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Formative   Listen
adjective
Formative  adj.  
1.
Giving form; having the power of giving form; plastic; as, the formative arts. "The meanest plant can not be raised without seed, by any formative residing in the soil."
2.
(Gram.) Serving to form; derivative; not radical; as, a termination merely formative.
3.
(Biol.) Capable of growth and development; germinal; as, living or formative matter.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books



... to average human nature. Men are eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... generalised, and on the other hand laid too exclusively to the charge of Jeroboam. The first king bears the weight of all the sins in worship of all his successors and of the whole body of the people. But the recognition of the sovereign priesthood of the ruler, of the formative influence which he exercised over the worship, is just. The most important temples were royal ones, and the priests who attended at them were the king's priests (Amos vii. 10 seq.). When therefore Jehu overthrew the house of Ahab, he did not extirpate all its members merely, and ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... small, yet large, matters that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional. But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she had met who was not ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... While the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, &c. The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit is a formative or animating function: the Spirit constitutes the life of 'trees and beasts and men.' This view is strictly within the limits ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... from the stamping press of the mint, is more sharply impressed with its image and superscription than was the formative period of our government by the genius ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... none of its original advantages in the diction of the reporter, and which represented him as young, slight in figure, with a refined and delicate face, bearing the stamp of intellectual force; a journalist from the time he left school, and one of the best exponents of the formative influences of the press in the training of its votaries. From time to time it was hard for Maxwell to make out whose words the interview was couched in, but he acquitted Godolphin of the worst, and he certainly did not accuse him of the flowery terms giving his patriotic reasons for not ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... history, perhaps because it belonged to a very old family, one of the prehistorics. As such it might have been that of a demigod, or, according to the development theory, of a demi-man. Or it might have been that of an old Irish gentleman, gentle in truth;—in the formative stage of society it is the monster that leaves traces of himself, as in an old geologic period the huge reptile left his tracks in the plastic earth, which afterward hardened ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... entered into Russell Conwell's life in these formative days of boyhood who unconsciously had much to do with the course of ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... master methods of advance by reasoning. But our children have their knowing also to attain to, their discoveries to make, their logic of proof, on occasions, to employ. Shall we lavish all the treasures of method on those who have passed the formative stage of mind, and acquired the bent of its activities? Rather, we think, the true intellectual method—combining both Baconian induction and Aristotelian deduction—yet waits to realize some of the best of the application and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... think what she would have done if Judith had not been there; but then, Judith was one of the formative elements of her life—as much as was the food she ate or the thoughts she had. What she did was to turn as quickly and unhesitatingly as though she had always meant to do it, put her arm through Camilla's and draw her rapidly towards ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... The formative period of the two older organizations furnished opportunities for a study of the disability benefit and showed its usefulness in strengthening the national unions. These organizations, however, experienced grave difficulties in their attempts to administer ...
— Beneficiary Features of American Trade Unions • James B. Kennedy

... rural school to the state university. The system in every state is quite complete and more or less efficient to accomplish its objects. The entire system is due to the presence of the Bible in our land, and especially during the formative period of our government. The states have deemed it necessary to train the young and rising generation in the interest of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative of minds. A volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone. The American and Briton, especially the British townsman, have a kind of bone-deep defiance of Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... Philologists have excluded the language from the Aryan and Semitic tongues, and included it in the Turanian group. It is said to possess all the characteristics of the Turanian family being agglutinated, that is to say, maintaining its roots in their integrity without formative prefixes, poor in conjunctions, and copious in the use of participles. It is uncertain when alphabetical characters were introduced into Japan, but it is believed to have happened when intercourse with Korea was ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... is a distinction that needs to be emphasized that many so-called schools are really homes, often very excellent homes, with which schools, often very inefficient schools, are united. All this we must lump together— it is, indeed, woven together almost inextricably—when we speak of home as a formative factor. The home, so far as its hygienic conditions go, we have already dealt with, and we have dealt, too, with the great neglected necessity, the absolute necessity if our peoples are to keep together, of making and keeping the language of the home uniform throughout ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... The clanger here, a danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped intellectual empires ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... old, but he's bald. His eyes screw into you. His nose," another formative gesture, "is like that. A nawful big nose. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... not only physically, but there had been development mentally and morally that would tell for good in the oncoming years. To have been under the guidance of such a couple as Mr and Mr Ross in such a formative period of their young lives was of incalculable value. Happy are the boys who have such guardians; happier still if their own parents are of this ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... implementation of its anti-trafficking law, but failed to impose significant penalties for convicted traffickers and failed to vigorously investigate and prosecute ongoing and widespread allegations of public officials' complicity in trafficking; victim protection efforts remain in early, formative stages and a lack of sensitivity for victims remains a ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... an observation he made to me one spring morning in 1919 when the Republican attitude toward the League of Nations was still in the formative process. Borah was "convinced" that Elihu Root and Will H. Hays were conspiring to induce the Republicans to accept the League and he said, quite seriously, that he had about come to the conclusion that it ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... mind. Quite sane now," said Pennington. "But don't you think, Dick, we ought to take that exciting book away from him? The mind of youth in its tender formative state can be inflamed ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler

... of an object corresponding to it must remain doubtful, unless we can discover some other ground, unless we know that the figure can be cogitated under the conditions upon which all objects of experience rest. Now, the facts that space is a formal condition a priori of external experience, that the formative synthesis, by which we construct a triangle in imagination, is the very same as that we employ in the apprehension of a phenomenon for the purpose of making an empirical conception of it, are what alone connect the notion of the possibility of such a thing, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... the less he liked its atmosphere. And the closer his contact with Jay Gould the more doubtful he became of the wisdom of such an association and perhaps its unconscious influence upon his own life in its formative period. ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... the presence of any danger, but he retained all his caution as he knelt down to drink, a caution become nature through all the formative years of practice and necessity. His knees made no noise as they touched the earth. Not a leaf moved. Not a blade of grass rustled. The rifle remained upon his shoulder, his right hand grasping it around the stock, just below the hammer, the barrel ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... remain in the world of sensation and of nature. Further, if with certain associationists we speak of an association which is neither memory nor flux of sensations, but is a productive association (formative, constructive, distinguishing); then we admit the thing itself and deny only its name. In truth, productive association is no longer association in the sense of the sensualists, but synthesis, that is to say, spiritual activity. Synthesis may ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative period. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... hand on to the generations yet to come. For full forty years, the Dutch Church was the only religious institution on this island, and who in these early times, when the great ideas for which America stands to-day were in their formative stage, guided in the light of truth the young country to a larger conception of her destiny? Not only from the standpoint of religion, but from the standpoint of education, the Dutch Church and her clergy were a mighty ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess. The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character it should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though she ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of a great work and no ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... new formative force was the influence of the classical drama, for which, with other things classical, the Renaissance had aroused enthusiasm. This force operated mainly not through writers for popular audiences, like the authors of most Moralities ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... a great change in the fortunes of the Barrett family, and may be said to mark the end of the purely formative period in Elizabeth Barrett's life. Hitherto she had been living in the home and among the surroundings of her childhood, absorbing literature rather than producing it; or if producing it, still mainly for her own amusement and instruction, rather than with any view of appealing to the general ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... Frogs' eggs and birds' eggs are really not so unlike as they seem at first sight, for though the frog's eggs have no shell, yet, just as in the bird's egg, there are two essential parts to be distinguished—the formative material out of which the young frog grows and the yolk on which the growing animal feeds. By the untrained eye nothing more can be seen in the frog's egg than a small black ball enclosed within a clear jelly-like substance. At the time the egg ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... meet her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... those early age periods either in city or in rural communities. The force of modern habits of life has led to the destruction of those natural habits of work, play, and recreation that gave a proportion of our forebears a fairly complete natural program of physical exercise during the plastic or formative periods of life. As a result, many students reach college nowadays with stunted growths and with poorly developed, poorly trained, or poorly controlled neuro-muscular equipment. Some of these matriculates are physically weak. They lack alertness; their response ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... themselves identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... broad, deep and far-reaching, and they are a unit in the prosecution of them. They are loyal to their convictions, making everything subservient to the interests of their religion. Understanding, as they do, the importance of moulding character in the formative period, they look diligently after the religious culture of their children. In all this they are deserving of commendation, and Protestants may receive valuable hints from them of tenacity of grip and self-denying devotion to ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... from him. But so sheltered was he by North Wind's arm and bosom that only at times, in the fiercer onslaught of some curl-billowed eddy, did he recognise for a moment how wild was the storm in which he was carried, nestling in its very core and formative centre. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald

... from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title "Constitutional History of the United States." The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... point in general courtesy and consideration for each other, and then go on with the girls, teaching them the gentle, faithful finesse which every wife has to understand, yet leaves her boy to "gang his ain gait" just at the formative period of his life, I am not ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell

... things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone can do—the things which, at least in their present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself personally, by the handiwork of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Philosophical, Psychological and Theological presuppositions of Christian Ethics. The second part will be devoted to man as moral subject, and will analyse the capacities of the soul which respond to the calls and claims of the new Life. The third Section will involve a consideration of the formative Principles of Character, the moulding of the soul, the Ideals, Motives and Forces by means of which the 'New Man' is 'recreated' and fashioned. Finally, under Conduct, the Virtues, Duties and Rights of man will be discussed; and the various spheres of service and institutions ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by ...
— Progress and History • Various

... generated from seed cannot be generated naturally in any other way. It ought, then, rather to be said that in the natural generation of all animals that are generated from seed, the active principle lies in the formative power of the seed, but that in the case of animals generated from putrefaction, the formative power of is the influence of the heavenly bodies. The material principle, however, in the generation of either kind of animals, is either some element, or something compounded ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... name Religion, though some brilliant scholars, such as Schelling and Max Mueller,[10-3] have claimed for it the first place as a formative influence on ethnic character. No one will deny the prominent rank it holds in the earlier stages of human culture. It is scarcely too much to say that most of the waking hours of the males of some tribes are taken up with religious ceremonies. Religion ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton

... he can obtain employment that offers any promise of future advancement. These years are often more than wasted, as he not only learns nothing of value from such casual jobs, but misses the healthy discipline of steady, orderly work, which is of so great importance during these formative ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz

... prevalence and use of the most highly generalized philosophical terms. Consider for instance, "Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo." No complete translation can be found for them in English; "Ri" and "Ki" may be best translated as the rational and the formative principles in the universe, while "In" and "Yo" signify the active and the passive, the male and the female, the light and the darkness; in a word, the poles of a positive and negative. It is true that these terms ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... from that which nature presents to us, the DESIRED word, the congenial. Men find what the artist brings intelligible and to their taste, stimulating and alluring, genial and friendly, spiritually nourishing, formative and elevating. Thus the artist, grateful to the nature that made him, weaves a second nature—but a conscious, a fuller, a more perfectly ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... of learning. Royalty, the Pope, the princes and nobility were all giving themselves with ardor to this higher culture. Under Dante the Italian language assumed new perfection. This period was to Vittoria one of intense stimulus, and it must have had a formative influence on her gifts and her mental power. Having no children, she adopted a young cousin of her husband, the Marchese del Vasto, to educate and to be the heir of their estates. In 1515, Pescara again returned and the entire island of Ischia was "aflame with bonfires, and the borders of the beautiful ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... suggested by lines from Byron's "Manfred." In the "Zwei Fantasiestuecke", op. 17—"Erzaehlung" and "Hexentanz"—but more particularly in the "Wald-Idyllen" of op. 19—"Waldesstille," "Spiel der Nymphen," "Traeumerei," and "Driadentanz,"—a definite poetic concept is implied. Here the formative influence of Raff is evident. The works which follow—"Drei Poesien" ("Nachts am Meere," "Erzaehlung aus der Ritterzeit," "Ballade"), and the "Mondbilder," after Hans Christian Andersen—are of a similar kind. The romanticism which pervades them is not of a very finely ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... speculate about any solid nucleus within, because, even if such a thing were possible, or probable, it must lie forever hidden from our eyes. But if we accept the theory that Saturn is in an early formative stage, and that, millions of years hence, it may become an incrusted and habitable globe, we shall, at least, follow the analogy of what we believe to have been the history of the earth, except that ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... entertaining a penniless young man can be demure, then demure was the Princess Sophie Zobraska. Paul, who prided himself on his knowledge of feminine subtlety, was at fault; but who was he to appreciate the repressive influence of a practical-minded convent friend, quickly formative and loudly assertive of opinions, on an impressionable lady awakening to curiosities? He was just a dunderhead, like any one of us—just as much as the most eminent feminine psychologist alive—which is saying ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... Vernon was grateful to the wearied chief of the republic. Yet it was not absolute repose. As a conscientious public servant; as the chief officer of a government yet in a comparatively formative state, and charged with the highest trusts that can be committed to mortal man, he felt most sensibly the care of state, even in his quiet home on the banks of the Potomac. One subject, in particular, filled him with anxiety. He had ordered ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the creative, formative ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life—her father's melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... There was a formative period when, socially speaking, the growth of Greenwich was the growth of New York. But that was when Greenwich was almost the whole of fashionable New York. Later New York plunged onward and left the green cradle of its ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... formative power of all the simultaneous members of our race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our original progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. The fatal sophistry in the traducian account ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Overbeck, as the formative type of the son, merits a further word.[3] If not quite a genius, he was the model of a scholar and a gentleman; besides being Burgomaster in the city of his birth, he was Doctor of Laws, Syndic ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson

... by the venerable Dr. Ryerson is the most important literary work of his life. It fitly crowns a career of unusual intellectual activity with a standard history of the formative period of Anglo-American civilization. The range and scope of the work are much wider than most persons would suppose from the announcement. Most people looked for a work that would be mainly made up of biographical sketches of the U. E. Loyalist pioneer in the settlement of ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... virtues. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the second of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... cells forming the base, or dilated part varies, but is always small in proportion to the larger ramenta, or protecting scales: these last have a single terminal cell, which in fact must be the same in every really cellular growth sooner or later, the last degree of formative power being the production of ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... of mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... so early a developmental stage as that of yelk division, but there is every reason to conclude that the changes it undergoes are identical with those exhibited by the ova of other vertebrated animals; for the formative materials of which the rudimentary human body is composed, in the earliest conditions in which it has been observed, are the same as those of other animals. Some of these earliest stages are figured below, and, as will be seen, they ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally combustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because they come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in which it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in its formative stage. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... the embryo from commixture of blood being wholly false, their opinion in this case must of necessity be likewise. I shall therefore conclude this chapter by observing that although a strong imagination of the mother may often determine the sex, yet the main agent in this case is the plastic or formative principle, according to those rules and laws given us by the great Creator, who makes and fashions it, and therein determines the sex, according to the council of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... the United States as the equals of the States it represents; informs that body that he is constitutionally the President of the States he has made, as well as the President of the States which have not enjoyed the advantage of his formative hand; and unmistakably hints that Congress, unless it admits the representatives of the States he has reconstructed, is not a complete and competent legislative body for the whole Union,—is, in plain words, a Rump. The President, to be sure, qualifies his suggestion by asking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school—so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street—where "blue-coat boys" passed the most importantly formative period of their lives. Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... that paddling canoes during one's formative period over our lakes and rivers develops the wrists and arms better than ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... after its preparation for the publishers, and to forego the strict editorial revisioning planned. The book is an accurate portrait of the Tuskegee of to-day, and reasonably forecasts the hopes for the institution of to-morrow. It tells with forceful directness and graphic precision the formative work that is being done for this generation, and supplies a fulcrum upon which there may justly rest a prophecy of greater things for the generations that are ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... is indeed a brilliant effort, worthy of the human mind, to comprise in one organic whole, the entire science of nature, from the laws of gravity to the formative impulse in animated bodies;" but the preoccupation of his vast mind, and the hold of pre-existing ideas, offered difficulties to the solution of the problem. But, note the approximation of his ideas to those herein expressed, he said: "The sun, as the main source of light ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... material vulgarity. We have laughed too heartily at the dinner of the ancients in 'Peregrine Pickle,' to wish to lead back the age to a classic model; and yet on all subjects connected with taste, there are some things to be learned from that people whose formative genius is still the wonder of the world. The meal of society among the Greeks consisted of only two courses, or, to speak more strictly, of one course and a dessert; and the first or solid course was in all ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various

... did together is now become vain. It may not be so in future; but the architecture we endeavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions of the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety; and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, with toil, decipher its floral carvings choked ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... to say that after looking over the comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... a strongly formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation: History ancient and modern, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... and spirit, and coin the word soulical as the antithesis of spiritual, we present his exact idea. The Greek word psyche, soul or life, when used as antithetical to pneuma, spirit, signifies that animating, formative, and thinking soul or anima which belongs to the animal, and which man, as animal, shares as his lower nature with other animals. Its range is within the limits of the five senses, within which limits ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... formed from the blood, and are subjected to several changes before they are perfected. At their early formative stage, they are cartilaginous. The vessels of the cartilage, at this period, convey only the lymph, or white portion of the blood; subsequently, they convey red blood. At this time, true ossification (the deposition of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... member of the Continental Congress, Mr. Adams did work in it which identified him in an enduring way with the formative period of republican institutions in America. This must be remembered in passing upon his acts when as President, succeeding Washington, he is brought into strong contrast with the extreme republicans of the French school. In the Continental ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in its material and technic elements, the mistress of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... normal instruction,—make it two years; give in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four years. In this as in all other progressive formative periods the way out ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell

... conception of justice, rejected the claims of divine right by the Stewarts, established capacity for self-government upon the independence of individual character that knows no superior but the law, and supplied the amazing formative power which has molded, according to the course and practice of the common law, the thought and custom of the hundred millions of men drawn from all lands and all races who inhabit this continent north ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root

... colonel. The appellation of "nigger lover" kept him ever after firmly wedged in his political grave. Thus, by the same stroke, was the career of an ex-slaveholder wrecked and that of an ex-slave made. This political blunder of a local office-seeker gave to education one of its great formative institutions, to the Negro race its greatest leader, and to America one ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... Britain's greatness. His brave heart beat for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,—perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... of Kipling were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where, though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established a reputation as a clever writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones, and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit to him in his future literary ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... contrasts are not obscure. We must suppose that a self-sufficing community might at one time, as well as at another, be drawn together by formative beliefs. But that it may take root somewhere and, by protecting itself against destructive external influences, succeed for a relatively long time in maintaining its integrity and its solidarity, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II or somewhat later, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... compared to the white of an egg. When at rest all sorts of vibratory, quivering and trembling movements can be observed within its mass. It forms the living material in all vegetable and animal cells; in fact, it is that component of the body which really does the vital work. It is the formative agent of all living tissues. Vital activity, in the broadest sense of the term, manifests itself in the development of the germ into the complete organism, repeating the type of its parents, and in the subsequent maintenance of that organism in its integrity and both these functions ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... therefore even more true to-day than when they were first published. The problem of the future is plainly the problem of China and no thoughtful person can afford to be indifferent to the vast transformation which is taking place as the result of the operation of the great formative forces of the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... levelling off of personal peculiarities. All who come into the social heritage learn the same great series of lessons derived from the past, and all get the sort of judgment required in social life from the common exercises of the home and school in the formative years of their education. So we should expect that the greater singularities of disposition which represent insuperable difficulty in the process of social assimilation would show themselves early. Here it is ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... cheese and timber worms are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such like, be procreated of putrid matter, which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of the mud of Nylus, to the ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... few Manska conquistas. The inhabitants of these towns, however, are of such a heterogeneous blend that it is difficult to assign any tribal place to them. It may be said, in general, that these towns are still passing through a formative period, the result of which will probably be their complete adoption of Mandya culture and language, if they are left free ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... God has made us the conservators of the race. To-day we are queens without a scepter; the penalty to the nation is that men are largely indifferent to its best interests and many do not vote. Men are under the influence of women during the formative period of their lives, first of their mothers, then of women teachers; how can they do otherwise than underestimate the value of citizenship? How can the young men of this nation be inspired with a love of justice? It is a dangerous thing that the education of citizens is given ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... circle in which our Joseph Jefferson passed his earliest years, the formative period of his life. There were the kind-hearted, easy-going father, the practical, energetic mother, a sister, and the half-brother, Charles Burke, whose after-reputation as an actor lives in the pages of Jefferson's autobiography enshrined in words of warm but judicious ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... translated—youth considering life with a purpose—"Martin Eden" is the beacon. Passing years only augment the number of messages that find their way to me from near and far, attesting the worth to thoughtful boys and girls, young men and women, of the author's own formative struggle in life and letters as partially ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London

... whose object it was to introduce slavery into California. These were fiery, fearless, eloquent and quick at stratagem. There was also Broderick's Tammany organization, an almost perfect political machine, though as yet in the formative stage. There was the tacit union of the underworld; gamblers, thieves, plug-uglies, servitors of or parasites upon the stronger factions. Each and all they feared and hated this ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... capacity of assistant to his father. That these were years of introspection and remorse to one of his spirit, however, there can be little doubt; there can be still less doubt that they were also years of formative growth, and that in this interval the irresponsible youth, who had given hostages to fortune by marrying at the age of eighteen, steadied by the responsibility of a growing family, quickly developed into some promise of ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... on the road to evil when he loses faith in woman. During the formative period of character she is, of earthly influences, the most potent in making or marring him. A kind refusal, where no false encouragement has been given, often does a man good, and leaves his faith intact; ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... of the Deity, in the masonic system, connects him with his creative and formative power. God is, to the Freemason, Al Gabil, as the Arabians called him, that is, The Builder; or, as expressed in his masonic title, the Grand Architect of the Universe, by common consent abbreviated in the formula G.A.O.T.U. ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... numerous minor poems attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts—till recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars—has compelled most of us to accept the Appendix Vergiliana at face value. These poems, written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved manner of the classical style, are full of personal reminiscences. They reveal many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... and her marital experience has given her an air of easy assurance, and she readily finds employment as a saleslady. Her influence afterwards, among girls comparatively innocent and without her experience, cannot but be pernicious, and at the same time must exert a certain formative and shaping process in determing the peculiar character of the whole class of girls in ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have been one of the formative factors of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... it is profitless to study the formative periods of English literature before trying to get acquainted with it in its present condition. One should work backwards, and not forwards, in this study. The practice of beginning with Anglo-Saxon writers, and studying down to ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... and women of inferior resources as compared with their natural possibilities. Even the supposed social wholesomeness of earlier marrying in the country must be scrutinized with the value of sex sublimation during the formative years clearly in mind. ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... vivacity had proved a tragic snare. A certain young capitalist—known as a great gentleman—of that countryside had pounced down on the gay and careless young Matilda, and had at once provided her life with its formative tragedy and its deathless romance. Even at fifty, hopelessly buried among the back streets and pawnshops of life, heaven still opened in the heart of Matilda Tipping at the mention of the name of William Allsopp. For several years she had lived with the Mesuriers, as general ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... perceptible; "protyle" seems likely long to evade recognition; and the only intelligible underlying principle for the reasonings employed—that of "one line, one element"—implies a throng beyond counting of formative material units. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of the situation concerning the management ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... conceived of as possessing any attribute at all—not even that of existence. A system a little less abstract is that of the Eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing. Then that of Giordano Bruno, who made soul and matter the formative principle and the principal recipient of forces—to be the ground of the universe. Then Spinoza, who postulated thought as the representative of the spiritual, and extension as that of the material principle; and these together are his originaux. From thence sprang the spiritual ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... of this important period of Church history—the formative period—has here a clear narrative, packed with information drawn from authentic sources and elucidated with the most recent results of investigation. We do not know of any other work on Church history in which so much learned and accurate instruction is condensed into a comparative ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... important because it gave to England a new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections, genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader experiences of an emancipated, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... for learning and study, as a means for the attainment of this higher end. Discipline and guidance were in his view still more prominently the business of a schoolmaster than the impartation of knowledge. His influence was stimulative rather than formative, the secret of his power consisting not so much in the novelty of his ideas or methods as in his commanding and magnetic personality. —From Thomas Arnold, by ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet

... "Women emasculate a monarch's reign;" and more than one instance of the truth of this statement may be found in the court annals of almost any country. The history of the little monarchies of Spain in that chaotic, formative period, when the Christians were slowly gaining in power and strength and preparing for the great final struggle which was to overcome the turbaned invaders and consolidate the Spanish interests, presents many chapters of exceeding interest wherein women play no ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... of work had been, perforce, relaxed lately, and almost all the working time had been devoted to writing the "Quest of Happiness," and an article on "Formative Influences" for the "Forum," besides the concluding articles for ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... conditions; and on the other hand, dissimilar variations arise under conditions which appear to be nearly uniform." Nietzsche, recognising this same truth, would ascribe practically all the importance to the "highest functionaries in the organism, in which the life-will appears as an active and formative principle," and except in certain cases (where passive organisms alone are concerned) would not give such a prominent place to the influence of environment. Adaptation, according to him, is merely a secondary activity, a mere re-activity, and he is therefore quite opposed to Spencer's ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... economies. They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for boys was so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense of the matter—which would have been that it all depended on what was meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very definite by their measure and intention; there were "advantages," generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... marks the close of the formative period of our history. Henry Williams had just received his call; Sir George Grey, who came almost with the bishop, and with whom he co-operated in so many ways, was to leave the country a few months later. He was the last governor who governed, as Selwyn ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas

... spent some time in London preparing an edition of Morga's Sucesos de las Filipinas, a work published in Mexico about 1606 by the principal actor in some of the most stirring scenes of the formative period of the Philippine government. It is a record of prime importance in Philippine history, and the resuscitation of it was no small service to the country. Rizal added notes tending to show that the Filipinos had been possessed ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... more is there to be said about her? Well, she does not leave; she stays here to complete the picture of the woman Torsen, child of the middle class who has read schoolbooks all through her formative years, who has learned all about Artemis cotula, but undernourished her soul. That is ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun

... During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl no contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or the needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact only with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the purpose ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... days in Hartford began a new era in Harriet's life. It was the formative period, and it is therefore important to say a few words concerning her sister Catherine, under whose immediate supervision she was to continue her education. In fact, no one can comprehend either Mrs. Stowe or her writings without some knowledge of the life and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... three general periods. The first is the formative period, and extends to the Persian wars, 500 B.C. The second period covers the flourishing era of Greece, from 500 B.C. to 359 B.C. The third is the Macedonian period, when the freedom of Greece was lost,—the era of Philip and Alexander, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... Christian parents have besought us for years, past to open a missionary school, through which their children might be saved to morality and integrity of character during the formative periods of their lives, we have at last seen our way to answer their pathetic appeal in part. A day school with an industrial department is ready for the opening, the building having been constructed during the months of summer. For valuable aid in sympathy, counsel and ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various

... be that Calvinism is eclectic as regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon individual character, certain it is that the Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other—the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... the Hellenic mind, whither the person who aspires to know the antecedents of himself and his culture must travel; or, he must learn of those who have been there, if he cannot go himself. Egyptian lore, which had a great influence upon the early Greek world in its formative period, must have some reflection in this primitive Greek book of education. So Telemachus, to complete his discipline, must reach beyond Greece into the Orient, he must get far back of Troy, which was ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... near, he left no doubt as to his intentions. Though some of his best friends urged him to stand for reelection, he firmly declined. He felt that he had done enough for his country in sacrificing the last eight years to it. He had seen it through its formative period, and had, he thought, steered it into clear, quiet water, so that there was no threatening danger to demand his continuance at the helm. Many persons thought that he was more than glad to be relieved of the increasing abuse of the scurrilous editors. No doubt he was, but we can hardly ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... surface is constantly being renewed. Although the great formative movements occurred ages ago, yet earthquakes, volcanic action, wind, frost and water are working continual changes. Hills and mountains have been thrown up, and nature has gone to work at once to shave down the mountains and fill up the valleys. The whole earth is as ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... strong intellectual movement which has swept over Ireland has been both embittering and embittered. These last five and twenty years have been the most formative in the country's history of any since Ireland became the composite nation that she now is, or, perhaps, has yet to become. At the back of it all lies the great social change involved in the transfer of ownership from the landlord to the cultivators of the soil—a change ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... have exercised so formative and controlling an influence on European thought and opinion as Ames. He was a master in theological controversy, shunning not to cross swords with the formidable Bellarmine. He was a scholar among scholars, being furnished ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature; and that the second in like manner comprises various {25} aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorganised element or principle; the first, to adopt a later method ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... that the day of that first enlistment oath was a pivotal point around which much of the destiny of Western Canada would turn for the rest of recorded time. Hence it is at this stage of the story that the formative day at Lower Fort ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... animation during the first year—that is to say, during the actual shooting of the wood. We are left to infer that in the second year, the pith of the then unprogressive shoot becomes collective only, not formative; and that the pith of the new shoot virtually energizes the new wood in its deposition beside the old one. Thus, let a b, Figure 26, be a shoot of the first year, and b c of the second. The pith remains of the same thickness in both, but that of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... Without the Church and within it wonderful contributions were thus made. In the eleventh century Avicenna accounted for the fossils by suggesting a "stone-making force";(129) in the thirteenth, Albert the Great attributed them to a "formative quality;"(130) in the following centuries some philosophers ventured the idea that they grew from seed; and the Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was constantly used to prove that these ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... lived to be a minister, and for many years was in charge of a church at Berkeley. This youth was sensitive, delicate, and far from strong. His faith in human nature received a shock, and his disposition was warped at the most receptive and formative period of his life, by the terrible scenes of suffering on the one hand, and relentless cruelty on the other, that he witnessed in that fatal place. He wrote, in his memoir many years after: "I have since found that the whole world is but one great prison-house of guilty, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... of the child is as old as the race, or older, and is a vitally important factor, not only in physical development, but also in mental development. In its destructive and disorderly activities the child shows the later adult forces in the formative stage. Old instincts and movements that were once self-preservative and of serious meaning to a wild ancestor reappear in the play of children, and, utilized wisely, may under new form become a valuable possession of the adult. There ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... culture, which he says, 'seemeth to be more accurate and elaborate than the rest,' which we find, upon examination, to be a strictly religious culture, and lastly the method to which he gives the preference, as the most compendious and summary in its formative or reforming influence, 'the electing and propounding unto a man's self good and virtuous ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable sort within his compass to attain.' He says enough under these heads to show the difficulty of writing on a subject where the science has been reported ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... All through this formative period Bell had adhered to and introduced the magneto form of telephone, now used only as a receiver, and very poorly adapted for the vital function of a speech-transmitter. From August, 1877, the Western Union Telegraph Company worked along the other ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... of James Kent" (Boston, 1898). Everett P. Wheeler's "Daniel Webster the Expounder of the Constitution" (1905) is instructive, but claims far too much for Webster's influence upon Marshall's views. New England has never yet quite forgiven Virginia for having had the temerity to take the formative hand in shaping our Constitutional Law. The vast amount of material brought together in Gustavus Myers's "History of the Supreme Court" (Chicago, 1912) is based on purely ex parte statements and is so poorly authenticated as to be valueless. He writes from the socialistic ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... bestowed on any other subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married—was still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of perfection of that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern she had married was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may, what she saw depicted on his face to-night ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... resist the convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the contrary, the steady pressure of hardship and misfortune, during a period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein to those which, under more favoring conditions, ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... In the history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... six instincts, then,—six formative and expansive instincts—which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should take account of and try to foster. Two of these are sympathetic; two are aesthetic; two are scientific. In and through the sympathetic ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... movement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession, revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhaps escape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family, even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization, expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social and economic tendencies the individual merges into the group; the group into the community; the community ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... the first instance by Schleiden, and accepted by Schwann, the connection between the three co-existent cell-constituents was long thought to be of this nature: that the nucleolus was the first to show itself in the development of tissues, by separating out of a formative fluid (blastema, cyto-blastema), that it quickly attained a certain size, that then fine granules were precipitated out of the blastema and settled around it, and that about these there condensed a membrane. In this way a nucleus was ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... Government, the weakness of the administration was such that only a bare majority of the House of Representatives was secured after a vigorous and aggressive campaign on the part of the Republican Party. Thus do the circumstances and incidents of the formative period in Mr. Lincoln's career illustrate and adorn the events that distinguished the man, the party ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell

... generative Soul, and the virtue or power of Heaven, and the virtue or power of the aliments united or bound together, that is the involution or complex nature of the seed. It matures and prepares the material for the formative power or virtue which the generating Soul bestows; and the formative power or virtue prepares the organs for the celestial virtue or power, which produces, from the power of the seed, the Soul in life; which, as soon as ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... Smith, that the testicular cells take up some substance or substances from the blood, thus altering the composition of the latter and perhaps stimulating the production of these substances in some other organ of the body. These substances may be provisionally called sexual formative substances. Smith's theory therefore is that the action of the testes in metabolism is rather to take something from the blood than to add something to it, and that it is this subtractive effect which influences the development ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... the political arena were not only a fighting time, they were a formative time. The young Roosevelt had to discover a philosophy of political action which would satisfy him. He speedily found one that suited his temperament and his keen sense of reality. He found no reason to depart from it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... the foregoing from the outset (and, of course, far, far more unrecorded,) I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps to my own character, now solidified for good or bad, and its subsequent literary and other outgrowth—the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one, (doubtless the best)—the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... an eager, observant, reflective, aspiring, and always original young woman whose formative years have been divided between the stifling restrictions of the 'Pale' and the glorious freedom of America. The infectious optimism and high courage of the book, as well as the vigor and picturesqueness of its style, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson



Words linked to "Formative" :   linguistic unit, constructive, biology, plastic



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