"Reducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... somewhat backwards to admit Observations for Universal) had the Curiosity to discover, that the Experiments would not Uniformly succeed, and of these Exceptions, the chief that I now remember, are reducible to the following three. ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... all nations applied with so great latitude, that they are not easily reducible under any regular scheme of explication: this difficulty is not less, nor perhaps greater, in English, than in other languages. I have laboured them with diligence, I hope with success; such at least as can be expected in a task, which ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... of the Personal pronouns. These forms are used under various circumstances, but they are mostly reducible to a single letter with or without its vowel for each person, the variations depending upon (a) the state of that letter, and (b) whether the vowel is placed before or after it. The vowel is elided in some cases, and coalesces with another ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... the rhythmic type. The series of three beats decreasing in intensity represents the natural dactylic; the distortion actually presented is the result of the proximity of each of these groups to a syncopated measure which follows it. This influence I believe to be reducible to more elementary terms. The syncopated measure is used to mark the close of a logical sequence, or to attract the hearer's attention to a striking thought. In both cases it is introduced at significant points in the rhythmical ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... contemplation will reduce that also to the similitude of a moderately-sized attic. And then, resolving to bear, if possible—for it is worth while,—the cramp in your neck for another quarter of a minute, look right up to the third vault, over your head; which, if not, in the said quarter of a minute, reducible in imagination to a tailor's garret, will at least sink, like the two others, into the semblance of a common arched ceiling, of no ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... be pressed back into the abdomen by the ordinary manipulation of the fingers, it is a Reducible Rupture. This is the first condition, but without a proper ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... seven,—but certainly not more than the latter number—and perhaps it is simpler to assume five—distinct plans or constructions in the whole of the animal world; and that the hundreds of thousands of species of creatures on the surface of the earth, are all reducible to those five, or, at most, seven, plans ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... that you, who are feelingly alive to each fine Sensation that Beauty or Harmony gives the Soul, should so often assert, contrary to what you daily experience, that TASTE is governed by Caprice, and that BEAUTY is reducible to no Criterion? I am afraid your Generosity in this Instance is greater than your Sincerity, and that you are willing to compliment the circle of your Friends, in giving up by this Concession that envied Superiority you might claim over them, should it ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... Association has nothing to do with this. It knows its function to be the investigation of facts, and of facts only; and, as was said, no sect was ever yet framed on undoubted facts. Now what are the facts of Spiritualism up to this date? They are reducible to two:—1st. The continued life and individuality of the spirit body of man after it has quitted its body of flesh; and, 2nd. Its communion with spirits still in the flesh, under certain conditions, by physical exhibition and mental ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not to this newly devised one: King Louis Restorer of French Liberty? Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... remembering; secondly, that it shows every appearance of having remembered; thirdly, that no other hypothesis except memory can be brought forward, so as to account for the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, which is not easily reducible to an absurdity. Beyond this we do not care to go, and must allow those to differ from us who ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... with reverberations finer and more momentous, personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever, enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, of personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... appear, that the most comprehensive formula to which life is reducible, would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many. But that there is a physiognomy in words, which, without ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ultimate facts of nature and one of the universal principles of art; and thus versification, which is the study of the rhythms of verse, is both a science and an art. But it differs from the other sciences in that its phenomena are not 'regular' and reducible to law, but varying and subject to the dictates, even the whims, of genius; inasmuch as every poem involves a fresh fiat of creation. Of course, no poet when he is composing, either in the traditional "fine frenzy" or in the more sober process of revision, thinks of prosody as ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... East Mesa shows that the mythologic personages most commonly chosen for the ornamentation of their interiors are the Corn or Germ goddesses.[117] These assume a number of forms, yet all are reducible to one type, although known by very different names, as Hewueqti, "Old Woman," ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... substance and matter of all fine art is the same, issuing from the common source of the human desire for expression, yet the region of fancy corresponding to each medium of utterance is molded by intercourse with that medium, and acquires an individuality which is not directly reducible to terms of any other region of aesthetic fancy. Feeling, in short, is modified in becoming communicable; and the feeling which has become communicable in music is not capable of re-translation into the feeling which has become communicable in painting. ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green |
