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Primordial   /prɪmˈɔrdiəl/  /praɪmˈɔrdiəl/   Listen
Primordial

adjective
1.
Having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state.  Synonyms: aboriginal, primaeval, primal, primeval.  "Primal eras before the appearance of life on earth" , "The forest primeval" , "Primordial matter" , "Primordial forms of life"



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"Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books



... puberty, but that the form assumed at this period is 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 narrower sense. A greater part is found to be incompatible with ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... security, moral, mental, and physical health, the qualities her reason demanded in a husband; but in the other was grace and charm, something wildly admirable. He allured as the warrior, intrepid and graceful, allured the maiden, as the forest calls the householder. Something primordial and splendid and very sweet was in her feeling toward him. There could be no peaceful wedlock there, no security of home, no comfort, only the exquisite thrill of perilous union, the madness of a few short weeks—perhaps only a few swift days of self-surrender, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... and Mlle. 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 heights. They travelled ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... 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 should be for ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... 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 ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... occurred to me that Chesterton would heartily approve of my approximation of Sirius and Stentor, of Capella and Cothurnia—the universe balanced. My attention was drawn from the atom Gonium—whose brave little spirit was striving to keep his foursome one—a primordial struggle toward unity of self and division of labor; my consciousness climbed the microscope tube and came to rest upon a slim glass of amber liquid on my laboratory table: a servant had brought a cocktail, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... over Nature man sometimes forgets his danger, oversteps the narrow margin of safety he has left between himself and the baffled forces of his ancient tyrants, Fire and Water, Earth and Air. Then indeed, in his moments of weakness, the primordial forces turn upon him and he becomes subject to tragic and terrific punishment. Of such character was the most prominent disaster of these years, the sinking of the ocean steamer Titanic. The best talent of England and America ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... 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 are essential to life. In man the ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... 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 ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... beside the fragrant hedge, if you will, with the green sward for benches, and the canopy of heaven for dome, she was honored in Ireland, even as she had been honored ages before in Greece, in Palestine, and by our primordial Celtic ancestors themselves. The hedge-schoolmaster conducted the rites, and the air resounded with the sonorous hexameters of Virgil and the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... these the Americans have shown 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 ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... primordial life began, and in it even in these latter days the far beginning of superior things may be discovered actively pursuing their craft and purpose in the order of the universe. Worms are abundant, and among them certain genera ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... holy sanctuary and leaving their memory to be perpetuated by the neighbouring "Monte Saraceno." The costume, on the other hand, may have come over from Greece; it is figured on Tanagra statuettes and worn by modern Greek shepherds. By Sardinians, too. ... It may well be a primordial ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... Glaudot thought. Incredible power. All the power to control worlds, to carve worlds from primordial slime, almost, for yourself. Here was far more power than any man in the galaxy had ever been ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger

... love,—the last relay And ultimate outpost of eternity? Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all? One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,— One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand. Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call And veriest touch of powers primordial That any hour-girt life ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite. So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light, there is for us no ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... dead, I should gladly have pitted my strength and wit against the savage and primordial world in which I found myself. I could have lived in seclusion within some rocky cave until I had found the means to outfit myself with the crude weapons of the Stone Age, and then set out in search of her whose image had now become the constant companion of my waking hours, and the central ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... 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

... furnish and twenty-five enfeebled acres to resuscitate, one must not mind. Advanced scientists assure us of life, motion, even intelligence, appetite, and affection in the most primitive primordial atoms. So, after a little study, I found that the inhabitants of Gooseville and its outlying hamlets were neither dead nor sleeping. It was only by contrast that they appeared comatose ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... in darkness, 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 ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne

... Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... success. This was the principle of fertilisation, which arose in this way from what would almost seem the chance union of two cells, at first alike, but afterwards more and more highly differentiated, and from whose primordial mating have proceeded by a natural series of ascending steps all the developed forms ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... 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 ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... 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 ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... 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 ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... 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 ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... 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 ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... down to the primordial being Isana, to whom multitudes make offerings, and who is adored by the multitude; who is the true incorruptible one, Brahma, perceptible, imperceptible, eternal; who is both a non-existing and an existing-non-existing being; who is the universe and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... case," 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 ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James

... trailed, he flushed, he chased, he broke all the commandments of a sporting-dog's morality. In this was demoralisation, but also great profit. For Jim came to be an adept at surprising game in the snow. His point now became exactly what it used to be in the primordial dog—a pause of preparation before the spring. Jim was beautifully independent. Except in the matter of delicacies, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... calculations. The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes refuge in ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... but the magic powers of youth and ignorance could have cajoled us to 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. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... just discussed had been uncommon in all respects; Maitland's scheme of courses and his specification as to details had roused the admiration of the Primordial's chef and put him on his mettle. He had outdone himself in his efforts to do justice to Mr. Maitland's genius; and the Primordial in its deadly conservatism remains to this day one of the very few places in New York where good, sound cooking ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... the midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are presenting themselves again for review; such ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... an instant Chloe's glance rested upon her companions; Big Lena sat scowling murderously at Vermilion's broad back. Harriet Penny had fainted and lay with the back of her head awash in the shallow bilge water. A strange alter ego—elemental—primordial—had taken possession of Chloe. Her eyes glowed, and her heart thrilled at the sight of the tense, vigilant figure of Vermilion, and the sweating, straining scowmen. For the helpless form of Harriet Penny she felt only contempt—the savage, intolerant contempt of the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... Argonautic expedition, (he observes in the Preliminary Disquisition to the latter work), has been questioned; but if the primordial history of every nation but one is tinctured with the fabulous, and if from among the rest a choice is necessary to be made, it must be allowed that the traditions of Greece are less inconsistent than those of the more distant regions of the earth. Oriental learning is ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... certain atoms had been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Were animals and plants created as eggs or seed or as full grown? At each act of creation was one individual or were many produced? For himself, he came to the conclusion that all organic beings had descended from some one primordial form into which life ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... to allude to a few of the most important. In Scandinavia occurs a 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 ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate the line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There is something primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps overbold in designating them as a great desire to share the race life. We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... Cambrian beds. In the lower they have all but disappeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long ages; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually reaching that "Primordial Zone" conceived of by M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living things had begun to people this planet, is a question not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be the true one. That there was life, in the sea at least, even before the ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... and in its essence unknowable, is "the fountain-head of all beings, and the norm of all actions. But it is not only the formative principle of the universe; it also seems to be primordial matter: chaotic in its composition, born prior to Heaven and earth, noiseless, formless, standing alone in its solitude, and not changing, universal in its activity, and unrelaxing, without being exhausted, it is ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... 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 the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... 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 universal Good and the universal Evil in which unthinking ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Samuel 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.

... a good deal of the cave man about him. The heavy, slouching shoulders, the glare of savagery, the long, hairy arms, all had their primordial suggestion. Given a club and a stone ax, he might have been set back thousands of years with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... man, did he not have Hamlet's doubt to face, I think perhaps we would all be better off for no knowledge of that subjective war. Man has too much to do to lift himself out of the still clinging primordial slough to dally with subjectiveness. We should be acting, aggressive, strident in the strength of the war ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... 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 backward, and ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul—Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia—a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt in these ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... of our age, nevertheless, merely know that our nearest origin is the father or the grandfather, as we are descended from them, and they from their fathers in succession. (They say) that the remotest (origin) is the undefinable (primordial) Gas[FN286] in the state of chaos; that it split itself into the two (different) principles of the Positive and the Negative; that the two brought forth the Three Powers of Heaven, Earth, and Man, which (in their ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... characeae, 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 to form ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... also the existence of life in the form of one or more primordial germs. He does not adopt the theory of spontaneous generation. What life is he does not attempt to explain, further than to quote (p. 326), with approbation, the definition of Herbert Spencer, who says, "Life depends on, or ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... out that ape and tiger, or at any rate keep it under unceasing control. Whence is this extraordinary human element, and what explanation can be given of the contradiction unless there be some higher synthesis into which the antinomy is taken up and resolved into unity? If out of the primordial nebula both the cosmos and man, with all that he is, have been evolved, then it would appear, plain as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly irreconcilable with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... expresses itself in all ways, the whole universe is the expression of the Divine, but "man is the highest and most perfect earthly being in whom the primordial force is spiritualised so that man feels, understands and knows his own power." Conscious development of one's own power is the triumph of spirit over matter, therefore human development is spiritual development. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... slippery surface the 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 a dismal thump of his head on the ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... of moulding and subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the wider social life his crowding ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... 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 after certain moments. In a short while Kolya became ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... fancy, because it is like the primordial chaos, a concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of infinite adventure and result are floating around you like a snow-storm. You do not know what may arise in a moment and colour all your future. Out of this mass may suddenly start something marvellous, or, it ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... texture, the individual plants are but indifferently preserved; nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit any very close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modern algaeologist. The cord-like plant, Chorda filum, known to our children as "dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at times to the too adventurous swimmer who gets entangled in its thick ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... 'Indeed, I shall 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 of all, the Soul and Framer of all things, and the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... divide the scientific world, very unequally, upon the origin of the existing diversity of the plants and animals which surround us. One assumes that the actual kinds are primordial; the other, that they are derivative. One, that all kinds originated supernaturally and directly as such, and have continued unchanged in the order of Nature; the other, that the present kinds appeared in some sort of genealogical connection with other and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... was 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 ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... 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

... traditions, with more than five hundred years of prescriptive standing; this principle which prevailed by usage and acceptance among all modern peoples long before it was embodied in legal form; this primordial deliverance of the spiritual life of the Germanic nations is the substantial fact which our modern society has now finally embodied in Article 20 of the Constitution and so has constituted a norm for the guidance ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus 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. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... for a moment. If this be yonder sun and this lesser crumb be the outermost one of our revolving system, and this the next within, and this the next, and so on; now if this be so tell me which of these fragmentary orbs is ours—which of all these crumbs from the hand of the primordial would be that we stand upon?" And I waited with an anxiety a light manner thinly hid, to ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... which the evolutionist must 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 system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... these changes of animal form, and innumerable others, which may be collected from the books of natural history; we cannot but be convinced, that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs, included one within another, like ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... 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

... acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... whole brutal exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... ancestors, but as being a continuation of the personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum IT ACTUALLY IS quite as truly as the octogenarian IS the same identity with the ovum from which he has been developed. This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove each one of us to BE ACTUALLY the primordial cell which never died nor dies, but has differentiated itself into ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... ball of matter suspended between two infinities. This gigantic and unmanageable material is so completely mastered by the poet's imagination, that we are made to feel at one and the same time the petty dimensions of our earth in comparison with primordial space and almighty power, and the profound import to us of the issue depending on the conflict. Other poets, of inferior powers, have from time to time attempted, with different degrees of success, some of the minor Scriptural histories; Bodmer, the Noachian Deluge; Solomon Gessner, the Death ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... being thrown instead of less; and reading in perfect good faith, we rose from our perusal with the impression that Mr. Darwin was advocating the descent of all existing forms of life from a single, or from, at any rate, a very few primordial types; that no one else had done this hitherto, or that, if they had, they had got the whole subject into a mess, which mess, whatever it was—for we were never told this—was now being removed once for all ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... 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 ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... would become more circular, they would gradually move further apart, rotate more slowly on their axes, and assume the shapes they have now. In cooling down, new chemical compounds, and probably elements would be formed, since the so-called elements are perhaps mere combinations of a primordial substance which have been produced at various temperatures. The heavier elements, such as platinum, gold, and iron, would sink towards the core; and the lighter, such as carbon, silicon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, would rise towards the surface. A crust would form, and portions of it breaking ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... was good that arrived. Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his "Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing simpler than ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... 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, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... had been traversed from west to east and they had crossed the fierce bosom of Unaga's plateau. The reality of it was no better and only little worse than had been anticipated. It had been a journey of hills, everlasting hills, and interminable primordial forests, with dreary breaks of open plains. Each season had brought its own troubles, with always lying ahead the deadly anticipation of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... of which he 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 edge ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler

... up to the present, only considered that form of segmentation and gastrulation which, for many and weighty reasons, we may regard as the original, primordial, or palingenetic form. We might call it "equal" or homogeneous segmentation, because the divided cells retain a resemblance to each other at first (and often until the formation of the blastoderm). We give the name of the "bell-gastrula," or archigastrula, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... 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 Bannockburn. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... any more than beauty (despite Keats' famous 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 ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... scientific observation leads equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, like himself ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... see this by turning to the diagram: the letters, A to L, may represent eleven Silurian genera, some of which have produced large groups of modified descendants. Every intermediate link between these eleven genera and their primordial parent, and every {432} intermediate link in each branch and sub-branch of their descendants, may be supposed to be still alive; and the links to be as fine as those between the finest varieties. In this case it would be quite impossible to give ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... alimentary canal squeezing the food along its course, and universally in the body where motion occurs, except in the case of the creeping phagocytes, and the ciliary waving of ciliated epithelium. This agent is muscle. We have, in muscular tissue, a very wide departure from the structure of the primordial cell; to use a common biological expression, a very great amount of modification ( differentiation). Sheet 7 represents the simpler kind of muscular tissue, unstriated muscle, in which the cell character is still fairly obvious. The cells are fusiform (spindle-shaped), ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... the dug-out or the cave where in primordial condition he won his food by his own hands from the uncut forests and the unfarmed waters. As family policeman he had no incentive to accumulations of food, clothing, or luxuries. These involved added police responsibilities ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron

... exhaustion to report "All Clear." Simple, is it not, to go on patrol from a line you cannot see towards another line you also cannot see ... sometimes you lost touch with the others and gazed round into the blackness with that primordial fear of the unknown inspired by the night. Lost! God, it nearly unmans you. With fast-thumping heart you hear the approach of guttural Hun voices ... DOWN and QUIET. At last calm thinking points out that yon burning house is in ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... is a natural accompaniment of the very highest originality. The perfect expression and orderly arrangement of ideas is a later process; but, when great thoughts are for the first time coming forth, there is a kind of primordial roughness about them, as if the earth out of which they are arising were still clinging to them: the polishing of the gold comes late and has to be preceded by the heaving of the ore out of the bowels of nature. Paul in his writings is hurling forth the original ore of truth. We owe to him ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... 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, every one begins its ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration, not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology, retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear and write, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith

... sense of the term,—the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought empty,—was his final test of any man. Unless there was something fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... universe. From its central sanctuary in which He, the unseen, dwells, this temple projects, 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

... will ask what is the political object of the war, what are the political conditions, and how much does the question at issue mean respectively to us and to our adversary. It is these considerations which determine the nature of the war. This primordial question settled, he will be in a position to say whether the war is of the same nature as those in which Napoleon's and Moltke's methods were successful, or whether it is of another nature in which those methods failed. He will then design and offer ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... whichever one wills; so that all the problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may be used as a hammer, or in the stick that may be used as a lever, as much as in the most complicated machine. These are the primordial cells of mechanics. And an organ is only another ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... much to tell us about the origin and phenomena, not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter have ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... and "molecules" for "works," and the application of the argument is obvious. The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of social metempsychosis,—of the abasement of moral and intellectual refinement to the elemental and unconscious vulgarity and irresponsibility of predatory Communism and mob indifference to shame! It is the devolution of Moral Responsibility into organized iniquity and characterizes primordial Passion released from sentiment and law,—and it was the necessary camouflage of the diarist in his struggle for life and in his efforts to ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... being plus arabes que les arabes, and then, if the game goes against them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his own compatriots—regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs his shoulders ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... 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

... on surer ground by following the process which exalts the dragon of the folk tale into the symbol of evil and primordial chaos. The Babylonian Creation Myth, for instance, can be shown to be a localized and glorified legend in which the hero and his tribe are displaced by the war god and his fellow deities whose welfare depends on his ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... moaned in the blackness to her right, eliciting delicious thrills that crept along her spine. The hair at the back of her head seemed to stand erect—yet she was unafraid. The muscles bequeathed her by some primordial ancestor reacted instinctively to the presence of an ancient enemy—that was all. The woman moved slowly and deliberately toward the wood. Again the lion moaned; this time nearer. She sought a low-hanging ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... held that the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... general rule. Most instincts are of what every one would call natural, and Mr. Darwin calls 'spontaneous' origin, he explaining the meaning of the latter term to be that the slight variations from a primordial type, the accumulation of which is considered by him to constitute actual instinct, are 'variations produced by the same unknown causes as those which produce slight deviations of bodily structure.' But here I am once more compelled to join issue with him. Of the ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all the forms ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... 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

... atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno, forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further distinctions—that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while the Stoical gods formed the ever-active soul of the world, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... enter my limbs, which are as those of the god Tmu. O let not the pains of death, which have reached thee; come upon me. I am the god Tmu, living in the foremost part of Tur [the sky]. I am the only one in the primordial water. I have many mysterious names, and provide myself a dwelling to endure millions of years. I was born of Tmu, and I ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... 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 ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... 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

... 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

... cultivated persons, not by coercion, but under free stipulation with the governed. Now, the rights of a Government, in circumstances thus peculiar, obviously depend neither upon the unrestricted theory of paternal principles, nor upon any primordial or fictitious contract of indefinite powers, but upon an express and known treaty, matter of positive agreement, not of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the primordial germ cells in the male. Each ultimate spermatogonium typically gives rise ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several of the most eminent geologists, with Sir E. Murchison at their head, are convinced that we see in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the dawn of life on this planet. Other ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... means than by frequent repetition of the same act on the part of one and the same individual. How this can be we shall perceive in subsequent chapters. In the meantime, we may say that all knowledge and volition would seem to be merely parts of the knowledge and volition of the primordial cell (whatever this may be), which slumbers but never dies—which has grown, and multiplied, and differentiated itself into the compound life of the womb, and which never becomes conscious of knowing what it has once ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... intelligible and true. For if, as we now believe, all animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must be considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown. This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made to appear ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler

... 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 ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... but a necessary note of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." To see, in short, only the divine ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz

... awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be knowledge for the sake of knowledge, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... a new perspective, their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the history of Materialism in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the 'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige and importance from the outlying circumference of the sciences to their ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... away popularity in the same breath, but a dog fight is arranged by occult forces, and must, like opportunity, be taken when it comes. We are educated to accept oratory, but we need no education in the matter of a dog fight. This red corpuscle was transmitted to us from the Stone Age, and the primordial pleasures alone ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... make; their nostrils were more contracted, their noses more pointed, their size inferior, and their limbs more slender. This remarkable tendency to rapid deterioration in European dogs subjected to the climate of India, may perhaps partly be accounted for by the tendency to reversion to a primordial condition which many animals exhibit, as we shall see in a future chapter, when exposed to new conditions ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... incapacity, the basal excellence and the basal fault, it is possible to define that whole affair of which morality is the constructive phase: the attempt of life to establish itself in the midst of primordial lifelessness, to avert dissolution and death, and to extend and amplify itself to ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... romantic life of the trappers and dusky tribes which it sheltered, were pregnant with interest. But his wildest dreams could not have foretold the part Shad Trowbridge was destined to play in this primordial land and life before he should bid farewell ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace

... 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 ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... 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

... culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this community together is largely traditional and customary and almost always as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sort of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or a localised saint, and its position indicates the central point of the locality, its ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... of the primordial mores. It dates from the earliest known existence of man on earth. It may reasonably be believed to be a custom which all peoples have practiced.[1039] Only on the pastoral stage has it ceased, where the flesh of beasts was common and abundant.[1040] It is indeed noticeable ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... fanciful to assume that the Liverpool Cabinet, in their ameliorating career, was directed by any desire to recur to the primordial tenets of the Tory party. That was not an epoch when statesmen cared to prosecute the investigation of principles. It was a period of happy and enlightened practice. A profounder policy is the offspring of a time like the present, when the original postulates ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... following closely the original outlines, but the added ornamentation had effectually disguised its primordial existence. Living rooms needed light and air, while a fortress or quarters for troops might well be ordained on other lines. The Renaissance livened up considerably the severe lines of the Gothic chateaux ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... allow a word to end in a vowel without adding the ignoble, 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

... Antonio Salandra in his memorable speech from the Capitol, expressed the living and the fighting spirit of Italy, a spirit of strength and humanity, when he said: "I cannot answer in kind the insult that the German chancellor heaps upon us: the return to the primordial barbaric stage is so much harder for us, who are twenty centuries ahead of them in the history of civilization." To support his, came the quiet utterances of Sonnino (whose every word is a statement of Italian right and a crushing indictment of Austro-German felony) "proclaiming still once ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... refreshing 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 ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... of winter the Blue Mesa reclaimed its primordial solitude. Mount Baldy's smooth, glittering roundness topped a world that swept down in long waves of dark blue frosted with silver; the serried minarets of spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow. Blanketed in white, the upland mesas lay like great, tideless lakes, silent ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert



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



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