against the wall at my side, struck me with so deathlike a chill that, had it not been for that one instant of preparation, I should have been seriously dismayed. As it was, I could not prevent ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... fixity is retained the strain in bad seasons is lessened by a free use of suspensions, and, if the amounts of which the collection has been deferred accumulate owing to a succession of bad seasons, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... tendencies, we shall be drawn off to an undue regard of the content to the neglect of the expression. And yet, for very little children, there is unquestionably something lost by the formality and fixity of a written story. A story told has more spontaneity, allows more leeway to include the chance happenings or remarks of the children; it can be more intimately personal, more adapted to the particular occasion and ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... one of the window-casements: from a hole without he saw the head of a tomtit protruding. He listlessly watched the bird during the successive epochs of his thought, till night came, without any perceptible change occurring in him. Such fixity would have meant nothing else than sudden death in any other man, but in Mr. Power it merely signified that he was engaged in ruminations which necessitated a more extensive survey than usual. At last, at half-past eight, after having sat for five hours with his eyes on the residence of the tomtits, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... our aristocracy is the origin of the fixity of our political institutions, which has been, is, and will continue to be, the great element of our pre-eminence as a nation: it possesses a force corrective and directive, and at once restrains the excess, while ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... proper field: he eschewed the occult and mysterious, and emphasized observation and experiment. It was Braid who gave us the word "hypnotism." At first a sceptic, he began experimenting and proved that fixity of gaze had in some way such an influence on the nervous system of the subject that he went off into a sleep. He therefore opined that the transmission of a fluid by the operator had ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... flimsiest gossamer of security against a pauper's death, and a pauper's grave. If he be as rich as Croesus, let him remember Solon's warning, with its fulfilment—and the change since 550 B.C. has by no means been in the direction of fixity of tenure. Where are one-half of the fortunes of twenty years ago?—and where will the other half be in twenty years more? Though I am, like Sir John, old only in judgment and understanding, I have again and again seen the wealthy emir of yesterday ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... elements as aligned after the adoption of the Grand Remonstrance by the Long Parliament in 1641. The first groups, however, which may be thought of as essentially analogous to the political parties of the present day, possessing continuity, fixity of principles, and some degree of compactness of organization, were the Whigs and Tories of the era of Charles II. Dividing in the first instance upon the issue of the exclusion of James, these two elements, with the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... not-black, though (to be sure) it may still seem black. The difficulty, such as it is, lies in this, that the human mind and its instrument language are not equal to the subtlety of Nature. All things flow, but the terms of human discourse assume a certain fixity of things; everything at every moment changes, but for the most part we can neither perceive this change nor express it ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... loses his sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really evanescent. It is like calculating the weight of the air on each square inch of our body to prove that it must be crushingly heavy for us. With every weight, however, there is an adjustment, and ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... Lavington, as if to surprise in him a corresponding change. At first none was visible: his pinched smile was screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a white-washed wall. Then the fixity of the smile became ominous: Faxon saw that its wearer was afraid to let it go. It was evident that Mr. Lavington was unutterably tired too, and the discovery sent a colder current through Faxon's veins. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... the veldt," was all he said, without relaxing the fixity of his face; "ladies are more ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign. What we do know is, that the more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that followed from such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He perfectly well knows what will happen, and will stake ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... helplessness of the senate was only one factor in the problem. More fatal flaws were its lack of insight to discover that there were new problems to be faced, and lack of courage in facing them. This moral helplessness was due partly to the selfishness of individuals, but partly also to the fixity of political tradition. In spite of the brilliancy and culture of some of its members, the senate in its corporate capacity showed the possession of a narrow heart and an inexpansive intelligence. Its sympathies were limited to ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... of evolution, so far as the present physical cosmos is concerned, postulates the fixity of the rules of operation of the causes of motion in the material universe. If all kinds of matter are modifications of one kind, and if all modes of motion are derived from the same energy, the orderly evolution of physical nature out of one substratum ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... several varieties are only one degree removed from each other, M. De Candolle supposes divergence to be the natural law which has governed their growth, and not hereditary fixity. But here again he has only remote probabilities to work upon, no absolute data. We are still speaking of his fossilized herbaria, not his modern specimens. These may show a large number of genetically-connected individuals, or those claimed ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... better mode of benefiting a youth than joining such a club as this. Much of my reading became such as had a bearing on forthcoming debates and that gave clearness and fixity to my ideas. The self-possession I afterwards came to have before an audience may very safely be attributed to the experience of the "Webster Society." My two rules for speaking then (and now) were: Make yourself perfectly at home before your audience, and simply talk ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... support, our conclusion may be erroneous. But a case, perhaps even more frequent, is that in which the error arises from not conceiving our premises with due clearness, that is (as shown in the preceding Book(229)), with due fixity: forming one conception of our evidence when we collect or receive it, and another when we make use of it; or unadvisedly, and in general unconsciously, substituting, as we proceed, different premises in the place of those with which we set out, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... unconscious fixity, looked into his assistant's honest face. He had an exasperating notion that McCrae might have said more, if ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... frequently, in the majority of places, these magistracies were utterly powerless and themselves in complete disorder. The efforts of Charlemagne, either to establish them on a firm footing or to make them act with regularity, were continual, but unavailing. In spite of the fixity of his purpose and the energy of his action, the disorder around him was measureless and insurmountable. He might check it for a moment at one point; but the evil existed wherever his terrible will did not ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... across at his neighbor, he found the dark glasses focused upon himself with such fixity that he responded with a friendly nod, and, making some trivial remark, found Mr. Mannering not at all averse to conversation. A few commonplaces were exchanged until the arrival of Mr. Rosenbaum's order, when ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... of a rare species than of a species that was very common. Now as these rare species do really vary much less than the common species, and in many cases hardly vary at all, it was very natural that a belief in the fixity of species should prevail. It is not, however, as we shall see presently, the rare, but the common and widespread species which become the parents of new forms, and thus the non-variability of any number of rare or local species offers no difficulty ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... study. Behind "sported oak," while dust accumulated on boxing-glove and foil—neither the banter of his brother officers nor his love for athletics inducing him to break the resolution—he bent to his work with a fixity of purpose that augured ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... what is known to occult science as the cleavage of the personality. Here is once more clearly revealed how important it is to add to the exercises for higher training others for giving fixity and firmness to the judgment, and to the life of feeling and will. For if certainty and firmness are not brought into the higher world, it will at once be seen how weak the ego proves to be, and how it can be no fitting ruler over the ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... idea of Brahma had attained fixity in the Hindu mind, and simultaneously with it, cast was developed, as we find it (but imperfectly) in the earliest records ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... any being), manogupti (to remove all false thoughts, to remain satisfied within oneself, and hold all people to be the same in mind), vaggupti (absolute silence), and kayagupti (absolute steadiness and fixity of the body). Five other kinds of caritra are counted in ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In the changes that followed the Peace of Luneville the fixity and routine of Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was already beginning ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... value your melancholy memorial of my late dear and honoured friend, the late Bishop Terrot. Though the photo represents our late friend the bishop with his features shrouded in the cold fixity of death, yet it does bring back the original to the memory of those who knew him well, and I am greatly obliged to you for this memorial of one who has gone from our sight for ever, so far as this world is concerned. It was very kind of you to ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... to search outside the world in which he dwells for beings who may procure him a happiness that nature refuses to grant; let him study that nature, let him learn her laws, and contemplate the energy and the unchanging fixity with which she acts; let him apply his discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from which nothing can withdraw him; let him consent to ignore the causes, surrounded as they are for him by an impenetrable veil; let him undergo without a murmur ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... strength are to the fore, a night's sleep is not of much account, for the system once braced up is not allowed to slacken. It was a notable sign of her strong nature that she was not even impatient, but waited with calm fixity the hour at which she had asked Leonard Everard to meet her. It is true that as the time grew closer her nerve was less marked. And just before it she was a girl—and nothing more; with all girl's diffidence, a girl's self-distrust, a girl's abnegation, ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... and dignity, and his face, cleared of its sombre brooding, was full of a bright, untroubled decision. The cypresses upon the hilltops stood no more resolutely erect, the hills themselves were no more steadfast. "Nay," he said, laughing a little, boyishly, in pure pleasure at the crystal fixity of his purpose. "Rather will I love the tyrant, and the tyranny will die of itself. Oh, it is the way! It is the way! And I could not think of it till now! Not till I saw thee killing and him bleeding. Then I knew." Then, more gravely, he added, "I will ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... quotes the Old Testament rather as Scripture, the New Testament rather as history. I think it will be felt that he has permitted his own style a freer play in regard to the latter than the former. The New Testament record had not yet acquired the same degree of fixity as the Old. The 'many' compositions of which St. Luke speaks in his preface were still in circulation, and were only gradually dying out. One important step had been taken in the regular reading of the 'Memoirs of the Apostles' at the Christian assemblies. We have not indeed proof ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... more than a generation and marked out the line which the development of palaeontology was to follow. The work was enthusiastically taken up by many very able men in the various European countries and in the United States, but, controlled as it was by the belief in the fixity of species, it remained almost entirely descriptive and consisted in the description and classification of the different groups of fossil organisms. As already intimated, this narrowness of view had its compensations, for it deferred generalisations ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... was fully as incapable as himself of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at the Royal Society came to an end. His next ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... face, the face of an old woman staring down at me from a semicircular opening in the gable of the adjoining house. An ordinary circumstance in itself, but made extraordinary by the fixity of her gaze, which was leveled straight on mine, and the uncommon expression of breathless eagerness which gave force to her otherwise commonplace features. So remarkable was this expression and so apparently was it directed against myself, that I felt like ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... machinery. The constitutions, strict as they appeared, imposed no barriers upon his will; for almost unlimited power was surrendered to him of dispensing with formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening or lengthening the periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career. Ideal fixity of type, qualified by the utmost elasticity in practice, formed the essence of the system. And we shall see that this principle pervaded the Jesuit treatment of morality. The General resided at Rome, consecrated solely to the government of the Society, holding ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... in the pirogue scanned also the two seamen at the oars and felt a vague pity for them. Unmistakably they were sick with fear. It was conveyed by their dejected aspect, by the tinge of pallor, by the fixity with which they regarded the cocked pistol in Blackbeard's fist. Jack Cockrell knew them as abandoned villains who had boasted of many a bloody deed but the swarthy, pockmarked fellow had been in the boat which had saved the two lads from the drifting ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... silent. She thought him unstable. He had no fixity of purpose, no anchor of righteousness ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... at table in the dining-room staring before her. Her parents moved restlessly in silence, trying not to irritate her by watching her, praying for something to change the fixity of her look. They acknowledged themselves helpless; like children, they felt powerless and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... it were an accepted fact. His face was handsome, with a strange, watchful alertness and a fundamental fixity of intention ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... intelligent women is better than their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it, seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no discipline.... You also are a person of high intelligence and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... flux, subject to the changes of taste in music, the drama, singing, acting, and even politics and morals; but in one particular the public has shown no change for a century and a half, and it is not quite clear why this has not given greater fixity to popular appreciation. The people of to-day are as blithely indifferent to the fact that their operas are all presented in a foreign tongue as they were two centuries ago in England. The influence of Wagner has done much to stimulate ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... placed; these can never be the same for all the beings of our species. These individual modes of being affected, then, will always furnish the colours of the portrait which man may paint to himself of the Divinity; it must therefore be obvious they can never be determinate—can have no fixity—can never be reduced to any graduated scale; the inductions which they may draw from them, can never be either constant or uniform; each will always judge after himself, will never see any thing but himself ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the Land Bill (although the resignation of the Lord Chancellor was threatened) would give what was known as "the three F's," and that the Government would insist on both Bills. [Footnote: The "three F's" were "Fair Rent" (i.e., judicially fixed rent), "Free Sale" (of tenant right), and "Fixity of Tenure."] The Lords would probably throw out the Land Bill, and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... for nobody denies it. What they really have to do, if they would upset the necessarian argument, is to prove that they are free to associate any emotion whatever with any idea whatever; to like pain as much as pleasure; vice as much as virtue; in short, to prove, that, whatever may be the fixity of order of the universe of things, that of thought ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... every aspect of thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution, organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure until a new form of institution makes its ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... top to toe. The old lady, with her high-bridged nose, was certainly a little like the parrot in the face, and though her eye had not the changing brilliancy of the bird's, it was quite its equal in the unblinking fixity of its gaze. ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... colouring about it. It literally means to 'hang upon' something, and so, beautifully, it tells us what faith is—just hanging upon God. Whoever has laid his tremulous hand on a fixed something, partakes, in the measure in which he does grasp it, of the fixity of that on which he lays hold; so 'they that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion,' that stands there summer and winter, day and night, year out and year in, with its strong buttresses and its immovable mass, the very emblem ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Ulster of to-day—Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were thickly settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and tenacious temper. In the original leases granted by the concessionaires in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was implied, and a nominal rent levied, somewhat after the American model; but under the example of other Provinces, and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been almost wholly obliterated. The absentee landlords, reckless ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... fitted with a pair of unseen wings, and, as insects flight on their too constant journeys, they were setting forth all ways round this starry blossom which burned so clear with the colour of its far fixity. On one side they were massed in fleecy congeries, so crowding each other that no edge or outline was preserved; on the other, higher, stronger, emergent from their fellow-clouds, they seemed leading the attack on that surviving gleam of the ineffable. Infinite was the variety ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... delving into Lawson's career—a most unwelcome task—the writer has detected a continuity of purpose, a fixity of design, a uniformity of method pervading his every public act. What he is doing now, i.e., exposing somebody or something, he has repeatedly done on a lesser scale in the past; not from worthy motives, but for the sole ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the remarkable rapidity of decision and fixity of purpose displayed by Curtis in squeezing the breath out of Hermione, and gazing into her eyes until her proud head bent and sought refuge for a glowing face by hiding it on his breast, it will be noted first, that, for a man who had no experience in love-making, Curtis ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... raised from the legal standard of sixteenpence to the rupee to 2s. 5d. The very important question then arose of the future legal ratio of the rupee to the sovereign or the L1 sterling. A Committee was appointed to advise the Secretary of State as to the best means of securing fixity of exchange under the new conditions; it took evidence in London during the year 1919 and reported towards the end of the year. A majority of the Committee recommended that the rupee should be linked with the gold sovereign ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... who pride themselves upon their fixity of purpose, and a lot of similar fixidities and steadiness; but I don't. I know of nothing so fixed as the mole, so obstinate as the mule, or so steady as a stone wall, but I don't particularly care about making their general characteristics the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... uttered rapidly, and in a wheedling undertone, with a continual snaky writhing of her whole body, except her eye, which seemed, in the intense fixity of its glare, to act as a fulcrum for all her limbs; and from that eye, as long as it kept its mysterious hold, there ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... fixity of the mores is extreme, but the element of persistency in the mores is always characteristic of them. They are elastic and tough, but when once established in familiar and continued use they resist change. They give stability to the social order ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... provided by the measure. Mr. E. B. Roche, who had at first hailed the measure as a boon, now declared his intention of opposing its further progress, because the nomination of all the professorships was in the crown, and there was no "fixity of tenure" for any administration which entertained friendly sentiments toward the Roman Catholic population of Ireland. Sir Robert Inglis repeated that this bill was "a gigantic scheme of godless education;" and agreed with Mr. O'Connell in thinking ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... first is its fixity; it cannot change to meet quickly changing conditions. The weakness of the second is the animal's inability freely to exchange ideas by language. The weakness of the third is the danger in acquiring it. But the three together are a ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... full, red lips pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the two men talked. Talk between them could never be intimate and could hardly be even easy, but they interested one another to-day. On Quisante's face especially there was a look of searching, of wonder, of a kind of protest. Once he flung himself back and stared at his guest with a fixity of gaze painful to see. But he said nothing of what was passing in his mind. At last Marchmont turned ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... her gaze back to her father. He had closed his eyes as if he were weary; yet she discerned in the lines of his face a hard fixity which troubled her, alarmed her. Though his eyes were closed he did not present a reposeful aspect. There was something really sinister about that alert face with its closed eyes—as there is about a house with its blinds drawn ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... perfectly natural. And the movements of these little men and women interested him so much that he watched them as they went to and fro, sweeping a roadway with large brooms. Thus it happened that the fixity of his gaze was intensified. And so it was that in a few minutes he saw with no astonishment that he was one of the group himself, he himself in the rich and stately attire of a samurai. From the instant that Cosmo Waynflete discovered ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... that he had contracted a close intimacy with it for the sake of the seat. There had been many contests, many petitions, many void elections, many members, but, through it all, Sir Henry had kept his seat, if not with permanence, yet with a fixity of tenure next door to permanence. I fancy that with a little management between the parties the borough might at this time have returned a member of each colour quietly; but there were spirits there who did not love political quietude, and it was at last decided that there should be two Liberal ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... me uncomfortable, and these were no exception; but the good folk of Zutphen found them absorbing. The murderers stood alone, staring with that fixity which only a wax assassin can compass; but for the most part the figures were arranged in groups with dramatic intent. Here was a confessional; there a farewell between lovers; here a wounded Boer meeting his death at the bayonet ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... scattered. Even men who have been civilized, when transferred to a wide wilderness, where each has to work hard and isolatedly for the first requisites of life, soon shew a retrogression to barbarism: witness the plains of Australia, as well as the backwoods of Canada and the prairies of Texas. Fixity of residence and thickening of population are perhaps the prime requisites for civilization, and hence it will be found that all civilizations as yet known have taken place in regions physically limited. That ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... narrowly her companion's lovely set face. Trained in the study of human nature she had learned to know the outward signs of a perturbed spirit. Her straight brows knit in a puzzled frown. Then, noting that Evelyn had colored hotly under the shrewd fixity of her sharp ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... so we passed the library. It held but one occupant, the Englishman. He was seated before a table, and his appearance was such as precluded any attempt at intrusion, even if one had been so disposed. There was a fixity in his gaze and a frown on his powerful forehead which bespoke a mind greatly agitated. It was not for me to read that mind, much as it interested me, and I passed on, chatting, as if I had not ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... upon customs as already established tends to promote fixity and repetition, and to discourage change regardless of the benefits to be derived from specific changes. Custom is supported by the group merely because it is custom; and the ineffective modes of life are ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... endurance. His hair was dark and cut very close. His short beard and his moustache were red. They concealed the squareness of his chin and the determination of his mouth. His eyes were not large, but they rested on the object that attracted his attention with a peculiar fixity. When he talked to you he did not glance this way or that, but looked straight at you with a deliberate steadiness that was a little disconcerting. He walked with an easy swing, like a man in the habit of covering ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... become a cisatlantic Britain, as some of the colonial adventurers had hoped. A wider destiny awaited her. Here were economic conditions which upset all notions of the fixity of class distinctions. Here was a continent of free land, luring the disaffected or disappointed artisan and enabling him to achieve economic independence. Hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from Europe, constantly shifting the social equilibrium. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... This fixity of race characteristics has enabled the several national varieties of men to go forth from their nurseries, carrying the qualities bred in their earlier conditions through centuries of life in other climes. The Gothic blood of Italy and of Spain still keeps much of its parent strength; the Aryan's ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the stiffness of a stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris simply does not exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features, the Calabrian fixity of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by Giotto, and of which a true Parisian would have taken advantage, above all, her strange way of dressing, gave her such an extraordinary appearance that she sometimes looked like one of those monkeys in petticoats taken about ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... problem is not to adjust our inner ideals to our environment, but rather to compel the environment to level up to our ideals. The world that ought to be makes us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and sets us with a fixity of purpose at the task of realizing the Kingdom which might possibly be, which we know ought to be, and which, therefore, has our loyal endeavour that it {xxxvii} shall be, regardless of the cost in pain and sacrifice. Man, as William Wallace has put it, "projects his own self-to-be ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... world. The modern spirit encompasses the old desert of the Sphinx on every side. It is true that up to the present no one has dared to profane it by building in the immediate neighbourhood of the great statue. Its fixity and calm disdain still hold some sway, perhaps. But little more than a mile away there ends a road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway cars, and noisy with the delectable hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the pyramid of Cheops squats a vast hotel to which swarm men and women of fashion, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... still. Conscious of the secret force I had within myself I resolved to try if I could use it upon him in such a way as to keep him a prisoner till I chose to let him go. I watched him till his eyes began to look vague and a kind of fixity settled on his features,—he was perfectly unconscious that I held him at my pleasure,—and presently, satisfied with my experiment, I relaxed the spell and withdrew ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... what is called responsible government will by no means prove to its advantage.... The institutions of Newfoundland have been of late in various ways modified and altered, and some time must unavoidably elapse before they can acquire that amount of fixity and adaptation to the colonial wants of society which seems an indispensable preliminary to the future extension ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... so heedful and pure and high-souled, that are so freed from pride and contentions of every kind, that are endued with such devoted understandings, and that pursue their end with such steadiness and fixity of purpose without ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... avoid recognition for as long as possible, Billie now put up her fan and turned to Jane. She was surprised to see that her friend was staring eagerly before her with a fixity almost equal to ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... quilted, has planted in every community in which it is an institution the seeds of numberless lifelong friendships. These friendships are being made over the quilting frames to-day just as they were in the pioneer times when a "quilting" was almost the only social diversion. Content with life, fixity of purpose, development of individuality, all are brought forth in every woman who plans and pieces a quilt. The reward of her work lies, not only in the pleasure of doing, but also in the joy of possession—which can be passed on even ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... assertion, assuming it to be true, has but little weight. It is not always possible to found an arch on rock. Some settlement may be anticipated in almost every foundation. As commonly applied, the elastic theory is based on the absolute fixity of the abutments, and the arch ring is made more slender because of this fixity. The ordinary "row-of-blocks" method gives a stiffer arch ring and, consequently, greater security against settlement ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hoereticorum"; for the agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, p. 107 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... one should repeat the exercise afresh, until the time comes when one can concentrate one's gaze in this way for at least four or five minutes of perfect fixity. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... all the agents in which the general have been found. They depend on the degree of fixity of the substance. A number of the anesthetics are irritating for the skin; chloroform in particular. According to Dr. Aran, the best agent for topical use is ether chlorhydique chlore. This is efficacious in a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... unless a firm government were established, and unless the boundaries with England and Spain were definitely established. As Washington's administration grew steadily in strength and in the confidence of the people the first condition was met. The necessary fixity of boundary was finally obtained by the treaties negotiated through John Jay with England, and through Thomas Pinckney ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... was made. To prove this Lucretius appeals to the order of nature as seen in the seasons, in the phenomena of growth, in the fixed relations which exist between life and its environment as regards what is helpful or harmful, in the limitation of size and of faculties in the several species and the fixity of the characteristics generally in each, in the possibilities of cultivation and improvement of species within certain limits and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... reflect views of the truth as it appeared to the men who framed them in the distant past. But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of righteousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not always plain nor always practicable; as expediency, policy, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... thrashing, however, the student must cultivate as best he can an intense fixity of perception upon every fact or word or date that he wishes to make permanently his own. It is easy. It is a matter of habit. If you will you can photograph an idea upon your cerebral gelatine so ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... to a sharp needle point. She tested the point, then slipped the weapon into her belt, beneath her scapulary. As she closed the panel, and turned back into the chamber, a light of high resolve was in her eyes. Her whole bearing betokened so fine a fearlessness, such noble fixity of purpose that, looking on her, Mary Antony felt ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... the wall, I stared at his personage with a dreadful fixity, for I counted him the figment of a disarranged mind. But palpably he remained before me, fanning himself complacently, and watching me with every mark of kindly interest. Evidently perceiving that I was fully alive to my surroundings, the Chinaman addressed a remark to ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... be either on the same level with, or actually in front of, the normally anterior pair of limbs; and such fishes are from this circumstance called "thoracic," or "jugular" fishes respectively, as the weaver fishes and the cod. This is a wonderful contrast to the fixity of position of vertebrate limbs generally. If then such a change can have taken place in the comparatively short time occupied by the evolution of these special fish forms, we might certainly expect other and far more bizarre structures would (did not ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... strength to endure. Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined to be ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... to attribute the same meaning to the same word wherever it occurs. We instinctively treat a language as if it were a fixed system of signs. Fixity, indeed, is a characteristic of the signs which have been expressly invented for scientific use, such as algebraical notation or the nomenclature of chemistry. Here every expression has a single precise meaning, which is absolute and invariable; it expresses an accurately analysed ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... John answered with fixity of purpose. "You don't need a thing that you haven't already got—except," he added slowly, "except what mother could help you to. But that isn't the point. I shall need you. It's time for me to get down to business and raise some money. Between building the house and going"—John ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... submission under a threat of physical violence. That a man should be ready to defend his honor—to convince an opponent by endeavoring to kill him—yes, he accepted without cavil those tenets of the French social code. But the brutal British fixity of purpose displayed by this truculent chauffeur left him gasping with indignation. He was quite sure that the man meant exactly what he had said. He felt that any real departure from the compact wrung from him by force would prove disastrous to his personal ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... The fixity of Swithin's eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped her hand, and said ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a cargo of furs from Green Bay to Niagara, was a great blow to La Salle, who, from this time until his death, suffered many misfortunes which might well have discouraged one of less indomitable will and fixity of purpose. On the banks of the Illinois River, a little below the present city of Peoria, he built Fort Crevecoeur, probably as a memorial of a famous fort in the Netherlands, not long before captured by the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... language. The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had not possessed in Elizabethan times. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... go—Yani-ya, I shall go (literally, I go to go), Zam-poo-yan, I have gone (literally, I rest from gone). Ya, as a termination, implies by analogy, progress, movement, efflorescence. Zi, as a terminal, denotes fixity, sometimes in a good sense, sometimes in a bad, according to the word with which it is coupled. Iva-zi, eternal goodness; Nan-zi, eternal evil. Poo (from) enters as a prefix to words that denote repugnance, or things from which we ought to be averse. Poo-pra, disgust; Poo-naria, falsehood, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten my existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... these inquiries, with such additional excitement to the work, and with the very highest advantages of interpretation and no little fixity of application from boyhood, it must go hard with me this winter if I do not fish up something from the well of Indian researches ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Kept within just bounds, such an affection is reasonable, is right and creditable to those who cherish it. Why I refer to this broad fact, which distinguishes the populations of all the four seaward Provinces, as much as it does Lower Canada herself, is, to show the fixity and stability of that population; to show that they are by birth British-Americans; that they can nearly all, of every origin, use that proud phrase when they look daily from their doors, 'This is my own, my native land.' ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... And at first, naturally enough, man did not like it. He was too lordly. For a long time, therefore, he pretended to be fighting for the Bible, when he was really fighting for his own dignity. This was rather hard on the Bible, which has nothing to do with the Aristotelian theory of the fixity of species; though it might seem possible to read back something of the kind into the primitive creation-stories preserved in Genesis. Now-a-days, however, we have mostly got over the first shock to our family pride. We are all Darwinians in a passive kind of way. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett |
