"Algebraic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but feel that the evidence presented to him is bewildering, indecisive, and obscure; and it may occur to him that the author is very like an individual who proposes to determine the value of two or three unknown quantities from one simple algebraic equation. His principal witness, Aristides, were he now living and brought up in presence of a jury, would find himself in rather an odd predicament. He is expected to settle the date of the death of Polycarp, ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... interest which it takes in the poorer classes, by its care for their welfare and the algebraic account it keeps of all their misery and needs, political economy had, of course, given to Henri Mauperin a colouring of Liberalism. It was not that he belonged to a very decided Opposition: his opinions were merely a little ahead of Government principles, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... head. True, we observe certain regularities in the way in which these phenomena occur, and the phenomenon at one place seems to be somehow dependent on some exercise of force at another place. And so we invent an ingenious theory, and fortify it all around with ponderous algebraic artillery for defense against all attack. And by persistent use of such theories we hypnotize ourselves into the belief that we are truly scientific in method, and are dealing with objective realities, and that these learned theories are something more than pretentious masks to hide our ignorance ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... It seemed to me that some important truths had escaped even "the inevitable eye" of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was of all general ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so disasters ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... analyzing the finite, is very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques himself ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Katherine, without turning round. "They are humorous all, and so each furnishes something suitable for the saddened mind. Wisdom comes through understanding your alphabet properly. For instance, first there was Gilbert, and that gave us G; then came Kipling, and he gave us K; thus we get an algebraic formula, G.K., which are the initials of Chesterton, a still later arrival, and as the mind increases in despondency it sinks lower and lower down the alphabet until it comes to S, and thus we have Barn-yard Shaw, an improvement on the Kail-yard school, ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... the essential forms which can affect the organism. This is a universal algebraic formula, by which we can solve all organic problems. We apply it to the hand, to the shoulder, to the eyes, to the voice—in a word, to all the agents of oratorical language. For example, it suffices to know the eccentro-eccentric form of the hand, of the eyes; and we ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... are computed by what may be called Long Measure. League is a vague term, and, like x in an algebraic equation, stands for an unknown quantity. It may mean ten miles, more or less,—any distance, in fact, over five miles. The unit of measure, as fixed by law, is estamos aqui, (here we are,) which is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... view, steaming under the hot rays of the noonday sun. Abstractly considered, the thing seemed preposterous enough for the plot of a dime novel, while in the light of her sweet presence the development of his love seemed as logical as an algebraic problem. At all events, the result was in both cases equally inexorable. It was useless to argue that she was his inferior in culture and social accomplishments; she was still young and flexible, and displayed an aptness for seizing upon his ideas and assimilating them which was fairly ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... find, at the opening of the next chapter, the admission, that "the historical development of the abstract portion of mathematical science has, since the time of Descartes, been for the most part determined by that of the concrete." Further on we read respecting algebraic functions that "most functions were concrete in their origin—even those which are at present the most purely abstract; and the ancients discovered only through geometrical definitions elementary algebraic properties ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... conception of quantity, therefore, if rigorously analyzed, will indicate a priori the natural and impassable boundaries of the science; while a subsequent examination of the quantities called infinite in the mathematical sense, and of the algebraic symbol of infinity, will be seen to verify the results of this ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work {467} out certain problems with: they are rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in Twice Told Tales and in the second collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, are more openly allegorical ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers |
