"Reducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of contrast between the two methods may now be presented in a few sentences. Plato held that all our cognitions are reducible to two elements—one derived from sense, the other from pure reason; one element particular, contingent, and relative, the other universal, necessary, and absolute. By an act of immediate abstraction Plato will eliminate the particular, contingent, and relative phenomena, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he is dealing not with a foreign or isolated language but with the earlier forms of his own mother tongue. The study will prove profitable and stimulating in proportion as close and constant comparison is made of the old with the new. The guiding principles in such a comparison are reducible chiefly to two. These are (1)the regular operation of phonetic laws, resulting especially in certain Vowel Shiftings, and (2)the alterations in form and syntax ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... as S. Augustine's Gloss has it,[345] "is derived from speculum, a 'mirror,' not from specula, a 'watch-tower.'" To see a thing in a mirror, however, is to see a cause by an effect in which its likeness is shown; thus speculation seems reducible to meditation. ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... is it neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not to this newly devised one: King Louis Restorer of French Liberty? Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd. But then if there be no ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... above the condition of the brutes. But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace these latter is the object of the present volume. Vast as the subject appears, it is easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without being wearisome, and render its study both ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... such false decks as in a moment should kill and take prisoners as many as should board the ship, without blowing the real decks up, or destroying them from being reducible; and in a quarter of an hour's time should recover their former shape, and to be made fit for any employment, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Further, every evil will is reducible to some species of malice. But the will that is at variance with erring reason is not reducible to some species of malice. For instance, if a man's reason err in telling him to commit fornication, his will in not willing to do ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the decorations of modern food basins used in the villages of East Mesa shows that the mythologic personages most commonly chosen for the ornamentation of their interiors are the Corn or Germ goddesses.[117] These assume a number of forms, yet all are reducible to one type, although known by very different names, as Hewueqti, "Old Woman," Kokle, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... nurse-biting and original sin in general are all strictly reducible from Darwinian principles; but don't by misadventure run against any ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Letronne, which is founded on official documents and coins, is without doubt more dependable than that of Plutarch, which is reducible to an imaginative metaphor; and the discovery of Letronne, concluding that concatenation of facts that I have set forth, finally persuades me to affirm that not a passion of love, suddenly re-awakened, led Antony in the second half of ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... poet's definition of poetry as "the heat and height of sane emotion" would have been unintelligible to Boileau. Deficient in imagination, he always saw life on its material side, and was irritated by any display of emotion not reducible to logic. So his poetry is sensible, clear argument in exquisitely careful metre. His great strength lay in a taste which recognized harmony and fitness instinctively. To us his quality is best translated by the dainty, perfect couplets ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... nature and one of the universal principles of art; and thus versification, which is the study of the rhythms of verse, is both a science and an art. But it differs from the other sciences in that its phenomena are not 'regular' and reducible to law, but varying and subject to the dictates, even the whims, of genius; inasmuch as every poem involves a fresh fiat of creation. Of course, no poet when he is composing, either in the traditional "fine frenzy" or in the more sober process ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... language denominated Etymology, we shall contend that all words are reducible to two general classes, nouns and verbs; or, things and actions. We shall, however, admit of subdivisions, and treat of pronouns, adjectives, and contractions. We shall contend for only two cases of nouns, one kind of pronouns, one kind of verbs, that all are active; three modes, and as many ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... things: first, upon the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... number—and perhaps it is simpler to assume five—distinct plans or constructions in the whole of the animal world; and that the hundreds of thousands of species of creatures on the surface of the earth, are all reducible to those five, or, at most, seven, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... remembering; secondly, that it shows every appearance of having remembered; thirdly, that no other hypothesis except memory can be brought forward, so as to account for the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, which is not easily reducible to an absurdity. Beyond this we do not care to go, and must allow those to differ from us who ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... internal or subjective, external or objective.—Association: its role reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to two, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... institutions are confronted. Churches should therefore estimate their policies by the responses of the marginal people of the community. Religious standards of value should be measured by final utility, not initial utility. The complaint against the church today is reducible to this: that she standardizes her ideals and her policies in accordance with the prosperous and well-to-do. The eloquence and the character of her ministers, the kind of music with which God is worshipped, the comfortable ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... logically deducible from the definition of the man. There is a similar hierarchy in the region of universals. Many universals, like many particulars, are only known to us by description. But here, as in the case of particulars, knowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately reducible to knowledge concerning what is ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... "They are all reducible to one—exhaustion of the will, the prime element of personality. The patient ceases to care. It is too much trouble to work; then too much trouble to read; then too much trouble to exert even those all but mechanical powers ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... been said upon the overpowering "lusciousness" of his poetry, and the magical "melody" of his verse: most of this is futile. There is in the former as much of fadeur as of lusciousness; and a certain tripping or trotting exactitude, not less fully reducible to the test of scansion than of a well-attuned ear, is but a rudimentary form of melody—while of harmony or rhythmic volume of sound Moore is as decisively destitute as any correct versifier can well be. No clearer proof of the incapacity of the mass of critics and readers to appreciate ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... driving power, then the main character, which becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own work has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of my books has always been reducible to its title. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... follow, that that government ought to be clothed with all the powers requisite to complete execution of its trust. And unless it can be shown that the circumstances which may affect the public safety are reducible within certain determinate limits; unless the contrary of this position can be fairly and rationally disputed, it must be admitted, as a necessary consequence, that there can be no limitation of that authority which is to provide for the defense and protection of the ...
— The Federalist Papers
... obtained, especially when instead of a rectangle a double catenarian curve was formed of it on one side of the galvanometer, and the two single curves or halves were swung in opposite directions at the same time; their action then combined to affect the galvanometer: but all the results were reducible to ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... oblations, obventions, mortuaries, dilapidations, reparation of churches, probate of wills, administrations, simony, incests, fornications, adulteries, solicitation of chastity; pensions, procurations, commutation of penance, right of pews, and other such like, reducible to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all his thoughts and actions. It was he that had them and did them; and this self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered very little what the substance of a thinking being might be: God might even ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... solids, liquids and gases, and that all chemical elements have their four etheric substates, the highest being common to all, and consisting of the ultimate physical atoms to which all elements are finally reducible. The chemical atom is regarded as the ultimate particle of any element, and is supposed to be indivisible and unable to exist in a free state. Mr. Crookes' researches have led the more advanced chemists to regard the atoms as compound, as a more or less complex aggregation ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality, and "walk" in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... particles, and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical rations. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother. What we ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... acts are reducible to one of two kinds: either they are acts of creation, effecting a new result, or they are acts of repetition. Acts of repetition tend rapidly to become habits; and they may be performed without attention or positive ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... touch, if not a first-class influence, is at least an approach to that. The combined power of soft contact and warmth amounts to a considerable pitch of massive pleasure; while there may be subtle influences not reducible to these two heads, such as we term, from not knowing anything about them, magnetic or electric. The sort of thrill from taking a baby in arms is something beyond mere warm touch; and it may rise to the ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... directly opposite to our poet's and his speaker's meaning. As I have stopped it, the sense quadrates with the context: and surely it is one unalterable property of philosophy to make seeming strange and preternatural phenomena familiar and reducible to cause ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... method as contrasted with the legal and personal methods above and later described, because it is impersonal and reducible to a rule of value. Distribution under competition is made, not with reference to abstract ethical principles or to personal affection, but to the value of the product. Each worker strives to do what will ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... still marble, for marble must have certain qualities if it is to be marble. In that case then the matter underlying the change in question is not pure matter, it is already endowed with some primitive form and is composite. But marble is ultimately reducible to the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, which are simpler; and theoretically, though not in practice, we can think away all form, and we have left only that which takes forms but is itself not any form. This ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... are in "bonds" are set before us as deserving an especial remembrance. Their claims upon us are described as a modification of the Golden Rule—as one of the many forms to which its obligations are reducible. To them we are to extend the same affectionate regard as we would covet for ourselves, if the chains upon their limbs were fastened upon ours. To the benefits of this precept, the enslaved have a natural claim ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... vital force or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can come into existence.[11] M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to physical or chemical forces." The AbbA(C) Needham is satisfied to formulate a "force vA(C)getative," so far as plant-life is concerned; Buffon invariably falls back on vital force or energy; and Burdach on a "force plastique," which is essentially inseparable from nature ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... course of evolution in the lower worlds man often introduces into his vehicles qualities which are undesirable and entirely inappropriate for his life as an ego—such, for example, as pride, irritability, sensuality. These, like the rest, are reducible to vibrations, but they are in all cases vibrations of the lower subdivisions of their respective worlds, and therefore they cannot reproduce themselves in the causal body, which is built exclusively of the matter of the three higher subdivisions of its world. For each section of the astral ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... to distress. The wealthy individual, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil causes; nay, more, he may readily elude the punishment which awaits him for a delinquency, by breaking his bail. So that all the penalties of the law are, for him, reducible to fines.[54] Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest social advantages to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... appear, that the most comprehensive formula to which life is reducible, would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... being composed of two membranes, and therefore essentially similar to Medusae. Thus, by a great piece of constructive work, an assemblage of animals was gathered into a new group and shewn to be organised upon one simple and uniform plan, and, even in the most complex and aberrant forms, reducible to the same type. The group, and Huxley's conception of its structure, are now absolutely accepted by anatomists, and have made one of the corner-stones of our modern idea of the arrangement of the animal kingdom. With the exception of sponges, concerning the exact relations ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Fortunate Islands to Serica, and from the Baltic to the sources of the Nile, the comparison of the phenomena of the various zones taught them the rotundity of the earth, and gave birth to a new theory. Having remarked that all the operations of nature during the annual period were reducible to two principal ones, that of producing and that of destroying; that on the greater part of the globe these two operations were performed in the intervals of the two equinoxes; that is to say, during the six months of summer every thing was procreating ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... outer world upon the hard warp of your own mentality; which perpetually imposes its own convention, and checks the free representation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various and full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... among all nations applied with so great latitude, that they are not easily reducible under any regular scheme of explication: this difficulty is not less, nor perhaps greater, in English, than in other languages. I have labored them with diligence, I hope with success; such at least as can be expected in a task, which no man, however learned ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... however has been proposed, and we shall not shrink from considering it. The scheme of Sir Robert Peel is reducible to a few points, which we shall now proceed to review seriatim. First—let us regard it with a view to its nature; secondly, as to its necessity under ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. The wealthy individual, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil causes; nay, more, he may readily elude the punishment which awaits him for a delinquency by breaking his bail. So that all the penalties of the law are, for him, reducible to fines. *n Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest social advantages to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... pointed out before, that all efforts, the sole object of which is to please from moment to moment the man who directs and pays for them, are, whether embodied in the form of commodities or no, really reducible to some kind of personal service, if a toy-maker, in return for food, makes a dancing-doll for another man, he might just as well have pirouetted for so many hours himself; and if the purchaser would be more amused by a man's antics than by a puppet's, this is precisely what the toy-maker would ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... various modes in which these parts are capable of combination, and the merits of buildings of different form and expression, are evidently not reducible into lists, nor to be estimated by general laws. The nobility of each building depends on its special fitness for its own purposes; and these purposes vary with every climate, every soil, and every ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... External causes of error, comprehending such as depend on external uncontrollable circumstances; such as fluctuations of weather, which disturb the amount of refraction from its tabulated value, and being reducible to no fixed laws, induce uncertainty to the amount ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... such a principle exists in the doctrine of Value—truly explained. The question from which all Political Economy will be found to move—the question to which all its difficulties will be found reducible—is this: What is the ground of exchangeable value? My hat, for example, bears the same value as your umbrella; double the value of my shoes; four times the value of my gloves; one twentieth of the value of this watch. Of these several relations ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... evident, there may be a good as well as an evil application of this Principle. And the ingenious Invention of that Excellent person, Doctor Wren of injecting liquors into the veins of an Animal, seems to be reducible to this head: I cannot stay, nor is this a fit place, to mention the several Experiments made of this kind by the most incomparable Mr. Boyle, the multitudes made by the lately mention'd Physician Doctor Clark, the History whereof, as he has been pleas'd to communicate ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... to the centripetal force, and the law of variation to the centrifugal force; and in truth their operations seem analogous, and possibly they may be the same in kind, though certainly unlike in this, that they are not reducible to arithmetical calculation and cannot be subjected to definite measurement. His thought is at least a highly suggestive one and ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... dances, it is impossible for a professor of this art, to make any figure without a competent stock of original ideas, reducible into practice. A dance should be a kind of regular dramatic poem to be executed by dancing, in a manner so clear, as to give to the understanding of the spectator no trouble in making out the meaning of the whole, or of any part of it. All ambiguity being ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... of gardening are reducible to three heads: the contrasts, the management of surprises and the concealment of the bounds. "Pray, what is it you mean by the contrasts?" "The disposition of the lights and shades."—"'Tis the colouring then?"—"Just that."—"Should not variety be one of the rules?"—"Certainly, one of the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... flying in right lines at velocities varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with each other at intervals varying up to 17,750,000 times in a second. To this analysis — if one understood it right — all matter whatever was reducible, and the only difference of opinion in science regarded the doubt whether a still deeper analysis would reduce the atom of gas ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... subject is not exhausted by these observations. That portion of it which is most reducible to points of argument has been stated, and, I trust, truly. There are, however, some topics of a more diffuse nature, which yet deserve to be proposed to the ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley |
