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Organism   /ˈɔrgənˌɪzəm/   Listen
Organism

noun
1.
A living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function independently.  Synonym: being.
2.
A system considered analogous in structure or function to a living body.



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"Organism" Quotes from Famous Books



... picture of intrinsic goodness. In this figure we have a whole represented in which every part is good for every other part. But this is merely a pictorial statement of the definition which Kant once gave of an organism. By an organism he says, we mean that assemblage of active and differing parts in which each part is both means and end. Extrinsic goodness, the relation of means to end, we have expressed in our diagram ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... starting-point, the proposition that "Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... that all the organic matter of our time is from preexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build up another? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end? There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organization in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there is certainly more now ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... thorough knowledge of bacteriology is the groundwork of therapeutics. It is practically admitted that every ailment, with the exception of mechanical injuries, is the direct result of a specific germ; and even in accidents and simple fractures, no matter what may be the nature of the bruise, a micro-organism soon announces its presence, so that if not the parent, it is the inseparable companion, in fact the shadow, of disease. Now, though not the first cause in this instance, it has been indubitably proved, that much of the effect, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, and value themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only in boys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probable that any lower organism ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... in that sort of child," replied the doctor. "Can you not see for yourself that she has a very delicate and a very nervous organism. She has lately, too, lost her mother, has ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade

... is right is possible. That which is necessary will inevitably take place. If something is right it is your duty to do it, though the whole world thinks it to be wrong. "God and one are always a majority," or in plain words, that omnipotent interior law which is God, and the organism that represents you is able to conquer the whole world if your cause is absolutely just. Don't say I wish I was a great man. You can do anything that is proper and you want to do. Just say: You can. You will. You must. Just realize this and the rest is easy. You ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont

... burst into wild laughter—shrill, acrid, cheerless, hysterical, her face turned upward, her hands clasped under her chin, her body shaking with what was not laughter, but the terrifying agitation of a broken organism. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... heart, and an earnest hope grounded on his misanthropic sadness, when I first knew him in his twentieth or twenty-first year, that a something existed in his bodily organism that in the sight of the All-Merciful lessened his responsibility, and the moral imputation of his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... subjects, especially physiological topics. It was found impracticable to compress within the limits of a book of moderate size anything like a thorough discussion of even the most important topics of all the departments of botany. As a thorough understanding of the structure of any organism forms the basis of all further intelligent study of the same, it has seemed to the author proper to emphasize this feature in the present work, which is professedly an ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... thing is that all the members of society work, just as in the individual organism all the cells perform their different functions, more or less modest in appearance—for example, the nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells—but all biological functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... the problem of ethics and science. The duty of dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... and in its knots, branches, and curvatures, the deposits which its sap has made and the imprint of the innumerable seasons through which it has passed. Using the philosophic definition, so vague and trite, to such an organism, is only a puerile label teaching us nothing.—And all the more because extreme diversities and inequalities show themselves on this exceedingly elaborate and complicated background,—those of age, education, faith, class and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... his mind. He had been a good man; he had preferred good to evil: had it all been a farce? Was the thing that he was being driven to do now a thing of satanic prompting, and he himself corrupt—all the goodness which he had thought to be himself only an organism, fair outside, that rotted inwardly? Or was this fear the result of false teaching, the prompting of an artificial conscience, and was the thing he wished to do the wholesome and natural course to take—right in the ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... Every organism, mechanism or social construct reaches a point in its life cycle at which its existing apparatus must be repaired, renovated and updated or scrapped, redesigned and replaced. Today western civilization in its ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... organism. It is forever striving to realize its own best estate. This is the true goal for all individuals. It is saying the same thing if we affirm the goal to be Health—for worlds or man: Body-Health, Mind-Health, ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock

... of impure and animal* thoughts. For Science shows that thought is dynamic, and the thought-force evolved by nervous action expanding outwardly, must affect the molecular relations of the physical man. The inner men,** however sublimated their organism may be, are still composed of actual, not hypothetical, particles, and are still subject to the law that an "action" has a tendency to repeat itself; a tendency to set up analogous action in the grosser "shell" they are in contact ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... reason, and his other powers, his other faculties, were benumbed little by little, and stopped. In his being there was manifested an effect at once analogous and contrary to that which curara produces on the organism, when it circulates in the network of the blood; the members are paralyzed, no pain is experienced, but cold rises, the soul ends by being sequestered alive in a corpse; in this case it was the living body that detained a ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... counter, might be called hyphenotomy. Everybody detests Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette, but as the banner patient of the sanitarium she must be treated with respectful consideration. All America's most skillful physicians have struggled with her organism. They have tried to get her symptoms into line, so to speak, so as to deduce some theory from the grand array of phenomena, but the symptoms courteously decline to point in any one direction. When the doctors get seven eighths of them in satisfactory ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... applied to living beings, Kant comes, on the contrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the general including the particular, and determining it as an end, consequently the idea also determines the external, the compound of the organs, not by an act springing from without but issuing from within. In this way the end and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... process must of necessity be a purely personal one, carried on, if I may use the expression, in one's own moral organism, I have a certain delicacy in attempting to describe it. In fact, Lady Fritterly, if you will allow me to say so, as the whole subject which has been under discussion this afternoon is the most profoundly solemn which can engage the attention of a human being, I shrink from entering upon it ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the head of the government may be. This inevitability alone can explain how the cruel Arakcheev, who tore ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... by more varied movements to external stimulation. But even when the stimulation received is not at once prolonged into movement, it appears merely to await its occasion; and the same impression which makes the organism aware of changes in the environment, determines it or prepares it to adapt itself to them. No doubt there is in the higher vertebrates a radical distinction between pure automatism, of which the seat is mainly in the spinal cord, and voluntary activity ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish. On the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of organic existence ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... compensate them for the change of scene and life; and the Australian public will take little account of a man who cannot show ability in some direction. For specialists there is not yet much scope. Our social organism has not yet become sufficiently heterogeneous, as the evolutionists would say, though it is gradually ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... benefited by seeking the green fields and healthful influences of the country; but on reaching that desirable Eden, let means be provided for his instruction; so, while sitting under the leafy trees, his mind may be benefited, and his bodily organism rested, rather than injured by feasting and rioting in ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... can be regarded as the basis of our physiological idea of the elementary organism; but in the animal as well as in the plant, neither cell-wall nor nucleus is an essential constituent of the cell, inasmuch as bodies which are unquestionably the equivalents of cells—true morphological units—may be mere masses of protoplasm, devoid alike of ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... individual animal or plant commences its existence as an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and it acquires all the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual differentiation into parts of various structure and function. When a series of specific forms of the same type, extending over a long period of past time, is examined, the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... does. I lost it in the hockey field, and did not find it for three days, and I dared not tell Chrissie all that time, for fear she might be offended. She's dreadfully sensitive. She says she has a highly nervous organism, and I think ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed organism; if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and suddenly to cast a vivid light ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... notably in the abdomen, the subject of the experiment resists for some time. I have seen a Grasshopper, bitten in the belly, cling firmly for fifteen hours to the smooth, upright wall of the glass bell that constituted his prison. At last, he dropped off and died. Where the Bee, that delicate organism, succumbs in less than half an hour, the Grasshopper, coarse ruminant that he is, resists for a whole day. Put aside these differences, caused by unequal degrees of organic sensitiveness, and we sum ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... transition that has occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it is frequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traits are to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part its individuals are either criminal, immoral, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... 'ask,' and 'asking' was the torture of tortures. So he had wandered, solicitous and helpless, up and down the stairs, until at length Leek, ceasing to be a valet and deteriorating into a mere human organism, had feebly yet curtly requested to be just let alone, asserting that he was right enough. Whereupon the envied of all painters, the symbol of artistic glory and triumph, had assumed the valet's notorious puce dressing-gown and established ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... amusement, the probabilities of the coming day, and, in short, social institutions generally, were all objectionable to her. It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... from him. He revealed himself as a mechanical expert with a special knowledge of cash registers. He and Tim Gorman pressed keys, twisted handles and bent together in absorbed contemplation over some singular feature of the machine's organism. Gorman, the elder brother, watched them with a confident smile. Ascher and Stutz sat gravely silent. They waited Mildmay's opinion. He was the man of the moment. A few minutes before he had bowed respectfully to ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... destroyed by fire. asbestos - a naturally occurring soft fibrous mineral commonly used in fireproofing materials and considered to be highly carcinogenic in particulate form. biodiversity - also biological diversity; the relative number of species, diverse in form and function, at the genetic, organism, community, and ecosystem level; loss of biodiversity reduces an ecosystem's ability to recover from natural or man-induced disruption. bio-indicators - a plant or animal species whose presence, abundance, and health reveal the general condition of its habitat. biomass - ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the conditions of nature remain uniform, species may persist for long ages unchanged, though even in the latter case changes in structure are apt to occur, since variation in species is not wholly dependent upon external changes. To a considerable extent it is due to causes existing within the organism itself, fortuitous variations being occasionally preserved when not out of harmony with the state of affairs prevailing in the external world. Or variation may occur through the establishment of new relations between the species inhabiting ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... position that woman should occupy in our social organism; how she may unfold her powers and faculties in all directions, to the end that she become a complete and useful member of human society, enjoying equal rights with all. From our view-point, this question coincides with that other:—what shape and organization human society must ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... motor, and moreover a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through internal recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an insect is provided after its transformation. In every living organism, necessity, through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the possible and requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our era, it was Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... of the Umbrian reformer Italy roused herself, recovered her good sense and fine temper; she cast out those doctrines of pessimism and death, as a robust organism casts ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... once loved like a she-wolf, but was now wasted, already sufficiently worn out for the grave. There had been strange workings of her nerves during her long years of chastity. A dissolute life would perhaps have wrecked her less than the slow hidden ravages of unsatisfied fever which had modified her organism. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... Court of the United States has recently declared that a court-martial such as this was is the organism provided by law and clothed with the duty of administering justice in this class of cases. Its judgments, when approved, rest on the same basis and are surrounded by the same considerations which give conclusiveness to the judgments of other ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson

... fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's noblest ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... change more plainly than animals, which continually wander about; and this apparently is the {148} case. Life depending on, or consisting in, an incessant play of the most complex forces, it would appear that their action is in some way stimulated by slight changes in the circumstances to which each organism is exposed. All forces throughout nature, as Mr. Herbert Spencer[330] remarks, tend towards an equilibrium, and for the life of each being it is necessary that this tendency should be checked. If these views and the foregoing facts can be trusted, they probably throw light, on ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... and gave the office a market-day "atmosphere." Then things went spinningly. The bank and the staff became a machine and the parts thereof, as if incited to action by the combustion of certain gas-mixtures in the place. Especially the teller's head took on the character of a metallic organism: he could almost hear the wheels buzzing. Occasionally a cog somewhere grated, as, for instance, when a drover brought in a cheque for $500 and had to wait in line behind the wife of a neighbor whom he hated, until she got $1.79 for ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... specialised nervous system should be affected by such minute particles; but we have no grounds for assuming that other tissues could not be rendered as exquisitely susceptible to impressions from without if this were beneficial to the organism, as is the nervous system of ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... storms that must have been prevalent at this time. It is doubtful whether any but the very lowest forms of life then existed. It is the strata at the bottom of the geological scale that are of the most portentous thickness, and the only organism suspected in them is the doubtful Eozoon Canadense. Sir Robert Ball believes, and several geologists agree with him, that the mighty tides we are contemplating may have been coaeval with this ancient Laurentian formation, and others ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... of the sebaceous glands and hair follicles, the essential point in the disease being the plugging of the mouths of the sebaceous follicles by a "comedo,'' familiarly known as "blackhead.'' It is now generally acknowledged that the cause of this disease is the organism known as bacillus acnes. It shows itself in the form of red pimples or papules, which may become pustular and be attended with considerable surrounding irritation of the skin. This affection is likewise most common in early adult life, and occurs on the chest and back as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... closer and closer together, his own affairs and institutions have consolidated. Concentration may typify the chief movement of the age—concentration, classification, order; the reduction of friction between the parts of the social organism. The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... (arrangement) ordo. Orderly orda. Orderly (military) servosoldato. Ordinance ordono. Ordinary kutima, ordinara. Ordnance artilerio. Ore minajxo. Organ (music) orgeno. Organ organo. Organic organa. Organism organismo. Organize organizi. Organization organizo. Orient oriento. Oriental orienta. Orifice truo, busxo. Origin deveno. Original originala. Originate devenigi—igxi. Ornament ornamo. Ornament ornami. Ornaments (jewellery, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... must have been affected quite considerably by Roman, Celt, and Teuton. The chief difference which we notice between this older system and the conditions of modern agricultural life—for the manor was pre-eminently a rural organism—lies in the enormous part then played in the organisation of society by the idea of Tenure. For, through all Western civilisation, from the seventh century to the fourteenth, the personal equation was largely ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett

... ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile, Mr. Snell gradually recovered a vivid impression of the effect produced on him by the pedlar's countenance and conversation. He had a "look with his eye" which fell unpleasantly on Mr. Snell's sensitive organism. To be sure, he didn't say anything particular—no, except that about the tinder-box—but it isn't what a man says, it's the way he says it. Moreover, he had a swarthy foreignness of ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy, which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... refuge. It limits the nation, and pulls it up short in face of its closed doors. It is a State within a State; where there is association, there arises at once a source of organisation other than the great organism of the popular will. It is like an animal which lives some sort of independent life within another animal larger than itself and which, living on that other animal, is still independent of it. In fact there can be only one association, the association of the nation, otherwise the sovereignty ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... population, and the law of diminishing returns, led to a scramble for unappropriated lands producing the raw materials of industry. It was, in a sense, a war of capital; but capitalism is no accretion upon the body politic; it is the creator of the modern world and an essential part of a living organism. The Germans unquestionably made a deep-laid plot to capture all markets and cripple or ruin all competitors. Their aims and methods were very like those of the Standard Oil Trust on a still larger scale. The other nations had not followed the logic of competition ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... the sayings of Swedenborg, that the Aryan West had something to learn from the Turanian East. It is so—the reverend thought of the dead as still forming a part of the organism of the family. With the revolt at the Reformation at the trade made out of the feelings of the bereaved, the coining of their tears into cash to line the pockets of the priests, came an unwarranted oblivion of the dead, a dissociation from them. The thought that ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... Boyle was primarily a chemist and not a biologist. He thought in chemical terms, drawing his examples from physics and chemistry; he did not think in terms of the living creature or the organism, and as a mechanist he passed quite lightly over the concept or organismic behavior. His basic anti-Aristotelianism prevented his appreciating the biologically oriented thought of Aristotle. Instead, Boyle talked ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... we bring in physiological factors—that is, if we remember that pleasure, like pain, cannot exceed certain limits, and that all sensations, when too violent, result in the paralysis of sensation. Our organism can only support a certain maximum of joy, pain, or effort, and it cannot support that maximum for long together. The hand which grasps a dynamometer soon exhausts its effort, and is ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... foremost scientists are uniformly agreed that certain unpleasant results may eventuate when the force of gravitation brings a human organism into sudden and severe juxtaposition with a cement sidewalk, I humbly suggest that you fire me. Besides, that act will automatically avenge me, for then your yellow old newspaper will ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... with many other Greek things, from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is really new in a new organism is the new cohering force—the mode of life,—so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the elements, for instance, of its peculiar national ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... form dead recesses in the river of life, would thus be swept into and dissolved in the current, and the waters would have been deepened and colored by their dissolution. Libraries are a sort of debris of the world, but the spiritual substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... the place began to exert a weird fascination upon me. It is difficult to describe or to induce people to believe; but I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... property are evidence of a considerable progress toward civilization. The natural inference from this is that they are tests of intellectual power, since mind is a combination of all the actual and possible states of consciousness of the organism, and an examination of the Eskimo system of trade draws its own conclusion. Their fondness for trade has been known for a long time, as well as the extended range of their commercial intercourse. They trade with the Indians, ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... that morality begins in human social relations and passes from them to the relations maintained with the other life and with the Gods. Or, if one prefers to consider ghosts and gods as inseparable elements of the primary organism, then we should say that morality is born in that all-embracing psychical atmosphere. But it does not follow from that fact that the rise and development of morality are conditioned by belief in Gods and in immortality. Merely human relations ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... the sex organs are so far developed that they are beginning to take up their peculiar functions. But they are like the immature buds of the flower, and need time for a perfect development. If she understands this, and recognizes her added value to the world through the perfecting of her entire organism, she will desire to take good care of herself, and during these years of early young womanhood to develop into all that is possible of sweetness, grace, purity, and ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... being laughed at for sixty years about the philosopher's stone, chemists, governed by experience, no longer dare to deny the transmutability of bodies; while astronomers are led by the structure of the world to suspect also an organism of the world; that is, something precisely like astrology. Are we not justified in saying, in imitation of the philosopher just quoted, that, if a little chemistry leads away from the philosopher's stone, much chemistry leads back to it; and similarly, that, if a little astronomy makes us laugh ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... phenomena, but a directing Mind, a prevailing Will. The world, according to this conception, was not "made" once upon a time, like a piece of clockwork, and wound up to run without further assistance; it is not a mechanism, but an organism, thrilled and pervaded by an eternal Energy that "worketh even until now." In Sir Oliver Lodge's phrase, we must look for the action of Deity, if at all, then always; and this thought of the indwelling God, revealing Himself in the majestic ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... from the minds of invalids their mistaken belief that they live in or because of matter, or that a so-called material organism controls the health 18 or existence of mankind, and induces rest in God, divine Love, as caring for all the conditions requisite for the well- being of man. As power divine is the healer, why should 21 mortals concern themselves with the chemistry of food? ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy

... Pregnancy Defined; Duration of Pregnancy; the Signs of Pregnancy; Quickening; the Determination of Sex at Will; the Influence of the Male Sexual Element on the Fernale Organism; Heredity; Hygiene of Pregnancy; Causes ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... confusion existed as to the origin and nature of venereal disease, but in 1905 a micro-organism, the Spironema pallidum, was demonstrated as the infective agent in syphilis, and the gonococcus as the infecting organism of gonorrhoea had been discovered in 1879. As regards modes of infection, syphilis is contracted usually by sexual congress; occasionally ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health

... soft—the blood WHICH IS THE LIFE—the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and springy, cellular substance, in which all are imbedded and lightly bound together. This breathing organism, this glorious panharmonicon which I had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice given to it, the doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... nationalities, but states forming nationalities, belong to the coming union of universal humanity, and pass into the Christian order. States have risen before this to destroy a nationality, dividing and quartering it for the profit of some selfish ideal, tearing asunder a living, palpitating organism, murdering a visible member of the Universal Humanity. He is but a child who calls this merely a political crime: it is a crime of the very deepest dye, a crime against the Humanity itself, against religion, where the daring criminals, striding ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... MILK, like a new-born babe. And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in the present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight weeks is by many doctors recommended as the only means of getting rid of deep-seated illnesses and enabling a patient's organism to make a completely new ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... egg contains the substances characteristic of certain categories of cells of the organism it ought to be affected at the same time as those cells and by the same agents. He thinks that the egg only contains the substances or the arrangements characteristic of certain general functions (nervous, muscular, perhaps glandular of ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... steadily increasing in number. The facts are now too patent to be denied—what we want is a better knowledge of the power which accounts for them. And if this beginning is now with us, by what reason can we limit it? The difference between the healing of disease and the renewal of the entire organism and the perpetuation of life is only a difference of degree and not of kind; so that the actual experience of increasing numbers shows the working of a principle to which we can ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward

... training is an elastic, vigorous condition of the nervous system, the superiority of light gymnastics becomes still more obvious. The nervous system is the fundamental fact of our earthly life. All other parts of the organism exist and work for it. It controls all, and is the seat of pain and pleasure. The impressions upon the stomach, for example, resulting in a better or worse digestion, must be made through the nerves. This supreme control of the nervous system is forcibly illustrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... exceed his capacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth were originally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processes by mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism into harmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. The machinery to produce wealth, of which man's own energies have become a part, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrial ideal would be an international ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... badly with him when he tried to escape a thrashing by telling a white lie. And to-day's misfortune had been the fault of his face; if you felt happy, you mustn't show it. He had discovered the danger of letting his mind lie open, and his small organism set to work diligently to grow hard skin to draw over ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... individuals, who, from the thirteenth century down to our own day, have been quite numerous and present some interesting varieties—some having only the mark of the crucifix, others of the scourging, or of the crown of thorns.[1] Let us add the profound changes of the organism, results of the suggestive therapeutics of contemporaries; the wonderful effects of the "faith cure," i.e., the miracles of all religions in all times and in all places; and this brief list will suffice to recall certain ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... sudden they stopped, and the following questions and answers were uttered through their vocal organism: ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... all of us—we're the task force. We've got to do the job. We've got to test, plant, breed, re-balance, create. There'll be a lot of trial and error. We've got to work out a way of life, so the thousands who will follow can be introduced safely and painlessly into the—well, into the organism. And we'll need new blood for the jobs ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby

... lurked in his muscles, and now that his sweetheart was taken from him, this passion burst out in blind violence. He was madly in love. This thriving brutish nature seemed unconscious in everything. He obeyed his instincts, permitting the will of his organism to lead him. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... of the doubt. Why, that teeming England, north and south, was crying out for the work of women, the help of women! Who knew it better than he? But call in thought!—call in intelligence! Find out the best way to fit the work to the organism, the organism to the work. What soil so rich as England in the seed of political ideas? What nation could so easily as we evolve new forms out of the old ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to form a connected doctrine at least as early as the eighth century A.D. Some of its principal ideas are as follows: (i) Letters and syllables (and also their written forms and diagrams) have a potent influence both for the human organism and for the universe. This idea is found in the early Upanishads[437] and is fully developed in the later Sectarian Upanishads. (ii) The human organism is a miniature copy of the universe.[438] It contains many lines or channels (nadi) along ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... tap-roots a language sends down into the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of expression. We must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; but to that duty American writers are quite as keenly alive as we. It is not a source of weakness but of power and vitality to the English language that it should embrace a greater variety ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... into the air with every root and fibre down to the minutest thread, all entirely cleared of soil, so that every particle could be seen in its natural position. I think it would astonish even the wise ones." From his instinctive sympathy with nature, he often credits vegetable organism with "instinctive judgment." "Observation teaches us that a tree is given powerful instincts, which would almost appear to amount to judgment in some cases, to provide for its ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... any sort. Under the influence of fatigue the power of the muscles to respond to any kind of stimulus is greatly reduced. (It is interesting to note, however, that muscular fibre detached from the living organism and mechanically stretched and relaxed shows after a period the same decrease in contractability under stimulation.) On the other hand any increase in adrenal secretion results in renewed sensitiveness to stimulation, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... their pattern, so that you have little but a pleasing piece of colour. My only excuse is that the impression they made on me was no other. There was just that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... helplessly. Fowler placed it in position each time, marking each new position, while I took note of the convulsive tremor which swept from time to time over the psychic. It was exactly as if she were a dynamo generating some unknown electrical energy, which, after accumulating for a time in her organism (as in a jar), was discharged along the direction of our will, and yet I could not detect any marked synchronism of movement between these impulses and the movement of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... one, modern critics are ready with their answer that Zeno's quibbles are simply "a play of words on the well-known properties of infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation is an "affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in {46} the first case the prior question where the idea of infinity came from, and in the second, where the idea of a ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... in physiology knows the effect upon the general organism of dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them to degenerate physically, and the body ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... and fauces swell to a high degree; the eyes become suffused and sensitive to the light; the mucous membranes of the nose and bronchia become also affected, the patient sneezes and coughs, and all the symptoms denote the intense struggle, in which the whole organism is engaged, to rid itself of the enemy which has taken ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde

... animals, but the remarkable fact about them was that they couldn't contract any disease. Not any. They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins, and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a tormal could not more or less immediately develop antibody-resistance. So that in interstellar medicine tormals were priceless. Let Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... anything and everything, but freedom to live the life appropriate to him as man, and as a man of a given type. That this freedom is limited in a variety of ways, by his material environment, by the clashing of impulses within himself, by the conflict of his desires with the will of the social organism in which he finds his place, is ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... test of a fine grotesque—a genuine Gothic monster—is, that he shall, in spite of his monstrosity, retain a certain anatomical consistency: it must be conceivable that the animal organism could have developed along these lines. In the thirteenth century, this is always possible; but in much later times, and in the Renaissance, the grotesques simply became comic and degraded, and lacking in humour: in a later chapter this idea will be ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... above all, in the eyes, related more eloquently than words the terrible agony of which she was the victim. The past twenty-four hours had acted upon her like certain long illnesses, in which it seems that the very essence of the organism is altered. She was another person. The rapid metamorphosis, so tragical and so striking, caused Boleslas to forget his own anguish. He experienced nothing but one great regret when the woman, so visibly bowed down by grief, was ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... is a good line of attack. We should, however, always remember that no change will ever be effected till a variation in the habits or structure or of both CHANCE to occur in the right direction, so as to give the organism in question an advantage over other already established occupants of land or water, and this may be in any particular case indefinitely long. I am very glad you will read my dogs MS., for it will be important to me to see what you think of the balance of evidence. After long pondering on a subject ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... And this is his answer. "In scripture," he says, "man is spoken of as consisting of body, soul, and spirit." And in Sir G. G. Stokes's opinion it is the third article which "lies at the very basis of life." It is spirit, "the interaction of which with the material organism produced a living being" in the Garden ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... misinterpreted by a whole school of non-biological writers, who have followed the lead of Lester F. Ward, in his classification of these neuter-organisms as females. Ward says ("Pure Sociology," Ch. 14): "It does no violence to language or science to say that life begins with the female organism and is carried on a long distance by means of females alone. In all the different forms of asexual reproduction from fission to parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense be said to exist alone and perform all the functions of life including reproduction. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... them," he repeated inwardly. A drawback indeed. Why could an interesting young organism so seldom be detached from its milieu and enjoyed in isolation? Prosy parents; tiresome, detrimental brothers ... He wondered if she had any idea what they were all like. It might be just as ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... now been said on correlative changes, to convince us that they are as a rule to be considered as the expression of some general internal or physiologic quality, which is not limited to a single organ, but affects all parts of the organism, provided they are capable of undergoing the change. Such characters are therefore to be considered as units, and should be referred to the group ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... destructive fermentation as it takes place in large masses of tissue, animal or vegetable, but far preferably the former, as they lie in water at a constant temperature of from 60 deg. to 65 deg. F., it will be seen that the fermentative process is the work, not of one organism, nor, judging by the standard of our present knowledge, of one specified class of vegetative forms, but by organisms which, though related to each other, are in many respects greatly dissimilar, not only morphologically, but ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... national soul in its darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart. The national soul in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic age it assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes a multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of peace, and in times of war it ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... conscience is free.[194] Before a new authority can be set up in the place of one that exists, there is an interval when the right of dissent must be proclaimed. At the beginning of Luther's contest with the Holy See there was no rival authority for him to appeal to. No ecclesiastical organism existed, the civil power was not on his side, and not even a definite system had yet been evolved by controversy out of his original doctrine of justification. His first efforts were acts of hostility, his exhortations were ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... doctrine of Malthus and the doctrine of Hobbes. The elder DeCandolle had conceived the idea of the struggle for existence, and, in a passage which would have delighted the cynical philosopher of Malmesbury, had declared that all Nature is at war, one organism with another or with external Nature; and Lyell and Herbert had made considerable use of it. But Hobbes in his theory of society, and Darwin in his theory of natural history, alone have built their systems upon it. However moralists and political ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... Micrococcus, Bacillus, Leptothrix, &c., occur as phases in one life-history. Lister put forth similar ideas about the same time; and Billroth came forward in 1874 with the extravagant view that the various bacteria are only different states of one and the same organism which he called Cocco-bacteria septica. From that time the question of the pleomorphism (mutability of shape) of the bacteria has been hotly discussed: but it is now generally agreed that, while a [v.03 p.0158] certain number of forms may show different types of cell ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... longed to save; but he was gone past redemption. Alcoholic stimulants and licentious excesses, without doubt, had produced those unseen changes in the brain, of which Dr. Forbes Winslow speaks; and the results were terrible in proportion to the peculiar fineness and delicacy of the organism deranged. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... have told by hearing the sounds of two breathing; Terry wondered quietly. The man seemed possessed of abnormal senses. It was strange to see that bulky, burly, awkward body become now a sensitive organism, possessed of a ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand

... picturesque and monumental masses of vegetable rock, "intertwisted {141} fibres serpentine,"—of far nobler and more pathetic use in their places, and their enduring age, than ever they could be for material purpose in human habitation. For this central mass of the vegetable organism, then, the English word 'trunk' and French 'tronc' are always in accurate scholarship to be retained—meaning the part of a tree which remains when its branches are ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin



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