Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Primordial   Listen
noun
Primordial  n.  A first principle or element.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books



... And the moon and the stars in their courses over the earth drew up the metallic substance of the earth and distilled and gave it to the sun; and he in his great speed cast them out upon the earth, again in minute atoms, and as they came in contact with their own primordial atoms which lie upon the earth, and more densely in the lower parts of the earth, they explode, causing atmospherical heat; each atom giving forth a yellow flame of light as it explodes, so minute that one light cannot be distinguished from another ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen

... stand up against the blazing sky, monstrous, horrific, smiting the senses like a blow. Their primordial faces were hacked and hewed fantastically, and there they posed in their immemorial isolation, virgin peaks, inviolate valleys, impregnably desolate ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last, "I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it will be needless to introduce to the reader in detail. ...
— The American • Henry James

... and feelings that are inhibited in the daily work is another matter; if it has such a value, play becomes of necessary importance. In outdoor games in general, the feeling of physical fitness, of discharging energy along primordial lines and the happy feeling that comes merely from color of sky and grass and the outdoor world, bring a relief from sadness that comes with the work and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... the book which rested in his strong slender hands, and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... necessary here regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no means. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... is as clear as Science can make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] We are dealing here with a simple question ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... Titanic race which constructs and "airs" the world for the reception of man.(1) Among these beings, more fully described in our chapter on the gods of the lower races, is Tiki, with his wife Marikoriko, twilight. Tane (male) is another of the primordial race, children of earth and heaven, and between him and Tiki lies the credit of having made or begotten humanity. Tane adorned the body of his father, heaven (Rangi), by sticking stars all over it, as disks of pearl-shells ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... of primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. There was a stab of pestilence, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... possessed a primordial talent that is rather rare in these physically degenerate days. He said nothing, but stood quietly in the middle of the road. The eyes of the crowd on either side of the road began to bulge, the lips of all opened with ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.

... In difference sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... in hishdory vitch few hafe oondershtand, Deutschers are, de jure, de owners of dis land, Und I brides mineslf oonshpeak-barly dat I foorst make be-known, De primordial cause dat Columbus vas derivet ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them harmoniously in the free ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... mosses and liverworts, and vascular cryptogams, where in special structures produced by cell-divisions there arise single primordial cells, which divide into two portions, of which the upper portion dissolves or becomes mucilaginous, while the lower contracts and rearranges itself ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... have inherited the change in form and colour when it would have been beneficial to both can only be explained, I think, on the supposition that the females had a choice of mates and preferred those that retained the primordial appearance of the group. This view is supported by the fact that many of the males of the mimetic Leptalides have the upper half of the lower wing of a pure white, whilst all the rest of the wings is barred and spotted with ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... add the psychologists, these fundamental types, by which all our judgments and ideas are inevitably shaped, and which our sensations serve only to illuminate, are known in the schools as CATEGORIES. Their primordial existence in the mind is to-day demonstrated; they need only to be systematized and catalogued. Aristotle recognized ten; Kant increased the number to fifteen; M. Cousin has reduced it to three, to two, to one; and the indisputable glory of this professor will ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... sweet to be broken and John took the comfort offered with gratitude. Jane was in her most charming mood, she waited on him as lord and lover of the home, found him the delicacies he liked, and gave with every one that primordial touch of loving and oneness which is the very heaven of marriage. She answered his words of affection with radiant smiles and anon began to talk of the Club balloting. "Was it really an important meeting, John?" she asked. ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... all men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... eye;" and will avoid the like. Vienna got its two kettle-drums and flag; extremely glad to see them; and even sang TE-DEUM upon them, to general edification. [Orlich, i. 62-64.] This is the naked primordial substance out of which the above Myth grew to its present luxuriance in the popular imagination. Place, the little Village of Baumgarten; day, 27th February, 1741. Of Tobias Stusche or the Convent of Kamenz, not one authentic word on this occasion. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... I rejoined. "You have the native American passion,—the passion for the picturesque. With us, I think it is primordial,—antecedent to experience. Experience comes and only shows us something we have ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James

... drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The crowd is ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... outline to the air's embrace, Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom; Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure To cut its one confided thought clean out Of all the world. But marble!—'neath my tools 100 More pliable than jelly—as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself, And whence all baser substance may be worked; Refine it off to air, you may—condense it 105 Down to the diamond—is not metal there, When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips? —Not flesh, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... we started the khan emptied itself behind us in a long string, jingling and clanging with horse and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland

... something formidable and noble in the way he drove all light and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent, away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, making men out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers of Aphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused to interrupt his cosmic labour for ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... know how we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... number." Seeing that analogy as strongly suggests a further step in the same direction, while he protests that "analogy may be a deceitful guide," yet he follows its inexorable leading to the inference that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... that perhaps such a description represents only or principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in permanence of direction, because our ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy

... wells up in me for this lost egg, this dead end in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of life had split and rushed by on either side of it. And you might," cried he, turning to the ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... gentle-voiced parson to tell Shacknasty James and Old Stand-up-and-Sit-down that the white father at Washington loved them and wanted them all to come and spend the summer at his house, and also that by sin death came into the world, and that we were all primordial germs at first, and that we should look up, not down, look out, not in, look forward, not ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... and that other, which, by some freak of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other planets than ours—dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these the sheer precipices of Chaos, against which the Redeemer hangs, or the frozen edges of the grave ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... him gently he was made Of nicely tempered mud, That man no lengthened part had played Anterior to the Flood. 'Twas all in vain; he heeded not, Referring plant and worm, Fish, reptile, ape, and Hottentot, To one primordial germ. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain plants ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... stream, Go, lay thy languid brow, And I will send thee such a godlike dream, As never blest the slumbers even of him,[8] Who, many a night, with his primordial lyre, Sate on the chill Pangaean mount,[9] And, looking to the orient dim, Watched the first flowing of that sacred fount, From which his soul had drunk its fire. Oh think what visions, in that lonely hour, Stole o'er his musing breast; What pious ecstasy Wafted ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institution could become, what it has become, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to the analogous ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... it take to bring this people out of savagery, and to build up so many flourishing cities? The learned did not readily resign themselves to a confession of ignorance on the subject. As they had depicted the primordial chaos, the birth of the gods, and their struggles over the creation, so they related unhesitatingly everything which had happened since the creation of mankind, and they laid claim to being able to calculate the number of centuries which lay between their own day and the origin ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... for example it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no further limit to be set to the power of nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organized forms from one primordial type (et l'on n'auroit pas tort de supposer, que d'un seul etre elle a su tirer avec le temps tous les ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... humming in unison with the motionless figure. Even when the man faced her and she saw in the dim light, not an Indian, but the young white man, Gregg Harlan, she did not cease. She was conscious of a feeling of companionship. Night had gilded the wilderness with a primordial beauty and made her kin to all earth's creatures. She moved slowly from her pile of driftwood and stood beside him for a moment in the trail watching the incoming canoes. It was a moment of simplicity and unconsciousness ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... spinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... produced by universal causes, for instance in this plant, and in that animal, as in particular causes. Fourthly, they are in the seeds produced from animals and plants. And these again are compared to further particular effects, as the primordial universal causes to the first ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... Secret Doctrine," by H.P. Blavatsky, "There exists an universal agent unique of all forms and of life, that is called Od, Ob, and Aour, active and passive, positive and negative, like day and night; it is the first light in creation; and the first light of the primordial Elo-him—the A-dam,—male and female, or, (scientifically) Electricity and Life. Its universal value is nine, for it is the ninth letter of the alphabet and the ninth door of the fifty portals or gateways, that lead ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... glistening crania. I recalled other losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing hairless, growing bald, growing toothless, unemotional, irreligious, losing the end joint of the little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial beauty. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... of fact, they are rights which are practically valid for you only in the will of the sovereign. Whether they are in their nature primordial or prescriptive rights, makes no difference as to this point. The will of the sovereign is the only effectual guarantee of the natural rights of individuals, and the only source of their political rights. The sovereign recognizes the former, confers the latter, and secures ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... to which Charley had looked forward with keen anticipation since Skipper Zeb had first announced that he and Toby were to accompany him. Reaching away for countless miles in every direction from the water's edge lay the vast primordial, boundless wilderness. What unfathomed mysteries it held! There it slept as it had slept through the silence of unnumbered ages since the world was formed, untrod by the white man's foot, known only to wild Indian hunters, as primitive as the wilderness itself. What strange beasts lived in its ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace

... are inwardly as incoherent as they are outwardly wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all our ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow adjustment got themselves into something approximating ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... had never looked upon before, cast a strange spell over Grosvenor. He too recognized, even at the distance, the power of St. Luc's personality, and Tandakora, looming, immense, in the firelight, was like some monster out of an earlier, primordial world. Warriors and soldiers asleep were scattered before the fires, and, at the edge of the forest, walked the sentinels. It was an alert and formidable camp, and the young Englishman felt that he and his comrades were grazing the extreme ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler

... B.C., an astronomer and geographer, following Thales chronologically, wrote a book on "Nature," the first written on the subject in the philosophy of Greece. He held that all things arose from the "infinite," a primordial chaos in which was an internal energy. From a universal mixture things arose by separation, the parts once formed remaining unchanged. The earth was cylindrical in shape, suspended in the air in the centre of the universe, and the stars and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... matter. If these speculations are sound, their only influence on Theism would be that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural genesis of matter from a single primordial substance, in the manner sketched out in Chapter IV. For the argument adduced by Professor Flint, that as the manner in which the vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore its origination ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... believe that which I hold to be the correct explanation, viz. that He has given to a certain fundamental and primordial medium, certain qualities and properties, by, and through which are originated and perpetuated, all the motions of the heavenly bodies already existent in the universe, or that are ever likely to be existent ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... inherent to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... we go no further than that? When one has got so far, one is tempted to go on a step and inquire whether we cannot go back yet further and bring down the whole to modifications of one primordial unit. The anatomist cannot do this; but if he call to his aid the study of development, he can do it. For we shall find that, distinct as those plans are, whether it be a porpoise or man, or lobster, or any of those other kinds I have mentioned, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... distorted most natural things that no one has been taught to understand them. Men were intended in the scheme of things to love women and to have children; women were meant to love men and to desire to be mothers. These instincts are primordial, the life of the world depends upon them. They have been distorted and abused into sins and vices and excesses and every evil by civilisation, so that now we rule them out of every calculation in judging of a circumstance; if we are 'nice' people they are taboo. Supposing we so suppressed ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn

... POOH. Don't mention it. I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. But I struggle hard to overcome this defect. I mortify my pride continually. When all the great officers of State ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... bold enough; but they are far surpassed by the inference which our authors draw from the vortex theory as they interpret it. Our authors exhibit various reasons, more or less sound, for attributing to the primordial fluid some slight amount of friction; and in support of this view they adduce Le Sage's explanation of gravitation as a differential result of pressure, and Struve's theory of the partial absorption of light-rays by the ether,—questions with which ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... so sudden that seconds had already elapsed before Marion Grimston uttered the cry that rent her like the wail of some strong, primordial creature without the power ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... Murchison, in a more comprehensive sense than was justified by subsequent knowledge. Thus the Silurian rocks of Bohemia were divided into certain stages (A to H)—the two lowermost, A and B without fossils (Azoic), succeeded by the third stage, C, which included the primordial zone, since recognized as part of the Cambrian of Sedgwick. The fourth stage (Etage D), the true lower Silurian, was described by Barrande as including isolated patches of strata with organic remains like those of the Upper Silurian. These assemblages of fossils were designated "Colonies," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia, and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... into the shock of mane, and the rough hair of the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then—"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up. But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man: no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the horse for countless generations against the tactics of rolling and rearing back. But he kicked like a master, and buck-jumped rather neatly. In five minutes Ugh-lomi lived a lifetime. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... elemental man of to-day, to the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... forgotten; but it was something about a flock of meteors which hit the earth every twelve billion years, and that it was now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic cell. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... face it with heedless confidence and eager zest. These conditions given, with health - the one essential of all enjoyment - added, the first escape from civilised restraint, the first survey of primordial nature as seen in the boundless expanse of the open prairie, the habitat of wild men and wild animals, - exhilarate one with emotions akin to the schoolboy's rapture in the playground, and the thoughtful man's contemplation of the stars. Freedom and change, space and the possibilities of the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... Beaver River fell off the highlands of the interior and precipitated itself into the cove below. These were the two things in Nature he had demanded to make his work possible. For the rest, the rugged immensity of scenery, the mighty contours of the aged land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... is so easy to memorise as a Correlation, for a Correlation is not a "mental picture" or "story"—it is neither a proposition, sentence or phrase. It has no rhetorical, grammatical, argumentative or imaginative character. It is simply an elemental primordial Psychological Sequence of Ideas in which one includes another, excludes another, or in which one idea has been so often or so vividly united with another in past experience that the two are inseparably connected in memory—and a little practice ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... are have been based on therapeutic data and explain the productions of symptoms. No attention has been paid to the general psychoneurotic or psychotic Anlage. When this is done I am sure that it will be found that there are just such primordial reactions as President Hall has been talking about lying back of all the sexual impulses. Sexual reactions have in the course of development come to be the vehicle for more primitive ones. We know by observation that the infant demonstrates anger in a much greater degree, and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London

... those which have disappeared in the great revolutions of our planet; and as microscopes are made more perfect, and are more extensively and efficiently employed. In the midst of this immense variety, and this periodic transformation of animal and vegetable productions, we see incessantly revealed the primordial mystery of all organic development, that same great problem of 'metamorphosis' which Gšthe has treated with more than common sagacity, and to the solution of which man is urged by his desire of reducing vital forms to the smallest number of fundamental types. As men contemplate the riches ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... expectoration, relieves the difficulty. Another will tell us he is very much troubled with indigestion, and he thinks tobacco relieves the difficulty; though, in truth, tobacco is the very worst drug he could use to relieve that disease, and is among the primordial causes of inducing it. Another will tell us that he is afflicted with the rising of his food after eating, and he thinks tobacco gives immediate relief; not suspecting, perhaps, that this rising of the food is occasioned by ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler

... that called for revision, and the foundations for reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. The effect of such a change has been enormous not ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... huge knife swinging at his belt. Fastened to the same girdle was a hide bag or pouch, half full of parched corn, rudely pounded. Expressionless, mute, untiring, the colossal figure strode along, like some primordial creature in whom a human soul had not yet found home. Yet, with an intelligence and confidence which was more than human, he ran without hesitation the trail of the unshod horse across this wide, hard plain, where even the eye of the cowboy could rarely discern it. Now and ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... existence is not inconsistent with the patriarchal theory. Bachofen here suggests a pre-matriarchal period in which the elementary family-group was founded on and held together by a common subjection to the oldest and strongest male. This is the primordial ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... possible, and even probable, that the primordial cause of both phenomena is the same. Heape (Transactions Obstetrical Society of London, 1898, vol. xl, p. 161) argues that both menstruation and ovulation are closely connected with and influenced by congestion, and that in the primitive ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's. It is better than the privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed, an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from Shakespeare's urn. It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say, from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain

... number.... Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from one prototype.... All the organic beings, which have ever lived on the earth, may be descended from some one primordial form." Darwin, because of his great scholarship, fairness, and candor, won for his theory more favor than it inherently deserves. Darwin taught that, "The lower impulses of vegetable life pass, by insensible ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... revealed to us about the basis of the primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is at the same time the principle and the result of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... inherent in every one of its manifestations. But this cryptic intelligence does not belong to the particular form excepting in the measure in which it is physically fitted for its concentration into self-recognizing individuality: it lies hidden in that primordial substance of which the visible form is a grosser manifestation. This primordial substance is a philosophical necessity, and we can only picture it to ourselves as something infinitely finer than the atoms which are themselves a philosophical inference of physical science: still, for want of ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... the survival of the fittest, it appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law; through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life, the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very highly developed animals to experience and environment, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... gradually evolved from rudimentary elements present even in the earliest years of life. Sexuality is not absent in the child, it is merely different, being unorganized and imperfectly adapted to its later functions. All this primordial mass of pleasurable activities enumerated above, undergoes profound modifications as the result of growth and education. One part only becomes selected and differentiated so as to form the adult sexual impulse in the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... be the governing principle of Nature—the key of all her mysteries—the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers—those powers are results of a PRIMORDIAL CAUSE,—while that CAUSE is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in TIME and SPACE, and who feel and act merely by the IMPULSE ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... [24] starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... odds were with the defensive. Moreover, Parker, having an athlete's confidence in his fists, suddenly responded to the instincts of primordial man. He leaped lightly to one side, caught the rushing giant's foot across his instep, and as Connick's moccasined feet went out from under him, the young engineer struck him behind the ear. He fell with ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... by fear, and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year- long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial superstition—the sex tabu. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... her memory by her notes, "you should begin by 'hating and despising the ideals of the average man'! You should create your own Truth—your own Morality. Obey only your primordial instincts—the Will ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... themselves among the most susceptible. Science, or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact, and to let all the rest—if rest there be—go. From this point of view, God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally disproved,—because ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... raged the death from which he had snatched her by a miracle. Beyond—a million miles away—the world whose claim had loosened on them was going through its routine of lies and love, of hypocrisies and heroisms. But here were just they two, flung back to the primordial type by the fierce battle for existence that had encompassed them—Adam and Eve in the garden, one to one, all else forgot, all other ties and obligations for the moment obliterated. Had they not struggled, heart ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... line of enormous shafts towering into a remote blackness. Like reddish monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to touch the low sky. He knew where he was now—the Calaveras Big Trees. The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few travelers ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, seek to explain the world as generated out of a primordial matter which is at the same time the universal support of things. This substance is endowed with a generative or transmutative force by virtue of which it passes into a succession of forms. They thus resemble modern evolutionists since they ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... construction of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, "in the beginning." But a new difficulty met him at the threshold—as change must be in existence, "we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence." His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was water.[167-1] This does in fact cover and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as the emerging of the dry land from the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... make their glory consist in the sinister brilliancy of battles and in the increase of their territorial domains. These same institutions give voice and vote in the direction of public affairs to the multitudes, whose primordial interest is ever peace, the sparing of their own blood, so unfruitfully shed in the great catastrophes ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... India dispenses completely with gods, holding that the primordial stuff is eternal, but it also holds that souls have a separate existence and are eternal. Thus a species of dualism emerges. Buddhism goes a step further, ignoring the soul as well as gods. It is agnostic in that, admitting the world to have a cause, it holds that it is impossible to ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... put those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges or in human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical science of the order: with questions of the threefold designation of God, the three primordial elements—sulphur, mercury, and salt—or the meaning of the square and all the various figures of the temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this class of Brothers to which the elder ones chiefly belonged, including, Pierre thought, Joseph Alexeevich ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as death—the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing until the light comes. This very childplay, as you call it, of Nature, is her assertion of the secret that life is the deepest, that life shall conquer death. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... Follicles. Each primitive or primordial ovum[3] is imbedded in a little vesicle or follicle, which is generally known as Graafian follicle, and there are as many Graafian follicles as there are ova. (The Graafian follicles were first described about 250 years ago—in 1672—by a Delft physician named De Graaf, hence ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... weird primordial scream, as the first man might have screamed in the face of the first saber-tooth, he hurled his axe among them and sprang forward, flashing the cold, gray blade of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... Nit, the heifer born from the midst of the primordial waters, had two crocodiles as her children, which are sometimes represented on the monuments as hanging from her bosom. Both the part played by these animals, and the reason for connecting them with the goddess, are ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Social Evolution; the symbolism of the visible world; why Science and Mysticism agree spiritually; the origin of "variation" the fundamental cause of woman's subjugation; when men defend "outraged honor," is it a primitive or a primordial instinct? the history of monogamy; the monogamic idea and the ideal monogamy; the history and cause of polygamy; the evolution of the "old-maid" idea and the psychic cause of this evolution; the path of the virtuous woman in ancient days; the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... law and religion were impossible—makes hereditary authority sacred to great masses of mankind in the old world. The obligation is the more stringent, therefore, on men thus set apart as it were by primordial selection for ruling and instructing their fellow-creatures, to keep their edicts and their practice in harmony with divine justice. For these rules cannot be violated with impunity during along succession of years, and it is usually left for a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... were, as the reader knows, transferred to Canada by Imperial sanction at the same time. It is not the author's intention, therefore, to cumber his pages with trite or irrelevant matter; yet certain transactions which preceded this primordial and greatest treaty of all not unfittingly may be set forth, though in the briefest way, as a pardonable introduction to ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... though," he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes. "Her man was clawed by a bear, and she's taking ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... extending itself in space in every direction; but by an opposite movement all its parts, closely united, converge to the sanctuary, gravitating toward the central point where their Head, their essential and primordial Reason, dwells; they struggle to penetrate its mystic veil, to mingle with it, to have their being in it, in order to accomplish the perfect union of variety with unity, of the finite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... or ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it — ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... abstract touches only the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to very partial ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... Orc IV—created prosthetic devices for their convenience and, when they tired of their history, breathed their own life into them and died. On Earth the legend is still in process. Many of the lower forms of life familiar throughout the galaxy can be seen on Earth in the primordial character of an appliance. Man regards the highest forms of life (as we know it) as tools—because he made them. How can we deny the superiority of the Creator? How will it feel to know we are nothing ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch

... we shall penetrate once more this Eden, that we may study with Yoritomo the manner of acquiring this art—somewhat unattractive perhaps but essentially primordial—called ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi

... considering his several impressions of these pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of them did he witness in the authentic version. Macbeth underwent in his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of Othello and Hamlet are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently characteristic of the variable moods ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... reshuffle the cards, resume, recommence. Adj. beginning &c v.; initial, initiatory, initiative; inceptive, introductory, incipient; proemial^, inaugural; inchoate, inchoative^; embryonic, rudimental; primogenial^; primeval, primitive, primordial &c (old) 124; aboriginal; natal, nascent. first, foremost, leading; maiden. begun &c v.; just begun &c v.. Adv. at the beginning, in the beginning, &c n.; first, in the first place, imprimis [Lat.], first and foremost; in limine [Lat.]; in the bud, in embryo, in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... faculty, wholly intuitive, and, so to speak, super-social, scarcely or not at all perceptible in persons, but which hovers over humanity like an inspiring genius, is the primordial fact of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... done in fire upon a long scroll of the abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black platform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces—forces which had always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetary ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... of the process of aggregation, more especially in dark red leaves, the contents of the cells often present a different appearance, as if the layer of protoplasm (primordial utricle) which lines the cells had separated itself and shrunk from the walls; an irregularly shaped purple bag being thus formed. Other fluids, besides a solution of the carbonate, for instance an infusion of raw meat, produce this same effect. But the appearance of the primordial utricle ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... all. They present the process as coming, not from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted in unison with the stately ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... her as she caught that phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as chipped flint. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... largest subdivision, and is apparently the primordial and simplest condition of the class. My observations will be best given by taking a few special cases. When the shoot of a Hop (Humulus lupulus) rises from the ground, the two or three first-formed joints ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... succeeding man throughout the course of time. The wheel! The eternal recommencement of things! And all the creatures of the human flock though changing the sheep-fold, never change shepherds; the shepherds are ever the same, the dead, the first to think, whose primordial thought was like the handful of snow which rolls and rolls down the hill-slopes, growing larger, bearing along everything which clings to it in ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... from the top, shuffle the cards, reshuffle the cards, resume, recommence. Adj. beginning &c. v.; initial, initiatory, initiative; inceptive, introductory, incipient; proemial[obs3], inaugural; inchoate, inchoative[obs3]; embryonic, rudimental; primogenial[obs3]; primeval, primitive, primordial &c. (old) 124; aboriginal; natal, nascent. first, foremost, leading; maiden. begun &c. v.; just begun &c. v. Adv. at the beginning, in the beginning, &c. n.; first, in the first place, imprimis[Lat], first and foremost; in limine[Lat]; in the bud, in embryo, in its infancy; from the beginning, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... illusion, a veil, masking at certain points the continuity of life. But substance, being one, why is there a variety of forms? There must be somewhere primordial figures, whose bodies are only images. If one could see, one would know the bond between mind and matter, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... as our method, we ask, What is the affirmative factor in the whole creation, and in ourselves as included in the creation, and, as we found in the first lecture, this factor is Spirit—that invisible power which concentrates-the primordial ether into forms, and endows those forms with various modes of motion, from the simply mechanical motion of the planet up to the volitional motion in man. And, since this is so, the primary affirmative ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all the time I had not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... her bridal day! Pause and think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition's earliest fable—waited still through the long eras of successive empires, while the hard-won light, broadening little by little, moved westward, westward, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... are trying to study God's big out-of-doors and must content themselves with stingy little parks. It's the love of Nature that takes them to the parks, and compared with this they have a poor substitute. This is the world as God made it, with all its primordial beauty. We're fortunate that circumstances placed us here, Thomas, and we ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... and linguists, especially the former, supports the progressive-evolution theory, which, briefly stated, is—that articulate language is the result of an elaboration in the long procession of ages in which there occurred three stages—the cry, vocalisation, and articulation. The cry is the primordial, pure animal language; it is a simple vocal aspiration without articulation; it is either a reflex expressing needs and emotions, or at a higher stage intentional (to call, warn, menace, etc.). ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... the difference—here lies our peculiar sin and shame. This great, primordial right is, with us, denied by law. The slave shall not be taught to read. Oh! that he might be taught! What floods of sympathy, what thunderings and lightnings of philanthropy, would then be spared the world! But why, we ask, should the slave be taught to read? That he might read the Bible, and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... Alternation, Symmetry, Progression, and Balanced Confusion; or else to one of their secondary causes, consonance, contrast, radiation, gradation, and complication; or lastly, to a combination of these different elements, which all finally lose themselves in a primordial cause—the origin of the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... celestial giant has not yet arrived at the stable condition of our dwelling-place. Owing to its considerable volume, this globe has probably preserved its original heat, revolving in space as an obscure Sun, but perhaps still burning. In it we see what our own planet must have been in its primordial epoch, in the pristine times ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... little. It is the place where the natural man must conquer his appetites, and long for, and finally seek for, a realm of order. Calypso is the concealer, she who conceals spirit in the jungle of nature. Here, then, occurs the primordial breach between the physical and spiritual, out of which an institutional world ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... because there are decencies to be observed by animals no less than men, he walked forward with his trunk outstretched into the primordial jungle and was ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... explain all, after having bowed down to that Self-existent, Primordial Being, who is eternal and undeteriorating and inconceivable, and who is at once vested with and divested of attributes. O tiger among men, this Janardana attired in yellow robes is the grand Mover and Creator ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... which went to seed unharvested each year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden from the keen-eyed songsters. And further, climbing after the sun through the wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and more royal even than the primordial ones ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... them again the action of Rome upon England is fortified. Even those among them who are most bent upon maintaining the local laws and traditions, have constantly to refer to the ancient law-makers and commentators; Roman law is for them a sort of primordial and common treasure, open to all, and wherewith to fill the gaps of the native legislation. The first lessons had been given after the Conquest by foreigners: the Italian Vacarius, brought by Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, had professed law at Oxford in 1149.[302] Then Anglo-Normans ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... face down in the mire, And prayed that darkness might become my pall; The rabble rout roared round me like some quire Of filthy animals primordial; My heart seemed like a toad eternally Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he; Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing, And life some beldam's dotard gossiping. Then, Lady, I bethought me of thy sway, And hoped again, rose up this prayer ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne

... root-principle, Mula-prakriti or undifferentiated primeval cosmic matter, which evolves out of itself consciousness and mind, and is generally called "Prakriti" and amulam mulam, "the rootless root," and Aryakta, the "unevolved evolver," &c.? This primordial tattwa or "eternally existing 'that,'" the unknown essence, is said to produce as a first producer, 1, Buddhi— "intellect"—whether we apply the latter to the 6th macrocosmic or microcosmic principle. This first produced produces ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... smiled, "The conversation," they added, "refers to the primordial scheme and cannot be divulged before the proper season; but, when the time comes, mind do not forget us two, and you will readily be able to escape from the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... these plants be established on farther evidence, then we are warranted in supposing that there were isolated patches of land in the Cambrian or Primordial period, and if there was land there must have been bodies of fresh water, hence there may have been both terrestrial and aquatic insects, possibly of forms like the Podurids, May flies, Perlae, mites and Pauropus of the present day. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... superfluous, and utterly brutal "er." When he wishes to confound Mr. Gladstone, he assaults about "Ugander"; when the concerns of our great Eastern dependency move him to interest, he asks about "Indier"; and he speaks of the primordial accomplishments of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... summon us before that final bar To give account of deeds done in the flesh. The spirit cannot thus be summoned, Since entity it hath not sound can strike. Let sceptics rave! I see no difficulty That He, who from primordial atoms formed A human frame, can from the dust awake it Once again, marshal the scattered molecules And make immortal, as was Adam. This body lives! Or else no deep delight Of quiring angels harping golden strings; ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon



Words linked to "Primordial" :   primordial dwarf, primeval, primal, aboriginal, early, primaeval



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com