"Synthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... troubles of Russia are entirely due to the cutting off of the supplies of caravan tea from China (the leading Bolshevists prefer vodka to tea in any form) and the consequent recourse to inferior synthetic substitutes. The rival merits of cream, milk and lemon are carefully discussed both from the gustatory and hygienic standpoint, Mr. WELLS pronouncing in favour of lemon, in which idiosyncrasy he resembles Mr. CONRAD and Mr. GALSWORTHY. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... the human body, but it can do little towards an explanation of the subtler meanings of life and mind. Its methods are analytical; it has reached no truly synthetic results in the regions where knowledge is most to be desired. Its effects on literature are destructive. Science destroys poetry, dries up the poetic sense, closes the doors of imagination. The attempt to make science co-operate with poetry is in itself the promise of failure. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... blood in that it conformed to all necessary specifications and yet it had a synthetic ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common, god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... proper of the Yucatecan peninsula. While there are a number of verbal similarities between Maya and Nahuatl, the radicals of the two idioms and their grammatical structure are widely asunder. The Nahuatl is an excessively pliable, polysyllabic and highly synthetic tongue; the Maya is rigid, its words short, of one or two syllables generally, and is scarcely more synthetic than French. This contrast is carried out in the style of their writers. Those in Nahuatl were lovers ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... workers in the field of synthetic formation of the alkaloids have been Wischnegradsky, of St. Petersburg—who, unfortunately for science, died at an untimely age in 1880—Koenigs and Fischer, of Munich, and Ladenburg, of Kiel. The study of the decomposition products of the cinchona alkaloids especially points ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... moments like this, with their synthetic bird's-eye view, the mind sometimes sees more clearly than in hours of careful reflection and analysis. And the first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly, ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... completed, Darwin and Wallace are together in this wonderful galaxy of the great men of science of the nineteenth century. Several illustrious names are missing from this eminent company; foremost amongst them being that of Herbert Spencer, the lofty master of that synthetic philosophy which seemed to his disciples to have the proportions and qualities of an enduring monument, and whose incomparable fertility of creative thought entitled him to share the throne with Darwin. It was Spencer, Darwin, Wallace, Hooker, Lyell and Huxley who led that historic ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... reached by such palpation with the hand, M. Villey gives the name of Manual Space. In this connection he thinks it necessary to distinguish between synthetic touch and analytic touch—the former resulting from the simultaneous application of different parts of the hand on the surface of a body, the latter that which we owe to the movements of our fingers when having only one point of contact with the object the fingers follow its contour. ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... you would not recognize him any more than the made-over old family umbrella that has ten times recovered its ribs and boldly fronted the hilarious wind, ever ready to blow it off. It was always surprising to me how he could produce such marvelous synthetic effects from the elemental forms found ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... bizarre and rare combination of events, so we need have no hesitation in postulating such events in our explanation. In the absence of data we must abandon the analytic or scientific method of investigation, and must approach it in the synthetic fashion. In a word, instead of taking known events and deducing from them what has occurred, we must build up a fanciful explanation if it will only be consistent with known events. We can then test this explanation by any fresh facts which may arise. If they ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... times idly flicked that corner of the pool with a synthetic moth. Again for the fourth time I cast, more from habit than hope. Then ensued that terrific rush from the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... transformations—will lead us, that is, in the direction of analysis. If, however, we inquire in what way such reflexes are combined or "integrated" into more complicated processes, we shall be led in exactly the opposite direction, that of synthesis, and here we soon come, as is not surprising, to a synthetic novelty. This is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... — N. elasticity, springiness, spring, resilience, renitency, buoyancy. rubber, India(n) rubber, latex, caoutchouc, whalebone, gum elastic, baleen, natural rubber; neoprene, synthetic rubber, Buna-S, plastic. flexibility, Young's modulus. V. stretch, flex, extend, distend, be elastic &c. adj.; bounce, spring back &c. (recoil) 277. Adj. elastic, flexible, tensile, spring, resilient, renitent, buoyant; ductile, stretchable, extendable. Phr. the stress is proportional ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... are certain conditions in which they flourish. So the best I can do is to make conditions favorable. Nor do I bother about the weeds. I just centre my attention and my hoe upon loosening the soil and let the weeds look out for themselves. Hoeing potatoes is a synthetic process, but cutting weeds is analytic, and synthesis is better, both for potatoes and for boys. In good time, if the boy is kept growing, he will have outgrown his stone-bruises, his chapped hands, his freckles, his warts, and his physical and spiritual awkwardness. ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... candour, be confessed that the synthetic formula for the middle party in opinion has not yet been found. Other parties have their formulae, but none that will really bear examination. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, would do excellently if there was any belief ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... contributory industrial system, in the principles that are embodied in social relationships, and in the general scheme of such a working philosophy of life as may predominate amongst the component parts of the synthetic society which is the product of all these varied energies and the organic forms through which ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... absence in the President's character of the heroic element. He would do a great deed in deshabille as promptly as in full dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect, regardless of the route ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... a wave of dizziness, but it passed quickly; all that was left was a pleasant inner warmth, now. He pulled his tray toward him and attacked the synthetic ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the role of Italy in the world to be a work of moral unification,—the utterance of the synthetic word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... bold revolutionary, promises to provide us with synthetic foodstuffs. The laboratory and the factory will take the place of the farm. Why should not physical science step in as well? It would leave the preparation of plastic food to the chemist's retorts; it would reserve for itself that of energy-producing food which, reduced to its exact terms, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... utterly one's relations with the world. An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated and unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together and correlated in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... a synthetic metal, almost perfectly transparent. It has practically the same refractive index as air, therefore it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. It's about five hundred times as strong as chrome-vanadium steel, and even when you've ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... an Examiner who says that the term 'plasticizer' is indefinite, and I must give a list of suitable plasticizers when he knows that Rule 118 forbids me to put in such a list. Can you imagine? He is saying in effect that a chemist who works with synthetic resins does not know what a plasticizer is, and I must take him by the hand and teach him something he learned in freshman chemistry. It has nothing to do with the invention, either. I am claiming a ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... dream. But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the only q it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle altered by having the self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken away. The function is accidental; synthetic, not analytic; and falls outside and not inside its being. [Footnote: It seems odd to call so important a function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the matter. Just as, if we start with the reality and ask ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... steadying and universalizing thing, in various manners. Some have attained it in this manner, and some in that. Scarcely a religious system has existed that has not worked effectively and proved true for someone. To me it seems that the need is synthetic, that some synthetic idea and belief is needed to harmonize one's life, to give a law by which motive may be tried against motive and an effectual peace of mind achieved. I want an active peace and not a quiescence, and I do not want to suppress and expel any motive at all. But to many people ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... though, he felt less kindly toward her and snapped a few times. Then it was Rhoda's turn to exercise forebearance and to try to smooth things over. Once she looked out the picture window at the perfect synthetic thatch of the Williams' great cottage, peeping over the hollyhock-topped rise of ground at the end of the ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... the Analytic and Synthetic Methods, in which the Principles of Arithmetic are explained in a perspicuous and familiar manner; containing also, practical systems of Mensuration, Gauging, Geometry, and Book-Keeping, forming a complete Mercantile Arithmetic, designed for Schools and Academies in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... however, is what we lack, and the verdict of the mere feeling is liable to fluctuate. In other words an imputed defect is never, at the worst, disengageable, or other than matter for appreciation—to come back to my claim for that felicity of the dramatist's case that his synthetic "whole" IS his form, the only one we have to do with. I like to profit in his company by the fact that if our art has certainly, for the impression it produces, to defer to the rise and fall, in the critical temperature, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... secure, if not physical predominance in the world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral, customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other possible coalescences. But these syntheses or other similar synthetic conceptions, if they do not contrive to establish a rational social unity by sanely negotiated unions, will be forced to fight for physical predominance in the world. The whole trend of forces in the world is against the preservation of local social systems however greatly and spaciously ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... whatever is universal or necessary. A complete "Transcendental Philosophy" would be a systematic exposition of all that is a priori in human knowledge, or of "all the principles of pure reason." But a "Critique of Pure Reason" cannot include all this. It can do little more than deal with the synthetic element or quality in a priori knowledge, as distinguished from the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... higher form of system is established whenever the bond of connection between part and part is an identity of function or of law. All language systems are of this nature, and the more highly synthetic the language the more intrinsic the connection there is between the parts of the system. Further, it should be noted that systems of this character can be used for the attainment of other ends than those of mere recognition and classification. They, of course, can be used ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... will, of course, be defined by the tendency to individuation. Thus, from its utmost latency, in which life is one with the elementary powers of mechanism, that is, with the powers of mechanism considered as qualitative and actually synthetic, to its highest manifestation, (in which, as the vis vitae vivida, or life as life, it subordinates and modifies these powers, becoming contra-distinguished from mechanism,(9) ab extra, under the form ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and tendencies encouraged by the authority and the tolerance of Smolenskin was fruitful of results. Ha-Shahar had made itself the centre of a synthetic movement, progressive and national, which was gradually revealing the outline of its plan and aims. The reaction caused by the unexpected revival of anti-Semitism in Germany, Austria, Roumania, and Russia, had levelled the last ruins ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... his will, and leads an independent life. So long as the intellect is in the service of the will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist for the intellect; but along with this partial severance of the two there comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, a complex of relationships not reproducible in linear thought, for the mind is oriented simultaneously in many different directions. Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is a classic example. He is reported to have said ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... after proper age, and then upon every suitable topic, by observation and investigation, and so, by discovery of the principles and results the mind is desired to attain; because it will be an education by rigidly consecutive, comprehended and firm lines of advance, employing processes analytic and synthetic, inductive and deductive, each in its requisite place and in accordance with the nature and stage of the topics under investigation. For the like reasons, it will have become, what we have long foreseen ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... lesser authority than that of truth, wheresoever it is found and whatsoever it turns out to be.] to the spiritual tradition and discipline of the "denomination" to which he in fact belongs, unless and until he is led to conclude that some other embodies a fuller and more synthetic presentation of religious truth. It is a mistake for a man to be content either to remain in ignorance of his own immediate spiritual heritage or to refuse to try to understand what is distinctive and vital in the religious heritage of others. Most fatal of all is the attempt to combine ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... method of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it seems so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking men must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at a game of blind-man's bluff as I watch the discussion of synthetic political ideas. The blind man thrusts his seeking hands into the oddest corners, he clutches at chairs and curtains, but at last he must surely find and hold and feel over and guess the name ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as ferro-plastic. Totally unknown, amazing imperviousness. A synthetic material, hardly the product of ...
— As Long As You Wish • John O'Keefe
... and while Astro brewed hot cups of tea with synthetic pellets and water from the shower, Tom and Roger told them about the traditions and customs ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... chapter and the next will serve to lay the foundations of this extraordinary doctrine. Then will be unfolded to the reader's vision an immense and novel career; then shall we commence to see in numerical relations the synthetic unity of philosophy and the sciences; and, filled with admiration and enthusiasm for this profound and majestic simplicity of Nature, we shall shout with the apostle: "Yes, the Eternal has made all things by number, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... were in plenty on the outer worlds, but one other essential was lacking ... oxygen. Coal on Mars, for instance, had to burned under synthetic air pressures, like the old carburetor. The result was inefficiency. A lot of coal ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... point," Van Rycke added to the lecture. "The Eysies are trading or want to trade perfumes. But they stock only manufactured products, exotic stuff, but synthetic." He took from his belt pouch two ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... gentleman should, and then ask for your sympathy—for him! And I don't speak of the bad ones, but of the good. They, after all, are the worst Ambrose Tester, as I say, did n't go into these details, but synthetic as he might be, was conscious that his position was false. He felt that sooner or later, and rather sooner than later, he would have to make it true,—a process that could n't possibly be agreeable. He would really have to make up his mind to care for his ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... all the anti-expectoration notices hung round he would certainly spit.] It is stacked ready to put on the market the day he passes in his checks. Hold on now. About the year 1918 Mr. Kedger, who had already financially made good over the manipulation of wood-pulp potatoes, synthetic bread, and real estate, turned his attention to the Anglo-American Theatre. For the Anglo-American Theatre did not pay. Here was Mr. Kedger's opportunity. Forming a small trust, he bought up the theatres, both of the Variety and of the Monotonous ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... believed that such a man as Pons existed, nor had Pons imagined that a Schmucke was possible. Here already you have a sufficient description of the good couple; but it is not every mind that takes kindly to the concise synthetic method, and a certain amount of demonstration is necessary if the credulous ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear together; each may ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the cunning of the magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not analytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience of life, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly to the fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... "comprehensive"—as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... retcon. 2. /vt./ To write such a story about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in "The Empire ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... one. Subject and object, mind and matter, are known only in correlation and contrast, and in the same common act: which knowledge is at once a synthesis and an antithesis of both, and may be indifferently defined an antithetic synthesis and a synthetic antithesis of the terms. Every conception of self necessarily implies a conception of not self; every perception of what is different from me, implies a recognition of the percipient subject in contradistinction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the slow processes of agriculture will be largely discarded, and the food of man be created out of the chemical elements of which it is composed, transfused by electricity and magnetism. We have already done something in that direction in the way of synthetic chemistry. Our mountain ranges may, in after ages, be leveled down and turned into bread for the support of the most enlightened, cultured, and, in its highest sense, religious people that ever dwelt on the globe. All this is possible if civilization ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... that has grown from one seed; it is like a lake that has been fed by countless springs. It is a great pool of living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much impurity. It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from original complexities; ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... was a mere collector of details. Now I find myself saying, 'What is the aim of all this? What is the synthesis? Where does it come in? Where does it tend to?' I have not as yet found any very definite answer to these self-questionings, but the new spirit, the synthetic spirit, is there; and I find myself too concentrating my expression; I have become conscious in your presence of a certain diffuseness of talk—I used, I think, to indulge much in synonyms and parallel clauses—a characteristic, I have seen it said, of our immortal Shakespeare ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Majesty,' says MacBethmann, 'shall I lay out yeer synthetic sausage or shall I fry up ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... conventional, every point of vantage has been so skilfully appropriated to plastic uses, every square inch of the ideal building becomes so naturally, and without confusion, a pedestal for the human form, that we are lost in wonder at the synthetic imagination which here for the first time combined the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single organism. Each part of the immense composition, down to the smallest detail, is necessary to the total effect. We are in the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... greatest asset of the human mind is that something called religion, which is no less real and potent because peculiar to each individual. Whatever may be that deepest current of thought and feeling, whatever that synthetic philosophy, that explanation of being, which guides my life, it can be of inestimable aid if enlisted in an effort to secure normal vitality of ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen |
