"Arbitrarily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admiringly. He was only a year from college, and he had been rather arbitrarily limited to the debutantes. He found, therefore, something rather flattering in the attention he was receiving from a girl who had been out five years, and who was easily the most popular young woman in the gayer set. It gave him a sense of maturity Since the night before ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... disciples were but humble fishermen and that the poor would be the only elect in the kingdom of heaven. Dropping the name of Essenes or Therapeutae, and retaining that of Christian, they incorporated a thread of real history corresponding to the reign of Augustus, and arbitrarily made the Christian era begin at that time. Having thus completed their scheme, they prudently destroyed the original from which they compiled their scriptures, and sending out missionaries to all parts of the Empire commissioned ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... disregarded the natural physical features of the western country and, by degrees of latitude and meridians of longitude, arbitrarily divided the public domain into rectangular districts, to the first of which the following names were applied: Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia, Pelisipia. ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values permissible to a painter. The music of certain Oriental nations, in which the religious orders are the art censors, has stuck fast in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... stages of history are not arbitrarily severed, but grow out of each other, we must briefly notice the mental conditions of the period in Germany which preceded the rise of rationalism; next indicate the new forces, the introduction of which was the means of generating the movement; and then explain ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another, given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... mastery over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... Hans, any betrayal to them being likely to reach Mirah in some way that would raise an agitating suspicion, and spoil the important opening of that work which was to secure her independence, as we rather arbitrarily call one of the more arduous and dignified forms of our dependence. And both Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda had more reasons than they could have expressed for desiring that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. Perhaps "the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... 'Hamlet.' If he wishes to say 'Bills of lading go forward by this mail, Invoices will follow,' he has only to telegraph 'Heretic.' For the most part, the compilers of these codes seem to have used the words arbitrarily, for the word 'Ellwood' has no visible connection with the words 'Blue Velvet,' which it represents; neither is there connection between 'Doves' and 'French Brandy,' nor between 'Collapse' and 'Scotch Coals,' though ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the divine and the human is reached in a different way from that of Smith by MM. Hubert and Mauss, and receives in their hands a peculiar coloring.[1900] They hold that the numerous forms of sacrifice cannot be reduced to "the unity of a single arbitrarily chosen principle"; and in view of the paucity of accurate accounts of early ritual (in which they include the Greek and the Roman) they reject the "genealogical" (that is, the evolutionary) method, and devote themselves to an ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Arbitrarily to restrain the power of pain, of feeling in revolt, would be to sin against the very meaning and aim of Art, and would betray a want of feeling and soul in ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... is supposed to be regu- lated by the Bank of England, and the "bank rate," which is arbitrarily fixed by the directors, is moved up and down (sometimes for other reasons than the value of money), and is sup- posed to be the rate of discount for bills of the best description. It is found in practice, however, that when there is an abundance of money ...
— Everybody's Guide to Money Matters • William Cotton, F.S.A.
... of an impudent plutocracy. You miserable little hiccius doctius, do you expect to deceive an intelligent people with that kind of howl, while the trade in wheat is left untrammeled and the demand for silver arbitrarily limited by law? Suppose that while the world's wheat fields were producing abundantly the leading nations should prohibit their people purchasing any more of that cereal for food production; would any macrocephalous donkey ascribe ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the more arbitrarily because it is not possible to make the ordinary moral man understand what toleration and liberty really mean. He will accept them verbally with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, because the word toleration has been moralized by eminent Whigs; but what ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... if the Corporation is to be "reformed" after the manner of Sir George Grey and his coadjutors—if the esprit de corps, which is now so beneficially and beneficently exhibited, is to be suppressed, what reasonable hope remains that men who have been arbitrarily deprived of all real interest in City matters will still devote their time, their energies, and their fortunes to purposes which only remunerate them with toil, anxiety, and personal discomfort? The inevitable ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... lands which Sulla had destined for allotment but had not yet parcelled out, nor directly abandoned the claim to them, but tolerated the former owners in provisional possession without regulating their title, and indeed even allowed various still undistributed tracts of Sullan domain-land to be arbitrarily taken possession of by individuals according to the old system of occupation, which was de jure and de facto set aside by the Gracchan reforms.(1) Whatever in the Sullan enactments was indifferent or inconvenient for the Optimates, was without scruple ignored or ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... other financial experts was delegated the power and authority to perfect a fair, impartial monetary system. First of all, they arbitrarily declared the dollar, the peso and the shilling to be without value. "Time" script was to be issued by the governing board, and as this substitute would automatically become useless on the day the castaways, were discovered and taken off the island, no citizen ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Russian workman is not at all insensible to the prospect of bettering his material condition and getting his everyday grievances redressed. Of these grievances the ones he felt most keenly were the long hours, the low wages, the fines arbitrarily imposed by the managers, and the brutal severity of the foreman. By helping him to have these grievances removed the Social Democratic agents might gain his confidence, and when they had come to be regarded by him as his real friends they might widen ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... question of "indecency" in writing,—is the patent ease with which this topic may be disposed of. Since time's beginning, every age has had its literary taboos, selecting certain things—more or less arbitrarily, but usually some natural function—as the things which must not be written about. To violate any such taboo so long as it stays prevalent is to be "indecent": and that seems absolutely all there is to say concerning this topic, apart from furnishing ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... object of scorn, which distressed me particularly on account of the daughter, such a pretty little girl, as I had heard, and one of whom I used often to dream, always imagining her with the same features and appearance, which I bestowed upon her quite arbitrarily, but with a charming effect. But from this afternoon, when I had learned that Mile. Swann was a creature living in such rare and fortunate circumstances, bathed, as in her natural element, in such a sea of privilege that, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... in various compositions, inasmuch as the number of beats enclosed between the vertical bars may be, and is, determined quite arbitrarily. What is known as a Simple measure contains either the two beats (heavy-light) of the fundamental duple group, or the three beats (heavy-light-light) of the triple group, shown in the preceding chapter. Compound measures are such as contain more than two or three beats, and they must always ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... existed between English landlords and tenants for generations, is utterly unwarranted. In several respects indeed he has been treated by the Act as if the land did not belong to him, while freedom of contract, until recent years one of the most cherished principles of our law, is arbitrarily interfered with. The chief alterations made by ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... Bristow, in a report that fairly sizzled with criticism of Southern Pacific and Pacific Mail Steamship Company methods, recommended that the government line be established. When Pacific freight rates were arbitrarily raised just before the Legislature convened, shippers of the State appealed, not to Senator Perkins or to Senator Flint, but to Senator Bristow from interior Kansas, asking that he concern himself with having government ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... And as for the non-Roman parts, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, it goes without saying that the county never was, and is not to this day, a true unit. The central and much of the west of England is the same. That is, the shires are cut as their name implies, somewhat arbitrarily, from the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... dimensions. But the Gaussian method can be applied also to a continuum of three, four or more dimensions. If, for instance, a continuum of four dimensions be supposed available, we may represent it in the following way. With every point of the continuum, we associate arbitrarily four numbers, x[1], x[2], x[3], x[4], which are known as " co-ordinates." Adjacent points correspond to adjacent values of the coordinates. If a distance ds is associated with the adjacent points P and P1, this distance being measurable and well defined from ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... inland city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France, arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port, can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved articles de Paris. The site now under our consideration, however, means to have no such one-sided success. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Nagen to be a gambler. As he was now by promotion of service Nagen's superior officer, and a near relative of the Brescian commandant, who would be induced to justify his steps, his object was to reach and arbitrarily place himself over Nagen, as if upon a special mission, and to get the lead of the expedition. For that purpose he struck somewhat higher above the Swiss borders than Karl and Wilfrid, and gained a district in the mountains above the vale, perfectly familiar to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... than love one when fortune had enabled her to do so much for him." So she had simply approved of his declaration, down by the run, of affection for which she was not yet ready, and she approved of him all the more fondly because he did not passionately and arbitrarily demand or expect that she should feel as he did, in return. "I didn't," she had said to herself a score of times, "and that was enough ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... have been known, the history of all absolute kingdoms will inform us; and since, as Aristotle observes, [Greek: hae oikonomikae monarchia], the government of a family is naturally monarchical, it is, like other monarchies, too often arbitrarily administered. The regal and parental tyrant differ only in the extent of their dominions, and the number of their slaves. The same passions cause the same miseries; except that seldom any prince, however despotick, has so far shaken ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Schmitz-Dumont, Acting State Mining Engineer; and J.F. de Beer, first special Judicial Commissioner, Johannesburg. Mr. Thos. Hugo, the General Manager of the National Bank, was appointed financial adviser, and certain advisory members were arbitrarily selected by the Government. The complete exclusion of all those who had had any direct or indirect association with the late Reform movement or with those in any way connected with it strengthened the conviction that the Government designed the Commission ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... for the Investigation of Natal Day Influences upon Character," he said, "does not seek to build up a theory upon isolated and arbitrarily selected examples. We deal with the subject scientifically. To continue with this date, February 29th. After several cases similar to those I have recounted had come to our notice, we made out a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... in the district, but it is useless for grey-haired men to apply; they cannot do the amount required, and as they are not permitted to work at a lower rate of wages than their fellows, the means of getting a living are arbitrarily taken out of their hands. As a consequence of these Trades-Union enactments, cases are not infrequent in which workmen who have just passed middle life, or have sustained injuries, drift insensibly into vagrant habits. These habits are acquired almost without their ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... all. The government has not only assumed arbitrarily to classify the people, on the basis of property, but it has even assumed to give to some of its judges entire and absolute personal discretion in the selection of the jurors to be impaneled in criminal cases, as ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... verses are singularly complimentary to Ephesus. The threat is qualified. There is no history to show that she did not repent. But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason. Both the cases I have just mentioned are instances in point. Those "prophecies" are distinctly leveled at the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to be loved by the beings He has created. Then He would not deliberately, arbitrarily destroy a love already existing in the heart of one of them—a love thankful to Him, enthusiastically grateful for happiness bestowed ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out unscathed after the closest examination." History indeed resolved itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the assistance of numbers. Neither of the development of national life, nor of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not inessential and anecdotic. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... We shall see the spirit of conquest, or of armed propagandism, or of some systematic design upon the territorial organization of Europe, inspire and determine the foreign policy of governments. Let one or other of these impulses prevail, and governments have disposed arbitrarily of the fate of nations. War has ever been their indispensable mode ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... through the spelling-task, it was Mat's custom to give out six hard words selected according to his judgment—as a final test; but he did not always confine himself to that. Sometimes he would put a number of syllables arbitrarily together, forming a most heterogeneous combination of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... indulgence of the passions which prompt those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral perceptions have thus ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... is ever the suit of doubtful or worse Prognosticks; of the Events that arbitrarily fall to Man's Lot, those things which hardly can any Prescience or Plans or Conditions of our own making amend. Thence is it that in especiall comes a serious, nay even a gloomy appearance to the Parallelogram. ...
— The Square of Sevens - An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note • E. Irenaeus Stevenson
... "the Spaniards," to the prison door, she was not even formally arrested by the Bailiff, though he was in attendance. He sat afar off at Hampstead, taking his drink—and on the box during the drive. She might be said to have been arbitrarily taken to the prison by Jackson—without a legal warrant. Had not the business been compromised, some other astute firm of attorneys might have found subject for an action ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... letter bequeathing twenty-five thousand dollars to Sadie Burch—whoever and whatever she may be—is either an attempt to make a will or a codicil to a will in a way not recognized by the statute, or it is an attempt to add to, alter or vary a will already properly executed and witnessed by arbitrarily affixing to or placing within ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... arbitrarily. They should be taken from the printed set of them worked out by Mr Cutter, and called the Cutter ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... was born at Venice about 1278, and was elected doge in 1354. For many years the government of the republic, under an oligarchy, had been arbitrarily dominated by the Council of Ten, an assembly that, after serving a special purpose for which it was created, was declared permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal. Professing to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed its liberties, disposed of its finances, overruled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... thought proper to retreat, and soon after departed from Albany. A second expedition in the Spring proved more successful, for he gained possession of the city and fort. No sooner was he in possession of the garrison, than most of the principal members absconded, upon which, their effects were arbitrarily seized and confiscated, which so highly exasperated the sufferers, that their posterity, for a long time, hurled their bitterest invectives against Leisler ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... De Cunnel send dis with his compliments. Merry Christmas, sa!' Such was the salutation arousing me on the anniversary of the birth of Him who came on earth to preach the Gospel of love and fraternity to all men—or the date which pious tradition has arbitrarily assigned to it. And Pomp appeared by the bedside of the ponderous, old-fashioned four-poster, in which I had slept, bearing a tumbler containing that very favorite Southern 'eye-opener,' a mixture of peach brandy and honey. I sipped, rose, and began dressing. The slave ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... blunt directness. When he wanted a question carried, he failed to ask for the negative votes; and soon he was called "the Boss," a title he never resented, and which usage has since fixed in our politics. So he ruled Tammany with a high hand; made nominations arbitrarily; bullied, bought, and traded; became President of the Board of Supervisors, thus holding the key to the city's financial policies; and was elected State Senator, thereby directing the granting of legislative favors to his city and ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will. There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... the letters of the different alphabets. But, in this sense, all things on earth are the same, as consisting of matter. This gives up the useful distribution into genera and species, which we form, arbitrarily indeed, for the relief of our imperfect memories. To aid the question, from whence our Indian tribes descended, some have gone into their religion, their morals, their manners, customs, habits, and physical forms. By such helps it ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... discomfort, and oppression, or walk. Railroad systems absorb short lines and control traffic over great districts; unless they are under government regulation they may adjust their time schedules and freight charges arbitrarily and impose as large a burden as the traffic will bear; the public is helpless, because there is no other suitable conveyance for passengers or freight. It is for these reasons that the United States has taken the control of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... two chapters of this study are summary chapters. The first of these is an analysis of democracy on one segment of the Pennsylvania frontier. Arbitrarily defining democracy, certain objective criteria were set up to evaluate it in the Fair Play territory. Political democracy was investigated in terms of popular sovereignty, political equality, popular consultation, and majority rule, and the political system was judged on the basis ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... thought. Letters and sounds, though often heedlessly confounded in the definitions given of vowels, consonants, &c., are, in their own nature, very different things. They address themselves to different senses; the former, to the sight; the latter, to the hearing. Yet, by a peculiar relation arbitrarily established between them, and in consequence of an almost endless variety in the combinations of either, they coincide in a most admirable manner, to effect the great object for which language was bestowed or invented; namely, to furnish a sure medium for the communication ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... treatment, is a term coined by A. McGill, indicating the presence of an excess of lime added during treatment. Though such presence would also indicate alkalinity, the term is arbitrarily used to apply to those hydrates whose presence is ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... invited then to believe,—for it is well to know at the outset exactly what is required of us,—that from the fifth century downwards every extant copy of the Gospels except five (DLT^{c}, 33, 124) exhibits a text arbitrarily interpolated in order to bring it into conformity with the Greek version of Isa. xxix. 13. On this wild hypothesis I have the ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... in these writings various intimations concurring in the person and history of Jesus, in a manner and in a degree in which passages taken from these books could not be made to concur in any person arbitrarily assumed, or in any person except him who has been the author of great changes in the affairs and opinions of mankind. Of some of these predictions the weight depends a good deal upon the concurrence. Others possess great separate strength: one in particular does this in an eminent ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... the votes of the men who are to be directed? On the same ground might the authority of all elective political and other posts be questioned. The directors have no means of compelling obedience? A mistake; they lack only the right of arbitrarily dismissing the insubordinate. But this right is not possessed by many other bodies dependent upon the discipline and the reasonable co-operation of their members; nevertheless, or rather on this very account, such ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... islands, that is to say, less than a degree to the northwest of them; that their inhabitants speak the Marquesan dialect, and that their laws, religion, and general customs are identical. The only reason why they were ever thus arbitrarily distinguished may be attributed to the singular fact, that their existence was altogether unknown to the world until the year 1791, when they were discovered by Captain Ingraham, of Boston, Massachusetts, nearly two centuries after the discovery ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... to preserve the property of the East India Company. I must confess I was very disagreeably affected with the conduct of Mr. Hutchinson, their pensioned Governor, on the succeeding day, who very unseasonably, and, as I am informed, very arbitrarily (not having the sanction of law), framed and executed a mandate to disperse the People, which, in my oppinion, with a people less prudent and temperate would have cost him his head. The Force of that body was directed ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... in conducting delicate negotiations, we have probably never had his equal in diplomatic initiative, or in the thorough preparation and presentation of cases. He did not meet occasions merely but made them, not arbitrarily but for the world's good. Settling the Alaskan boundary favorably to the United States at every point save one, crumbling with the single stroke of his Pauncefote treaty that Clayton-Bulwer rock on which Evarts, Blaine, and Frelinghuysen in turn had tried dynamite in vain, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... in Arabic. It is to me often difficult from several causes: (1) It is not pointed, nor even the Teshdied added; (2) I could not bring Golin's with me, and the dictionaries which I have are very imperfect; (3) the writer has most arbitrarily changed the details of Robinson's story, and makes it often incoherent and stupidly impossible; so that neither does the original help me much, nor can I rest on internal congruity ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... much so that it is no longer possible to determine what percentage of old native thought may still linger on in fragments here and there. In the face of all this, moral ideals, which were of common knowledge derived from the teaching of the Chinese sages, are now arbitrarily referred to the "Imperial Ancestors." Such, in particular, are loyalty and filial piety—the two virtues on which, in the Far-Eastern world, all the others rest. It is, furthermore, officially taught that, from the earliest ages, perfect concord has always subsisted in Japan between ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... thus wealth is very often supposed to consist in the quantity of money which any one possesses, as this is the medium by which all trade is conducted and a fortune made, others again regard it as of no value, as being of none by nature, but arbitrarily made so by compact; so that if those who use it should alter their sentiments, it would be worth nothing, as being of no service for any necessary purpose. Besides, he who abounds in money often wants necessary food; and it is impossible to say that any person is in good circumstances when ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... the introduction Thus saith the Lord, omitting the remnant of Israel, combining two pairs of lines and including the following couplet, effects the arrangement of octastichs to which he has throughout the book arbitrarily committed himself. ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... says this legislation does not go far enough. If he will have patience, we may perhaps be able to satisfy him a little later—one should not be hasty or try to do everything at once! Such laws are not made arbitrarily out of theories and as the result of asking "what kind of law would it be wise to make now?" They are the gradual outgrowth of earlier events. The reason why we come to you today only with an accident-insurance law is because this branch of the care of the poor and the weak was especially ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... presented this point with elaboration. The question really involved, was "whether discontented individuals, too few in number to control the administration according to the organic law, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without pretenses, break up the government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all Republics this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... presence of God and other spirits. Artificial divination is also of two kinds: the one argues from natural causes, as in the predictions of physicians relative to the event of diseases, from the tongue, pulse, etc. The second the consequence of experiments and observations arbitrarily instituted, and is mostly superstitious. The systems of divination reduceable under these heads are almost incalculable. Among these were the Augurs or those who drew their knowledge of futurity from the flight, and various other actions of birds; the Aruspices, from the entrails ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... which nearly all the vegetables useful to man, except forest trees, bud and blossom and ripen, and in which a vast majority of the ordinary operations of material life are performed. They give the rise and fall of the mercury at heights arbitrarily taken, without reference to the relations of temperature to human interests, or to any other scientific consideration than a somewhat less liability to accidental disturbance.] and when we are told that the annual fall of rain on the roof of the observatory at Paris ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... acquainted with life, and knew that Eros never mingles more arbitrarily in the intercourse of a young couple than when, after a long separation, there is anything whatever ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... suggesting themselves to him, and he will doubtless get no little pleasure and profit from attempting to answer them. As will be seen, some of the questions are not simple. If Swift has been wise he has not reduced everything arbitrarily on a horizontal scale to one-twelfth of its apparent size, capacity, weight, or strength, but has properly apportioned all. The reader may find that he will be called upon for some nice discrimination, before he can judge correctly as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hallucination. Therefore, an hallucination which, when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in reality, is different in kind from an ordinary dream. Science gains nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically different are identical. Anybody would see this if he were not arguing under ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... clashes. On the 15th Japanese cavalry and infantry began to arrive in large numbers from the South Manchuria railway zone (where they alone have the Treaty right to be) and the town of Chengchiatun was arbitrarily placed by them in ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... what it always had, it can only derive this from one cause. That cause is a second cue, tampering with the balls and interfering with them, or even more than this—a second hand taking them up and arranging them arbitrarily in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... sun—photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing, positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The sinking of the "Victoria" in 1893, was brought about by the orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So does the modern electric telegraph, contrary ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... many are the unsuspected double stars, and frequent are the parasite weeds, which the philosopher detects in the received opinions of men:—so strong is the tendency of the imagination to identify what it has long consociated. Things that have habitually, though, perhaps, accidentally and arbitrarily, been thought of in connection with each other, we are prone to regard as inseparable. The fatal brand is cast into the fire, and therefore Meleager must consume in the flames. To these conjunctions of custom ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... and Sicily, with the Spanish province of Guipuscoa and the duchy of Milan, in compensation of his abandonment of other claims. When the conditions of this treaty became known they inspired natural indignation in the minds of the people of the country which had thus been arbitrarily allotted, and the dying Charles of Spain was infuriated by this conspiracy to break up and divide his dominion. His jealousy of France would have led him to select the Austrian claimant; but the emperor's undisguised greed for a portion of ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... goodness,—how did he acquire it? Was it self-gained, did God inspire it? Choose which; then tell me, on what ground Should its possessor dare propound His claim to rise o'er us an inch? Were goodness all some man's invention, Who arbitrarily made mention What we should follow, and whence flinch,— What qualities might take the style Of right and wrong,—and had such guessing Met with as general acquiescing As graced the alphabet erewhile, When A got leave an Ox to be, No Camel (quoth the ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... equally important views about its nature. I will not presume to say what is the definition of the soul in European philosophy but in the language of popular religion it undoubtedly means that which remains when a body is arbitrarily abstracted from a human personality, without enquiring how much of that personality is thinkable without a material substratum. This popular soul includes mind, perception and desire and often no attempt is made to distinguish it from them. But in India it is so distinguished. The soul ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... individuals coperating with the entrepreneur are not, however, arbitrarily determined. The entrepreneur must bow to economic law, and give these individuals what free competition in industry sets as a proper reward for their respective services. Let us examine into this conformity to ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... Penny Crain—one of the sacred crowd. Failing that, she had found Ralph himself, and had not expected to find him; had talked with him about Nita, and had quarreled a bit with him, perhaps, over his love-sodden behavior. And the crisis had become so acute that Polly had arbitrarily called upon Clive Hammond and then had forced Ralph to ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... remark that if we can thus easily define and measure the difference of entropy between two states of the same body, the value found depends on the state arbitrarily chosen as the zero point of entropy; but this is not a very serious difficulty, and is analogous to that which occurs in the evaluation of other ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... this according to the law of the holy Olaf? or have you gone to work more arbitrarily in this than is written down ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... represented by the first group be called the classic; the second the classic-romantic; the third the romantic, and the last the bravura. I beg the reader, however, not to extend these designations beyond the boundaries of the present study; they have been chosen arbitrarily, and confusion might result if the attempt were made to apply them to any particular concert scheme. I have chosen the composers because of their broadly representative capacity. And they must stand for a numerous epigonoi whose names make up our ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... States, we find evidence of the extensive employ of "birth control" measures to prevent that normal development of family life which underlies the vigor and racial power of every nation. These preventive measures which arbitrarily control human birth had long been in use in France with results which, especially since the war, have been frequently and publicly deplored in the press, and have led the French Government to offer substantial rewards to encourage the propagation of large families. From ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... matters, too, the policy of silence or of arbitrarily forbidding the daughter to indulge in certain pleasures, coupled with the natural curiosity of the girl, tends to develop in her the habit of deceitfulness. If she is forbidden some harmless amusements she very frequently learns these diversions at the homes of her friends. The mother ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... that it was not man, nor some extrinsic mythical power which arbitrarily dictated the code of private and social life, but this presented itself to man as a spontaneous result of the world's law, relatively to the conditions possible for social life. For if, as in fact is the case, and as the progress of knowledge and, of human civilization ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... exercising the right of testimony, the bounties of His providence upon men, as it seems good in His sight." It is very true that God is the source of all the good in the world, but does He bestow it arbitrarily? If a man neglects being thrifty, and lives beyond his means, his offspring will inherit his poverty. There are economic as well as physical laws in the world, and the non-observance of them descends unto the ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... the thermal death point of most bacteria ranges from 130 deg.-140 deg. F. where the exposure is made for ten minutes which is the standard arbitrarily selected. In the spore stage resistance is greatly increased, some forms being able to withstand steam at 210 deg.-212 deg. F. from one to three hours. If dry heat is employed, 260 deg.-300 deg. F. for an hour is necessary to kill spores. Where steam is confined under ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... blind stairway went up in a kind of dark well, and once up it was a difficult matter to get down without a plunge from top to bottom, since the undefended opening was just where no one would expect to find it. Sometimes an angle was so arbitrarily walled up that you felt sure there must be a secret chamber there and furtively rapped on the wall to catch the hollow echo within. Then again you opened a door, expecting to step into the wilderness of a garden, and found ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of March had caught forty-one of the proposed Federal justices of the peace for the District of Columbia without their appointment having been fully made. Jefferson arbitrarily cut down their number to twenty-five, "having been thought too many," as he said. Among those dropped were four whose commissions had been made out and sealed by the acting Secretary of State, but had not been delivered. Madison, who became Secretary of State under Jefferson, refused ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Here we have an illustration of how music intensifies and exalts the emotions of educated men. St. Augustine's devotion "glowed within him" when he heard the music. It is for this power that the church has always employed music as a hand-maid; and those ecclesiastics who would to-day banish it arbitrarily from the church, know not what a valuable ally they are blindly repulsing in these days of religious scepticism. As Mr. Gladstone very recently remarked: "Ever since the time of St. Augustine, I might perhaps say of St. Paul, the power of music in assisting ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... without meeting the casual footpad. The town is drained; the river is embanked; our streets are paved; and we have a penny post. Almost all that is left to us of the good old times are these bars, arbitrarily set up across our thoroughfare, watched by a gentleman in a seedy suit, and a rain-beaten hat girt with tarnished golden lace. I beseech your Lordships, by your memories of infancy, by your love of our old Constitution, by ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... corrupted in form, stand each for an object. It is true that the forms of Chinese writing have long since lost their direct relationship to the pictures in which they originated. The present forms are simplified and symbolical. So free has the symbolism become that the form has been arbitrarily modified to make it possible for the writer to use freely the crude tools with which the Chinaman does his writing. These practical considerations could not have become operative, if the direct pictographic character of the symbols had not long ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... an object.' Here is the great though unconscious truth (shall we say?) or error, which underlay the early Greek philosophy. 'Ideas must have a real existence;' they are not mere forms or opinions, which may be changed arbitrarily by individuals. But the early Greek philosopher never clearly saw that true ideas were only universal facts, and that there might be error in universals as ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... the keen eyes of imagination and faith. With all its weird unearthliness, there is hardly another book in the whole range of human literature which is marked with such unswerving veracity as the "Divine Comedy." Nothing is there set down arbitrarily, out of wanton caprice or for the sake of poetic effect, but because to Dante's imagination it had so imposingly shown itself that he could not but describe it as he saw it. In reading his cantos we forget the poet, and have before us only the veracious traveller in strange realms, from whom the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... "fairy-women" and "witch-doctors," who rely upon herbs, prayers, and incantations in their treatment of the sick. In Ireland, too, are individuals reputed to be masters of the art of "setting" charms for controlling hemorrhage; their method being the repetition of certain words arbitrarily selected, whose weirdness tends to impress the patient with a sense ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... position (S477). This act broke up the "Cabal," by compelling a Catholic nobleman, who was one of its leading members, to resign. Lather, Parliament further showed its power by compelling the King to sign the Act of Habeas Corpus, 1679 (S482), which put an end to his arbitrarily throwing men into prison, and keeping them there, in order to stop their free discussion of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... transformations only by dint of the exquisite distinction and felicity of word and phrase that always characterize him. Now, with Bulwer there is none of this lovely inevitable spontaneity. He costumes his tale arbitrarily, like a stage-haberdasher, and invents a voice to deliver it withal. 'The Last Days of Pompeii' shall be mouthed out grandiloquently; the incredibilities of 'The Coming Race' shall wear the guise of naive and artless narrative; the humors of 'The Caxtons' and 'What ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the consequences of the Jacksonian Revolution. As a fact, however, they did accept these consequences and so the party system endured, but at the expense of its reality. There was no longer any fundamental difference of principle dividing Whigs from Democrats: they were divided arbitrarily on passing questions of policy, picked up at random and changing from year to year. Meanwhile a new reality was dividing the nation from top to bottom, but was dividing it in a dangerously sectional fashion, and for that reason ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... been debauched from their officers,—after property had lost its weight and consideration, along with its security,—after voluntary clubs and associations of factious and unprincipled men were substituted in the place of all the legal corporations of the kingdom arbitrarily dissolved,—after freedom had been banished from those popular meetings[25] whose sole recommendation is freedom,—after it had come to that pass that no dissent dared to appear in any of them, but at the certain price of life,—after even dissent had been anticipated, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... setting-up, and while thou art busy at it, it will rise of its own accord." And so it came to pass. Hardly had Moses put his hand upon the Tabernacle, when it stood erect, and the rumors among the people that Moses had arbitrarily put up the Tabernacle without the command of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG |
