"Plasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 237 I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning—"romantic" temperament, "realist" senses—blending of their donnees in his imaginative activity—shifting complexion of "finite" and "infinite" 237 II. His "realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and veracity of intellect and senses 239 III. But his realism qualified by energetic individual preference along certain well-defined lines 245 IV. Joy in Light and Colour 246 V. Joy in Form. Love of abruptness, of intricacy; clefts and spikes 250 VI. Joy in ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... her. It is true that as the time grew closer her nerve was less marked. And just before it she was a girl—and nothing more; with all girl's diffidence, a girl's self-distrust, a girl's abnegation, a girl's plasticity. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... self-interest, keeping men of far greater abilities to play like puppets, and despising those whom it has brought down to its own level. The petty fixed idea naturally prevails; it has the advantage of persistence over the plasticity ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... "variation has been led along certain beneficial lines," like a stream "along definite and useful lines of irrigation." Darwin's conclusion was that, if we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organization which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to a natural selection ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... pace with the growth of the other parts of the body as a result of its disuse. These are simple examples of a wide range of phenomena exhibited everywhere by animals and even by the human organism, demonstrating the plasticity of the organic mechanism and its modification by functional primary factors ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... V.—a sentiment that, if he uttered it, means more of sarcasm than of praise; for it is the very putting off a man's identity that establishes his weakness. All real force of character excludes dualism. Every eminent, every able man has a certain integrity in his nature that rejects this plasticity. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in the dining-room drinking tea. Ivan Petrovitch, seeing that his visitor was bored and preoccupied, drew some notes out of his waistcoat pocket, read a funny letter from a German steward, saying that all the ironmongery was ruined and the plasticity ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sulphuric acids, is thoroughly washed and partially dried. Camphor is then added, and the whole is ground together and thoroughly mixed. At this stage coloring matter may be put in. A little alcohol increases the plasticity of the mass, which is then treated for some time to powerful hydraulic pressure. Then comes breaking up the cakes and feeding the fragments between heated rolls, by which the amalgamation of the whole is completed. Its perfect plasticity allows it to be rolled into sheets, drawn ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of joy with the easy Albert—he at home there and master of the scene to a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add, that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the spring; for how else ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... exogamous types of society. Whatever may have been the origin of exogamy, the survival of the exogamous type in progressive societies may easily be explained on the ground of superior adaptability, variability and plasticity, which enables such societies to survive a change of environment while the more rigid structure of the endogamous clan ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... there came the first dawning of a conscious life similar in nature to the conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, and for the same reason. All birds and mammals which take care of their young are teachable, though ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... learns to speak a foreign language late in life never attains the facility and ease that might have been reached at an earlier age. This is because the neural paths for speech are already set for his mother-tongue, and, with the lessened plasticity of age, the new paths are hard ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... my early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... most often succeed in accommodating his sentiments to those of his conjoint. On the other hand, this average representative of normal mediocrity easily becomes the slave of routine and incapable of new ideas. However normal he may be, he has less faculty of adaptation or mental plasticity and less liberty, than a man of higher ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... and with a peculiarly Italian morbidezza, or plasticity we find Machiavelli. Others before had written of politics, but Machiavelli "had the better talent of writing." He wrote to tell things clearly. Imagination he had none, as an historian, and his comedy is in Limbo. He is all intellectual strength, but the moral ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... instances had occurred; or that we should not have had reason to despair, if four such experiments had been made, and if they had all failed? They afford us again ground for believing, that there is a peculiar softness, and plasticity, and pliability in the African character. This softness may be collected almost every where from the Travels of Mr. Mungo Park, and has been noticed by other writers, who have contrasted it with the unbending ferocity ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... place of gold where the circumstances and conditions indicate that the latter should be used. Of course, the virtue is not in the gold or the tin, but in the mechanical perfection of the operation, and tin having more plasticity than gold, that perfection can be secured with more ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... though the moments are not infrequent when the utterance is more fluent than significant. The typical phrases which he chose to symbolize the persons and passions of the play are most of them deficient in plasticity, and nearly all of them lack that expressiveness which Wagner knew so well how to impress upon his melodic elements; the greater, therefore, was the surprise that Mr. Damrosch was able to weave them together in a fabric which moved steadily forward for more than an hour, and reflected ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... actual achievement at this time may be in the first case smaller than in the second. He will do less at first, but he promises to outrank the other man after a period of further training. Special experiments must be carried on and have been actually started to determine this plasticity of the psychophysical apparatus as an independent ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... critical scenes, or those which specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity. It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find short passages of dialogue sketched out ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... child by all the arts of mind and hand—her mother directed her to ambition. The second-rate position of this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to the plasticity and adulation which her mother's domestic condition required and illustrated. At sixteen years of age her precocious beauty and musical talent caused her to be already sought in the salons. Her mother produced her there in the dubious publicity between the theatre and the world. An artiste ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... described all the differences in the skeletons which I have observed. It is impossible not to be struck with the high degree of variability or plasticity of many of the bones. We see how erroneous the often-repeated statement is, that only the crests of the bones which give attachment to muscles vary in shape, and that only parts of slight importance {124} become modified under ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... modifications of their own. The crude brick of Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used while damp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pise.[171] Spread out in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one to another by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with which they were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the courses above.[172] The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single huge block. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorways and drains, that ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... recollect—he had shown great plasticity for a time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn's letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled him through various scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then—a little later—he could see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and Raeburn, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... executed with the sagacity of genius by the illustrious naturalists of the last century and the beginning of the present. But the frames which they have traced are fixed and rigid; nature with her infinite plasticity escapes from them. We render a great homage to the classifiers when we say that they have confined the facts as closely as it is possible to do. The catalogues which they have prepared are of a utility ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... accessibility to new ideas, powers of imitation and invention, make them the leaders of the Orient. Steamships of twenty-two thousand tons, and equal to any Atlantic Cunarders, yet built in their own dockyards by shipwrights who twenty years ago knew nothing of their trade, are a proof of extraordinary plasticity and ability. Civilization and Christianity may find new expression, if the Japanese are subdued by ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comic whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... nervous system, and particularly upon the brain. To understand habit we must look beyond thought and action and consider some of the fundamental characteristic features of the nervous system. One such characteristic is the plasticity of the nervous substance. If I bend a piece of paper and crease it, the crease will remain even after the paper is straightened out again. The paper is plastic, and plasticity means simply that the substance offers ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... the home. It is a period of very rapid, if not fulminating psychic expansion. It is the natal hour of new curiosities, when adult life first begins to exert its potent charm. It is an age of exploration, of great susceptibility, plasticity, eagerness, pervaded by the instinct to try and plan in ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... evanescent. It was as if suffering had removed some substance unapt, [Footnote: Spenser's 'Hymne in Honour of Beautie.'] and rendered her body a better-fitting garment for her soul. Her face, which had before required the softening influences of sleep and dreams to give it the plasticity necessary for complete expression, was now full of a repressed expression, if I may be allowed the phrase—a latent something ever on the tremble, ever on the point of breaking forth. It was as if the nerves had grown finer, more tremulous, or, rather, more ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... place not previously occupied, and in which it is subject to no opposition from beings of its own class, or where it attains so great a perfection as to be able easily to overcome all opposition, the character eventually loses its original plasticity, or tendency to vary, since improvement in such a case would be superfluous, and becomes, so to speak, crystallized in that form which continues thereafter unaltered. It is, at any rate, clear that while all other birds rub together in the struggle for existence, the humming-bird, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impassive; her attitude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity at others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And now, when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to myself, it failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a savage and acrimonious ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... him of making no effort to analyze the mental processes which his tests bring into play. It is true that many of Binet's earlier assumptions proved untenable, and in this event he was always ready, with exceptional candor and intellectual plasticity, to acknowledge his error and to plan a new line ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... taking advantage of any channel that it can find, just as the water in a cistern would in a moment find the one open pipe among a dozen closed ones, and proceed to empty itself through that. If the wish be merely an indefinite one for his general good, the elemental essence in its wonderful plasticity will respond exactly to that less distinct idea also, and the creature formed will expend its force in the direction of whatever action for the man's advantage comes most readily to hand. Of course in all cases the amount of such force ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater |
