"Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... system (the principle of the indeterminate system) and made the prisoners' liberation depend upon their conduct and character and not upon the original offence. Maconochie's experience led him to write in after years to a friend, "if you would try a social-moral one (prison system) you would soon get important results. If our punishments ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, they were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... wandering breeze from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible things, a substance that in its own general and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the subtle curve of her eyelids, the low full brow with its waving line of soft black hair, seemed to brood over the lower part of the face with its still indeterminate curves, over the wholly immature figure of ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the determination of the factor most difficult, and because of the "rule-of-thumb" determination frequently necessary, the factor of safety becomes in reality a factor of ignorance. As opposed to such indeterminate factors of safety, in the Babcock & Wilcox boiler, when the factor of safety for the drum or drums has been determined, and such a factor may be determined accurately, the factors for all other portions of the pressure parts ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... which no physician can accurately calculate its duration or termination. It had, as diseases often have, its periods of such utter quiescence that it seemed as if it had entirely disappeared. It was not a year after Harry had received his indeterminate death sentence before he looked better than he had done for a long while. The color came back to his cheeks, his expression regained its youthful joyfulness. Everybody said that Harry Edgham was quite well again. He had observed a certain diet and taken remedies; then, in the summer, he ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... broken presently by the sound of the old man's choking sobs, and the low, soothing tones of Natalie, murmuring against his ear. From the drawing-room came indeterminate scraps of Mrs. Wynyard's gay chatter, as she regaled Mrs. Rathbawne with the gossip gleaned in a round of calls. She herself was partly visible, drawing off her gloves before the fire. From the music-room beyond issued the chords of Dorothy's ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... agreements is almost negligible. To plead the Statute of Frauds in an action for non-delivery or non-acceptance of goods under such informal agreements might be a defence in the law courts, but would not save the defendant from the indeterminate but effective penalties due to the feeling of his fellows that he was acting dishonourably. It is instructive to notice that in dealing with the question of industrial disputes, which are in many ways analogous to international, ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... Moze was a Missouri hound that Jones had procured in that State of uncertain qualities; and the dog had grown old over coon-trails. He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog had an evil eye, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his tail—an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this evidence of a good heart under a rough coat, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... is, to start with, content under the form of substance. Even when we say, "God," "spirit," we have only words, indeterminate representations. The essential point is to know what has been produced in the consciousness. And that is, first, the simple, the abstract. Here, in this first simple determination, we have God only under the form of universality. Only we do not halt ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... reverse all our habits in a moment; and the new relation with the dead is one to which we have to learn to accustom ourselves. I remember a case where a mother and a son had never been separated for more than a day at a time, though he was far on in manhood. There came a time of indeterminate separation and the mother's grief was intense notwithstanding that there was no thought of a permanent separation. It took some time for her to accustom herself to the new mode of communication by letter. It is not far otherwise in death; ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare) when it indulges in insurrection ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Aylward, for he halted to stare at it, then stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship of the thing was rude yet strangely powerful. ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... knowledge; but reasoning such as that in 'Supernatural Religion' is vitiated at the outset, because it starts with the assumption that we know perfectly well the meaning of a term of which our actual conception is vague and indeterminate in the ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... To Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself. But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning gesture of Ransom, could hold ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... for an indeterminate sentence, allowing of parole when earned by continuous good conduct, and final release when ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Moses, who not thought: "Woe is me! For it seems as if Aaron had lost his rank, since he may not at all times enter the sanctuary. The statement of the periods for his admission into the sanctuary is also so indeterminate that I am not at all sure whether they are to recur hourly, or daily, or annually, every twelve years, perhaps even seventy, or not at all." But God replied: "Thou art mistaken, I was not thinking of fixing a certain time. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... propositions are regarded as implying the existence of their terms, and the corresponding equations are so framed as to express existence. With this end in view, the symbol v is adopted to represent 'something,' or indeterminate reality, or more than nothing. Then, taking any particular affirmative, such as Some metaphysicians are obscure, and writing x for 'metaphysicians,' and y for 'obscure,' we ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... shall succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution x. Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... transferred to the world of thought. His pretended re-investigation of the foundations of the moral sentiments reminds one of the mud geysers of the Yellowstone, which break out periodically and envelop everything within reach in an indeterminate shower of mud. To me there is more of vanity than of philosophic acumen in his onslaught on well-nigh all human institutions. He ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and training, in the production of the civilized man. The rest we have to ascribe to his world in general, of which his home is simply the first and most intimate aspect. In every developing citizen we have asserted there is a great mass of fluid and indeterminate possibility, and this sets and is shaped by the world about him as wax is shaped by a mould. It is rarely, of course, an absolutely exact and submissive cast that ensues; few men and women are without some capacity for question and criticism, but it is only very rare and obdurate material—only, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little distance. But only for a little distance. Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the distance in mystery and in dread. It was a land apart; ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... battle-pieces, or spectacles of military pomp, or the animated scenes which the chace presents; and he seems to have exhausted all the efforts of his genius, in the variety of incident and richness of execution, which these subjects are fitted to afford. From the confused and indeterminate expression, however, which the multitude of their objects exhibit, we turn with delight to those simpler scenes in which his mind seems to have reposed, after the fatigues which it had undergone: to the representation of a single incident, or the delineation of a certain occurrence—to ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... an entire pack of cards, and admitted of an indeterminate number of players, termed 'punters,' and a 'banker.' Each player laid his stake on one of the 52 cards. The banker held a similar pack, from which he drew cards, one for himself, placed on the right, and the other, called the carte anglaise, or English card, for the players, placed on ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... (the bottom sheeting being left in place) is, of course, a matter of conjecture. There can be no doubt that there is an arching of the material, as suggested by the author. How much this may be assisted by the practical non-disturbance of the virgin material is, of course, indeterminate. That substructures and retaining walls designed according to the Rankine or similar theories have an additional factor of safety from too generous an assumption in regard to earth pressure is practically admitted everywhere. It is ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... sway weakened was indeterminate. We boys after a while swapped places with Mammy, and made her the recipient of our small pedantries. I do not recollect, however, that we were ever cruel enough to throw ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... whatever a man does may be the occasion of another's spiritual downfall, because accidental causes are indeterminate. Consequently, if scandal is something that occasions another's spiritual downfall, any deed or word can be a scandal: and this ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... will be well to deal first with the tribes of that quarter of the globe. "The Negrito" (i.e., pigmy black) "type," says the authority whom I have just quoted, and to whom I shall have to be still further indebted,[A] "was first placed in South Asia, which it without doubt occupied alone during an indeterminate period. It is thence that its diverse representatives have radiated, and, some going east, some west, have given rise to the black populations of Melanesia and Africa. In particular, India and Indo-China first belonged ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... element of foods is the vitamin, a nitrogenous substance of indeterminate nature. Without it we would starve, though eating plenty of proteins, carbo-hydrates, fats, salts and water. Nothing will sustain life if the vitamins are absent from the diet. Goat's milk contains ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... subject to cross-examination, to be sure, but before all accessible to complete and unreserved study. This would mean a substantial participation of law in the promotion of knowledge of facts and constructive activity, and a conception of indeterminate sentence not merely in the service of leniency but in the service of the best protection of the public, and, if necessary, lasting detention of those who cannot be reformed, before they have had ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... Chances; bookmaking; assurance; speculation, gaming &c 621. V. chance, hap, turn up; fall to one's lot; be one's fate &c 601; stumble on light upon; take one's chance &c 621. Adj. casual, fortuitous, accidental, adventitious, causeless, incidental, contingent, uncaused, undetermined, indeterminate; random, statistical; possible &c 470; unintentional &c 621. Adv. by chance, accidentally, by accident; casually; perchance &c (possibly) 470; for aught one knows; as good would have it, as bad would have it, as luck would have it, as ill-luck would have it, as chance would ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a pause. The man leaned back, embracing one knee with both hands. They were nerveless, indeterminate hands, with long fingers, such as are in the habit of dropping things. Zora wondered how they supported his knee. For some time he stared into vacancy, his pale-blue ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... today? The sea does not change, and seamen are what they were if their ships are not those we admired many years ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the River, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Deptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What could they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the effect of a constant going and coming of spectres about him. There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary fancies disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de la Barillerie, there was a grocer's shop whose porch was garnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops of tin from which hung a circle of wooden candles, which came in contact with each ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... were demanded which would stop the leak before it became a flood. In the exigency there was no time for the Food Administrator to devise and carefully test plans suggested by even the most favored theories of economists, if these plans offered remedies which would only be available in an indeterminate future. The scope of the war had disorganized the life and practices of the whole world, had overthrown all precedents, shattered all fundamental relations. And on nothing was its disturbing influence upon the normal more potent than in relation ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words. A word may have several meanings, but all of them fixed and recognized ones; as the word post, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... studied as one would take soundings at sea. The measurement of one place is no guarantee of the depth in another. What was believed twenty years ago, may not be endorsed by the leaders of to-day. One writer of their fold says: "Unitarianism is loose, vague, general, indeterminate in its elements and formularies."[242] When George Putnam installed Mr. Fosdick over the Hollis Street Church, he said with commendable candor, "There is no other Christian body of which it is so impossible to tell where it begins ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... polished and flawless. Inside it could be made out various objects—a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top there was a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... been so warmly recommended, is no better than a vain fervor, which dwells only in the disordered mind of the enthusiast. That Religion is of a more steady nature; of a more sober and manly quality; and that she rejects with scorn, the support of a mere feeling, so volatile and indeterminate, so trivial and useless, as that with which we would associate her; a feeling varying in different men, and even in the same man at different times, according to the accidental flow of the animal spirits; a feeling, lastly, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... no doubt this last discovery that led him to formulate his doctrine in the striking saying 'Things are numbers', thus definitely giving the priority to the element of form or limit instead of to the indeterminate ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... which one only meets with in Beethoven.... One may find here and there harmonies that are commonplace and trivial, and others that are incorrect—at least according to the old rules. In some places his harmonies have a fine effect, and in others their result is vague and indeterminate, or it sounds badly, or is too elaborate and far-fetched. Yet with Berlioz all this somehow takes on a certain distinction. If one attempted to correct it, or even slightly to modify it—for a skilled musician it would ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... adroit in formulating reports and propositions in awkward controversial questions; he knows how to give his draught a color of compromise without the least sacrifice of any Austrian interest, as soon as the correct interpretation comes to the aid of the apparently indeterminate expression. When his draughts become the basis of subsequent discussion, it is then usually discovered for the first time that the real purpose for which they were drawn is contained in what seemed to be casual and incidental ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... his work: his early love, his sorrow at parting from parents and home, the shock of the Warsaw revolt, his passion for George Sand, the death of his father and of his friend Matuszynski, and the rupture with Madame Sand—these were crises of his history. All else was but an indeterminate factor in the scheme of his earthly sojourn. Chopin though not an anchorite resembled Flaubert, being both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent. Unlike Liszt he seldom sought the glamor of the theatre, and was never in such public view ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... principally dwelt. Upon reaching Vienna he wrote a number of instrumental pieces, bearing the name of symphonies, pieces which in no way differed from the conventional music of the day. The Haydn symphony had not yet been invented, and the form was wholly indeterminate. There was an opera in this year; also a love affair. Gluck was deeply in love with the beautiful and charming daughter of a rich merchant, who upon no account would consent to her marriage with a musician. So Gluck went back to Italy, and there he wrote another opera, rather better ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... easily turned in a wrong direction," and he apparently accounted for inversion by this fact, and by the precocity of neurotics. Obici and Marchesini (Le 'Amicizie' di collegio, p. 126) refer to the indeterminate character of the sexual feelings when they first begin to develop. A correspondent believes that sexual feelings are undifferentiated in the early years about puberty, but at the same time considers that school life is to some extent responsible; "the holidays," he ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the attributes which ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... two categories; did she offer amorous possibilities or not. An attitude that had no half lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men and women, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... heat, and power. It holds five small worlds—Vulcan, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—within a space whose radius it would require a locomotive half a thousand years to traverse. It next holds some indeterminate number of asteroids, and the great Jupiter, equal in volume to 13,000 earths. It holds Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and all their variously related satellites and rings. The two thoughts that overwhelm us are distance and power. The period of [Page 178] man's whole history is ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... The verb pugnatur means, literally, it is fought; translate freely, the battle is fought, or the contest rages. The verb pugno in Latin is intransitive, and so does not have a personal subject in the passive. A verb with an indeterminate subject, designated in English by ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... said, have fallen within a few years. For this reason persons in the neighborhood are afraid to venture in. There is a rumor that the corpse of a woman, coated with stalagmite, can be seen in this cave; also several bodies (sex apparently indeterminate) lying like spokes in a wheel, with heads at the center. No one could be persuaded to go in and point out the place where ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... up suddenly, for without any further warning there had come a tiny indeterminate tapping against his panel. He held his breath and listened. It came again. Then fearlessly he drew back the bolts, slid the panel open and shut his eyes, dazzled ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... her bed. She was so alarmed that she fetched her brother in, and he slept on the sofa. The limping began again, and she asked him if he heard anything, and he at once agreed that somebody was walking round the bed. In his own room—I forget which—he twice saw the ghost, once in the shape of an indeterminate mist, once in the shape of a man, who came in by the door and vanished in the wall. Mrs. 'G.'[B] now appears on the scene, and slept in No. 1 (I think). She heard only the bangings, which she declares were indescribably loud. They were mostly at the ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... this and some of the neighbouring counties for such a series of years, should so long have escaped particular attention. Finding the prevailing notions on the subject, both among men of our profession and others, extremely vague and indeterminate, and conceiving that facts might appear at once both curious and useful, I have instituted as strict an inquiry into the causes and effects of this singular malady as local ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... of the Iroquois word hiro, used to conclude a speech, and kou['e], an exclamation (Charlevoix). Hale gives as possible derivations ierokwa, the indeterminate form of the verb to smoke, signifying "they who smoke;" also the Cayuga form of bear, iakwai.[39] Mr. Hewitt[39] suggests the Algonkin words [-i]r[-i]n, true, or real; ako, snake; with the French termination ois, the word ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility. Such planless ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... hymn his excellences in an indeterminate, artificial manner, till the men came into the room, and conversation became general. Lord Manorwater made his way to Alice, thereby defeating Mr. Stocks, who tended in the same direction. "Come outside and ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... offences alleged against him amounted to high treason; that their number could not change their quality; that an endeavour to subvert the law, or religion, or the rights of parliament, was not treason by any statute; and that the description of an offence, so vague and indeterminate ought never to be admitted;: otherwise the slightest transgression might, under that denomination, be converted into the highest crime known ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... been an indeterminate period in a blank fog for Orne, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a creche. Had to be. He could remember his sudden exposure on Heleb, the explosion—then nothing. Good old creche. It made him feel safe ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... an arbitrary standard for that dignity which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard. They gave themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the honour of the Crown, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of Parliament, estimating the dignity ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into nothingness, like ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... air was close and heavy even among the scanty grass tufts in which we were trying to get cover. It was very hard work indeed, but after a half hour of it we gained a thin bush not over thirty yards from a half dozen dark and indeterminate bodies dozing in the very centre of a brush patch. Cautiously I wiped the sweat from my eyes and raised my glasses. It was slow work and patient work, picking out and examining each individual beast from the mass. Finally the job was done. I let ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the rest of their lives to writing out answers! E. M. RIX points out that, if fractional ages be admissible, any one of the three sons might be the one "come of age"; but she rightly rejects this supposition on the ground that it would make the problem indeterminate. WHITE SUGAR is the only one who has detected an oversight of mine: I had forgotten the possibility (which of course ought to be allowed for) that the son, who came of age that year, need not have done so by that day, so that he might ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... that 'drowned bodies' require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the surface. Both science and experience show that the period of their rising is, and necessarily must be, indeterminate. If, moreover, a body has risen to the surface through firing of cannon, it will not 'sink again if let alone,' until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was an out-and-out "office" man, anything but a "flat foot." Weak looking and pallid, with the sedentary air of a junior desk clerk, vibratingly restless with no actual promise of being penetrating, he was of that indeterminate type which never seems to acquire a personality of its own. The small and bony and steel-blue face was as neutral as the spare and reticent figure that sat before a bald table in a bald room as inexpressive and reticent as ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... bishop Cumberland why Nineve was so called? and he will answer, from Schindler, that it was a compound of [472]Nin-Nau, [Hebrew: NIN NWH], a son inhabited. But is it credible, or indeed possible, for these cities to have been named from terms so vague, casual, and indeterminate; which seem to have so little relation to the places to which they are appropriated, or to any places at all? The history of the Chaldeans is of great consequence; and one would be glad to know their original. They are properly called Chasdim; ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... sin are indeed excellently useful, as rousing men to consider and look about them: but they do often want effect, because they only raise confused apprehensions of things, and indeterminate propensions to action; which usually, before men thoroughly perceive or resolve what they should practise, do decay and vanish. As he that cries out "Fire!" doth stir up people, and inspireth them with a kind of hovering tendency every ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of association is not primary and irreducible. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... par excellence. It is the most beautiful and most ancient of all, inasmuch as it dates back to the indeterminate times of highest antiquity. Its mission is not only to make us acquainted with the innumerable orbs by which our nights are illuminated, but it is, moreover, thanks to it that we know where and what we are. Without it we should ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of the notion ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... concrete general name should be given a definite connotation with the least possible change in the denotation; and this is what is aimed at in every definition of a general name already in use. But we must not confound the use of names of indeterminate connotation, which is so great an evil, with the employment, necessitated by the paucity of names as compared with the demand, of the same words with different connotations ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... discuss various artifices for the simplification of equations, giving methods which are still in common use. In the body of the work he displays considerable ingenuity in reducing his problems to simple equations, which admit either of direct solution, or fall into the class known as indeterminate equations. This latter class he discussed so assiduously that they are often known as Diophantine problems, and the methods of resolving them as the Diophantine analysis (see EQUATION, Indeterminate.) It is difficult to believe that this work of Diophantus arose ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the smile, after he had gone, came a frown and a look in her eyes as if at something revolting; then the smile returned, to be succeeded by the frown, which was followed by an indeterminate shaking ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... with brisk, emphatic, fiery splashes of language. Indeed, in reading even great poetry, is one not sometimes sadly aware, as in the case of Shelley or Swinburne, that the logical sequence of thought is loose and indeterminate, and that this is concealed from one by the reverberating beat of metre, which gives a false sense of structure to a ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... chloranthy, according as the anomaly affects the ordinary flowering branches, or the leafy shoots of the year, the summits of which, instead of developing in the customary manner, terminate each in one vast and long inflorescence, very loose and indeterminate, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... of indeterminate age, hollow- chested, thin-faced, gravely benignant. It was not alone his glasses that lent him a scholarly appearance; he had the stooped shoulders, the thoughtful intensity of gaze, the gentle, hesitating backwardness of a book-raised man. There were tutors at Yale ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... in whose face geniality and humor seemed the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of the child; ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... granules, of indeterminate shape and size, Y, for inorganic matters, such as the salts of bone and teeth, and Z, to stand as a symbol of the fluids, and you have the letters of what I have ventured to call the alphabet ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... their writings contain many things excellent, well considered, and well calculated to kindle pious emotions; but also many things unduly rigorous, and derived from the Stoic and Academic philosophy; many things vague and indeterminate; and many things positively false, and inconsistent with the precepts of Christ. If one deserves the title of a bad master in morals who has no just ideas of the proper boundaries and limitations of Christian duties, nor clear and distinct conceptions of the different virtues and vices, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... Italy, Lorraine, The Deccan, Poland, Hungary, Catalonia, Corsica, Finland, Switzerland, and in Basque, Spain. The earliest form in which the pure type occurs is in Basile's Pentamerone, 1634, and of the indeterminate type in Bonaventure des Periers Nouvelles Recreations, 1557, though the latter seems more cognate to the ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... the writer's attack was the grim sarcasm for such methods of thievery as are kept within the law. That phrase held the girl's fancy, and she read the article again with a quickened interest. Then, she began to meditate. She herself was in a curious, indeterminate attitude as far as concerned the law. It was the law that had worked the ruin of her life, which she had striven to make wholesome. In consequence, she felt for the law no genuine respect, only detestation as for the epitome of injustice. Yet, she gave it a ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals with—matter, organism, consciousness—began in a state of indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface. Increasing indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic law, the world of motion ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... thoroughfare literally swarmed with vehicles of every kind, and on the sidewalks the pedestrians were so numerous that they looked like two indeterminate black ribbons unfurling their length from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. A flood of sunlight played on this gay scene, making the varnish of the carriages, the steel of the harness and the handles of the carriage doors shine ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... knew he had been admitted to one of the officers' training-camps, and that he was making rather helpless and puzzled purchases. Going into his room she would find a dressing-case of khaki leather, perhaps, or flannel shirts of the same indeterminate hue. She would shed futile tears over them, and order them put out of sight. But she never ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... His white habit beneath, and heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business. He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... could have been more definite, more brilliant than the colour of the eyes and hair, or the whiteness—which was a beautiful and healthy whiteness—of her skin. Whereas everything about Mrs. Fountain was indeterminate; the features with their slight twist to the left; the complexion, once fair, and now reddened by years and ill-health; the hair, of a yellowish grey; the head and shoulders with their nervous infirmity. Only the eyes still possessed some ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... directly due to woman suffrage may be summed up as follows: Equal guardianship of children; raising the "age of protection" for girls from 16 to 18 years; establishment of a State Home for Dependent Children; a State Industrial School for Girls; indeterminate sentence for criminals; a State Arbitration Board; open meetings of school boards; the removal of emblems from ballots; placing drinking fountains on the corners of most of the down-town ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the indeterminate equation ax by c may be effected by means of continued fractions. If we suppose a/b to be converted into a continued fraction and p/q to be the penultimate convergent, we have aq - bp 1 or -1, according as the number of convergents is even or odd, which we ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... such conditions—with the added absurdity that the troops on both sides were most unwilling to face long-range rifle fire but would cheerfully hack each other to mince-meat with knives—and a tedious, indeterminate campaign is the certain outcome. De Sylva had said that local conflicts were usually "short and fierce." Applied to such upheavals as had taken place in the capital during recent years, the phrase ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... permanent load is one of constant and indeterminate duration, as books on a shelf. In the case of a bridge the weight of the structure itself is the dead load. All large beams support a uniform dead load consisting ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... Canada, the history of the future in the West would be different from that of the past. As in times of emergency, the conscription of Catholic forces is the supreme duty of the hour. It is the duty of our leaders to affect by a definite policy the "indeterminate masses," just as it is the duty of each individual of the masses to shoulder his share of responsibility by an active co-operation. Without a definite workable policy of united action, and the awakened consciousness of the Catholic masses at ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Considered in itself alone, it is perhaps to be seen as governed by absolutely determined laws of its own. It is heavy, then it will fall unless obstructed; it is solid, then it will resist intrusions. But considered as material for organization by higher forms, it is indeterminate. It acts in one sort of way under the persuasion of the sheep-form, and in another sort of way under the persuasion of the [16] dog-form, and we cannot tell how it will act until we know which form is going to capture it. No amount of study bestowed on the common material ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed, except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the fourth degree (and believed that his method could go beyond), stated the law which connects the positive and negative roots of an equation with the changes of sign in the consecutive terms, and introduced the method of indeterminate coefficients for the solution of equations.[28] These innovations have been attributed on inadequate evidence to other algebraists, e.g. William Oughtred (1575-1660) and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, she would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her always. Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was like the contrast between the soft indeterminate lines of her charming face and Lucy's ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ascent was finished and below him lay the house and climbing woods,—woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the generous ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fact two Clevelands—before marriage and after marriage—the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor had ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... his expectations,—the suit of Legard had replaced his own. It was then that Maltravers began to consider how far the fortune of Evelyn and her destined husband was such as to preclude all anxiety for their future lot. Fortune is so indeterminate in its gauge and measurement. Money, the most elastic of materials, falls short or exceeds, according to the extent of our wants and desires. With all Legard's good qualities he was constitutionally careless and extravagant; and Evelyn was too inexperienced, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lighted now, all save the front of the room. There, a mass of compact boxes were piled one on another, and interconnected in various and indeterminate ways. And one table lay in a brilliant path of illumination. Behind it stood Arcot. He was talking to the dim white group of faces beyond the table, the ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... "one and only one man wrote Waverley, and he was a poet"; when we say "the author of Waverley was Scott" we mean "one and only one man wrote Waverley, and he was Scott." Here the identity is between a variable, i.e. an indeterminate subject ("he"), and Scott; "the author of Waverley" has been analysed away, and no longer appears as a constituent of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... governing this flexibility of the conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil service, therefore, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... and I was not so blind as to be unaware that for the clergy this meant not yet indeed prosecution, but proscription and exclusion from advancement by either party in the state, and for laymen a vague and indeterminate prejudice with serious doubts how far persons infected in this particular manner could have any real capacity for affairs. Sir Robert Peel must, I think, have exercised much self-denial when he put me in his cabinet in 1843.' The movement that ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... To some indeterminate extent the power to wage war embraces the power to prepare for it and the further power to deal with the problem of adjustment after hostilities have ceased. In his Commentaries, Justice Story wrote as follows with specific reference to ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... line is therefore to be conclusive; not experimental. "I have determined this," says the engraver. Much excellent pen drawing is excellent in being tentative,—in being experimental. Indeterminate, not through want of meaning, but through fullness of it—halting wisely between two opinions—feeling cautiously after clearer opinions. But your engraver has made up his opinion. This is so, and must forever be so, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... one could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder of the captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so vague, so indeterminate and unearthly that it seemed like ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the certainty of civil war, therefore, it was necessary to lay down the line of inheritance by a peremptory order; to cut off resolutely all rival claims; and, in legislating upon a matter so vital, and hitherto so uncertain and indeterminate, to enforce the decision with the most stringent and exacting penalties. From the Heptarchy downwards English history furnished no fixed rule of inheritance, but only a series of precedents of uncertainty; and while at no previous time had ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Approximately Spencer's First Cause satisfied his reason, though he meant to buttress Spencer's contention in its weakest place and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of our success was a carefully planned system, mathematically demonstrated. Everything that could be controlled was controlled, and the indeterminate factors of storms, open leads and accidents to men, dogs and sledges, were taken into consideration in the percentage of probabilities and provided for as far as possible. Sledges would break and dogs would fall by the way, of course; but we could ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Henry VII. was not clearly defined. The House of Lords was but a small body. It comprised simply those lords, temporal and spiritual, who were entitled to receive from the king, when a parliament was to be held, a special writ, i.e., an individual summons. The number of these was indeterminate. The right of the archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots to be summoned was immemorial and indisputable, although the abbots in practice evaded their obligation of attendance, save in cases in which it could be shown that as military tenants of the crown they were obligated to perform parliamentary ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... one for my purpose whether it is admitted or not. [Perfect duties are usually understood to be those which can be enforced by external law; imperfect, those which cannot be enforced. They are also called respectively determinate and indeterminate, officia juris and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Bob sat gazing after her, indeterminate, that he felt a hand from behind the seat upon his shoulder; looked up to see a tall young man, fresh ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... six mouths later, one of those warm, still, sunshot-and-grey March evenings when elm-root are blue with violets and the air is full of the faint indeterminate scent of tree flowers, that Lawrence brought his bride home to Farringay. March weather is uncertain, and he preferred to go where he could be sure of comfort, while Isabel, having once consented to be married, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the forecross-trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man, nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles together, the fringe of cocoa-palm and pandanus extended ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... fashion of the man himself. He was unprepossessing in every line. His thin, pale face widened rapidly, like a top, to a broad and shining pate, which looked not so much bald as half naked below its sparse covering of reddish hair. His eyes were glimmering and of an indeterminate colour. Yet his voice was not unattractive in its persuasive intonation, and his manner was friendly almost to the verge of effusiveness. Whatever might be his demerits from a physical point of view, he lacked the general ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... than to use a splendid army, and possibly his ideals of efficiency were too high for those early days. Yet "Little Mac" was idolized by his soldiers, with whom he fought and won bloody battles, and even the indeterminate ones are held in doubt as to his responsibility. Had Hooker obeyed his command, and crossed the bridge at Antietam and occupied the heights beyond, soldiers think to-day that Lee would have been crushed. Another ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... revolves in four days at the rate of fifty-seven miles a second,[1446] or quicker, in proportion as its orbit is more inclined to the line of sight, round a centre at a minimum distance of three millions of miles. But the position of the second star being unknown, the mass of the system remains indeterminate. The lesser component of the splendid, slowly revolving binary, Castor, is also closely double. Its spectral lines were found by Belopolsky in 1896[1447] to oscillate once in nearly three days, the secondary globe ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self- abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to deal with conditions buried in the earth. Especially in metal mines we cannot know, when our works are initiated, what the size, mineralization, or surroundings of the ore-bodies will be. We must plunge into them and learn,—and repent. Not only is the useful life of our mining works indeterminate, but the very character of them is uncertain in advance. All our works must be in a way doubly tentative, for they are subject to constant ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... days of her convalescence, Beatrix manifested an utter indifference to the tidings from the outer world. She lay by the hour, her baby on her arm, looking down at the fuzzy little head and the red little face whose indeterminate features were fast taking the stamp of those of their father. Strange to say, the fact caused Beatrix no repulsion. The fires of her being seemed to have burned themselves out, and even her feeling to Lorimer shared ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... traversed and mapped, but the streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the unknown. The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Sumatra are minutely set to book, but the wars of the phagocytes remain indeterminate, unexplained. With microscope to his eye the bacteriologist is now examining the constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and minutely studying the germs of fevers, the growths of tumors, and other elemental forms of human parasites, in order to discover ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... next day in smoking an indeterminate quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to see ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... lectures on radium, or the probable exhaustion of the sun's energy, and have never learned the laws of motion. Few people estimate properly the evil of habitual intercourse with that which is vague and indeterminate. The issues before us not being clearly cut and comprehensible, the highest faculties of our minds are not exercised. We lazily wander over the surface without coming to a definite conclusion. Perhaps we ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... that the protection of manufactured articles should be reduced, not immediately, but at some indeterminate time, not to the lowest rate of entrance, but to ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... high cheek-bones fixes the whites of his porcine eyes (eyes the pupils of which are as indeterminate as the eyes of a blind man) upon the woman in the green scarf. Then, having, like a calf, plucked and chewed some stalks of the withered grass, he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, bends one fist into the crook of the elbow, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... may be projected a considerable distance and remain floating in the air for some time. These particles are so fine as to be invisible; they may be inspired, and their presence in the air forms an area of indeterminate extent around the infected person within which such infection is possible. Such spray formation is also an important means of the extension of infection in the sick individual, for it is continually formed and inspired. It is in this way that the extreme prevalence of broncho-pneumonia ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... by this war was assured the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon political and legal tradition over the whole American continent north of the tropics, and that the same tradition shall, for a future yet indeterminate, decisively shape the course of India and the Philippines? The preceding war, 1739-1748, had been substantially inconclusive on the chief points at issue, because European questions intervening had diverted the attention of both France and Great Britain from America and from India; ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... indeterminate sound, thinking of Imogen as she used to climb about his knee or pull Christmas ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Great Headquarters, where, among other interesting sights, I have already seen the Kaiser, the King of Saxony, the Crown Prince, Major Langhorne, the American Military Attache; Field Marshal von Moltke, and shoals of lesser celebrities with which the town is overrun. My stay is of indeterminate length, and only until the polite but insistent pressure which the Kaiser's secret police and the General Staff are bringing to bear on their unbidden guest ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... followed by the Great Blank [t'ai su], which is the first formation of Substance. Substance, Pneuma, and Form being all evolved out of the primordial chaotic mass, this material world as it lies before us came into existence." And that which made it possible for Chaos to evolve was the Solitary Indeterminate (i tu or the tao), which is not created, but is able to create everlastingly. And being both Solitary and Indeterminate it tells us nothing determinate ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... tiny men with delicate physical and mental adjustments. Only to the mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... answer to my cable pointing out the probable results of his declared intention of sending us no "reinforcements of importance" during an indeterminate period. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the convents provided for certain offences the punishment of flagellation, imprisonment in a dungeon for indeterminate periods, living on bread and water, and public confession of sins. The mildest punishment consisted in being compelled to eat off the ground, kneeling, at the hour of the refectory. The friar who by his conduct had become incorrigible, and worthy of the severest punishment, was sent away, for ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... Although somewhat indeterminate, the policy of the United States in respect to the landing of foreign submarine cables, so far, at least, as the executive branch of the government is concerned, appears to be based chiefly upon considerations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... which we may suppose to be represented algebraically by the symbol t, would remain as an unknown quantity to the end. What the mathematician sought to do was to present the astronomer with a series of algebraic expressions containing t as an indeterminate quantity, and so, by simply substituting for t any year and fraction of a year whatever—1600, 1700, 1800, for example, the result would give the latitude, longitude, or ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... being one of the few allusions to be found in the Zu-Vendi ritual to a vague divine essence independent of the material splendour of the orb they worship. 'Taia', the word used here, has a very indeterminate meaning, and signifies essence, vital principle, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... grown up into an unwholesome, spotty, indeterminate young man, with a speckled necktie, and cuffs of which he was inordinately proud, and which he insisted on "flashing" every second minute. He was also evidently self-satisfied; which was odd, for I have seldom seen ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... effects. Yet such was his precaution and care for himself that he left no finger-print behind him nor any other token which could lead to personal identification. Even though his footsteps could be traced in much the order I have mentioned, they were of so indeterminate and shapeless a character as to convey little to the intelligence of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.... That which has not been thus determined by God cannot determine itself to action. A thing which has been determined by God to any action cannot render itself indeterminate. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the same act, the same Court of Directors were ordered to take into consideration and to decide on the indeterminate rights of the Rajah of Tanjore and the Nabob of Arcot; and in this, as in the former case, no power of appeal, revision, or alteration was reserved to any other. It was a jurisdiction, in a cause between ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
