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Coherency   Listen
noun
Coherency, Coherence  n.  
1.
A sticking or cleaving together; union of parts of the same body; cohesion.
2.
Connection or dependence, proceeding from the subordination of the parts of a thing to one principle or purpose, as in the parts of a discourse, or of a system of philosophy; a logical and orderly and consistent relation of parts; consecutiveness. "Coherence of discourse, and a direct tendency of all the parts of it to the argument in hand, are most eminently to be found in him."
3.
The state of cohering.
Synonyms: cohesion, cohesiveness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Coherency" Quotes from Famous Books



... religious idea so unadapted to the conscious demands of any order or condition of men. A few persons of redundant leisure, touched with the restlessness in belief which is characteristic of the time, may thread the mazes of "Absolute Science" until they awaken the desirable perception of it coherency and strength. We know that there is somewhere a flock awaiting the leadership of any vigorous mind which does not doubt its mission, and mocks at all question and compromise. Especially is it the duty of those who feel that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... propositions are commonly taken to be universally true, which yet seem to rest on no other grounds than that we have a strong disposition to accept them, and that they are indispensable to the systematic coherence of our beliefs,—it will be more difficult to reject a similarly supported assumption in ethics, without opening the door to universal scepticism" ('Methods of Ethics,' ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... of Wellington's Peninsular campaign, from Vimiera (1808) to Toulouse (1814), the magnificent unity of scheme preserved throughout is, perhaps, the most wonderful: the dramatic coherence, development, and final catastrophe of triumph. For this, however, readers must be referred to Napier's History; Enough here to add that one of the most decisive steps was the formation of the lines in defence of Lisbon, of which ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... this synopsis of a communication to show the kind of thing we got—though this was a very favourable specimen, both for length and for coherence. It shows that it is not just to say, as many critics say, that nothing but folly comes through. There was no folly here unless we call everything folly which does not agree with preconceived ideas. On the other hand, what proof ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle

... merchants who take Nicholas into their counting-house. Then for single characters commend me to Mrs. Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The high-life personages are far less successful. Dickens had small gift that way, and seldom ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can suggest ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... it to him from thirteen miles beyond Cornwall's Creek, where there was an immense deposit of the same kind. It was, in fact, soft asphalte, or petroleum, or bitumen, or whatever the learned may please to designate it, in a state of coherence. ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... PARAGRAPH Length Paragraphing of Speech Indentation of the Paragraph Essential Qualities of the Paragraph Unity Coherence Emphasis ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... request was accordingly granted, and the faithful Achates (Mr. Fireblood) was soon produced to bear testimony for his friend, which he did with so much becoming zeal, and went through his examination with such coherence (though he was forced to collect his evidence from the hints given him by Wild in the presence of the justice and the accusers), that, as here was direct evidence against mere presumption, our hero was most honourably acquitted, and poor Heartfree was charged ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... he flung jests at her anger, Barron felt secretly surprised to note the strides his Awdrey's mind was making. Much worth consideration appeared in her sudden attack upon the picture. She had evidently been really reflecting, with coherence and lucidity. That astonished him. But still ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... Saxony, who had been previously contracted to the Lady Catherine. Meanwhile Lord Lassenbergh, who is living disguised as a painter under Flores' roof, has gained the affections of Lucilia. In the conduct of the complicated plot no great dexterity is shown. There is a want of fusion and coherence. The reader jumbles the characters together, and would fain see at least one couple cleared off the stage in order to simplify matters. In making Earl Cassimeere marry the deformed Cornelia and share his estate with her father, the author ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various

... effect of promiscuity, however, being to hinder social evolution, wherever it was accompanied by unions having some duration, the product of such unions were likely to be superior to others, and from this primitive stage domestic evolution takes place in several directions by increase of coherence and definiteness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... a strange roaring and rushing is heard, but above which loftier tones resound with magic and exciting power. For a peculiar life breathes in these lines; an under-current runs through their apparently unconnected import, uniting them as with an electric chain, and with firmer links than any mere coherence of subjects could have effected. I experienced this myself, to the most remarkable degree, when I first made the attempt to arrange, in accordance with their period and substance, the hundreds of individual pages bearing neither date nor address, and I was soon convinced that a connecting text ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace

... when they sat side by side on the piazza settee, and when coherence and logic had become attributes to their conversation, Keith sighed, with a little catch in ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter

... gossip mind and the genius mind is the power of genius to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy, the trivial and the relevant, the true and the false. The thoughts of the gossip, so the psychologists tell us, have connection but not coherence; the thoughts of the genius have coherence and likewise connection and unity. Thus we discover that scandal-mongers are at fault in the mind more than in the heart; and that it behooves people who do not wish to have themselves voted mentally defective to draw a distinction between scandal ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... the trembling child, who could read very fairly, should yet, after such an introduction to the ways of school, fail utterly in making anything like coherence of the sentence before her. What she would have done, had she been left to herself, would have been to take the little boy in her arms and cry too. As it was, she struggled mightily with her tears, and yet she did not read to much better purpose ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... within the limits of the same tribe "are branded with everlasting infamy" (31. See an able article in the 'North British Review,' 1867, p. 395. See also Mr. W. Bagehot's articles on the Importance of Obedience and Coherence to Primitive Man, in the 'Fortnightly Review,' 1867, p. 529, and 1868, p. 457, etc.); but excite no such sentiment beyond these limits. A North-American Indian is well pleased with himself, and is honoured by others, when he scalps a man of another ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe acted in New York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... words came too rapidly for coherence and her heart would dance against her breast. "I—I'm just as happy!" Kissing her mother once on each eye, she danced across to her brother, tagging him playfully. "Lazy! I'll go to the door. Lazy! Lazy! Tra-la-la, tra-la-la!" and danced to ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... third power, that of the Hittites, grew up towards the north, chiefly perhaps in Asia Minor, but with a tendency to project itself southward into the Mesopotamian region. Upper Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, were at this time inhabited by weak tribes, each under its own chief, with no coherence, and no great military spirit. The chief of these tribes, at the time when Thothmes I. ascended the Egyptian throne, were the Rutennu in Syria, and the Nahari or Nairi in Upper Mesopotamia. The two monarchies of the south, Elam and ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... there would be intenser in an hour than in twenty years of Northampton. His studio was a huge, empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland's more luxurious ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... The tea and dry biscuits she ordered enabled her to marshal her distracted thoughts into something approaching coherence; she realised that, as she was not going back to "Dawes'," she must find a ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... a simple enough message, but as it translated itself into intelligible coherence it sent a creeping thrill of conflicting fear and triumph through her. For the words which sped across space from ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... so senseless that throughout the whole of your speech you were at variance with yourself; so that you said things which had not only no coherence with each other but which were most inconsistent with and contradictory to one another; so that there was not so much opposition between you and me as there was between you and yourself. You confessed that your stepfather had been duplicated in that enormous wickedness, yet you complained that ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... the diversity of schools and the conditions giving rise to them, which are here to be treated for the first time from the point of view of a modern history of literature, the reader will readily convince himself that the subject lacks neither coherence nor unity. It is superfluous to say that in this first attempt at a history of modern Hebrew literature, the grouping of movements and schools borrowed from the Occidental literatures is bound to have ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... 'tears,' 'blood,' 'tempest,' 'sea,' 'thunder,' 'calm,' 'morning,' 'sun,' 'joy.' No grammatical construction hitherto, but a significant sort of grouping of the separate words, as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence. My idea is that she is being exercised in the language, in the character, in order to fuller expression hereafter. Well, you would have us snowed upon with poppies till we sleep and forget these things. I, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long purely Autobiographical delineations; yet without connexion, without recognisable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of 'P.P. Clerk of this Parish.' Thus does famine of intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, order, appears to be unknown to the Professor. In all Bags ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... position of a science at all; it cannot, like the Physical Sciences, proceed by the Inductive Method: it has not the necessity of Mathematics: it does not, like Metaphysic, argue from abstract notions or from internal coherence. It is made up of scattered observations. A few of these, though they may sometimes appear to be truisms, are of the greatest value, and free from all doubt. We are conscious of them in ourselves; we observe them working in others; we are assured of them at all times. For ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... you trace the principle of solidarity actually at work in industrial life? Give cases where you have observed a real sense of human coherence and loyalty between employer and employes. How had the feeling been promoted in those cases and what effect did it have on the economic relations of the two groups? Why is the feeling of antagonism between these groups so common? Does the wages system make this ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... must unburden his heart. He told Jean all his suspicions, his arguments, his struggles, his assurance, and the history of the portrait—which had again disappeared. He spoke in short broken sentences almost without coherence—the language ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... conceived and executed idea. From the first appearance of the broken glass of fashion and mould of form, pale and worn with weeping for his father's death, and remotely suspicious of its cause, to his final struggle with Horatio for the fatal cup, there were cohesion and coherence in Mr. Fechter's view of the character. Devrient, the German actor, had, some years before in London, fluttered the theatrical doves considerably, by such changes as being seated when instructing the players, and like mild departures from established usage; but he had worn, ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens

... first conception of National law. He prepared a code for the administration of justice in his Kingdom, which was prefaced by the Ten Commandments, and ended with the Golden Rule; while in his leisure hours he gave coherence and form to the literature of the time. Taking the writings of Caedmon, Baeda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius; translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of others upon a wide ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... harmonies between cause and effect, and the proportionate agencies which characters introduced in the Drama bring to bear upon event and catastrophe, are carefully shunned,—as real life does for the most part shun them,—yet there is a latent coherence in all that, by influencing the mind, do, though indirectly, shape out the fate ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... upon me, and folded his arms, and spread his great chin upon his deer-skin apron, and nodded briskly with his deep gray eyes, surveying me in triumph. To his mind, that mill was the wonder of the world, and any argument based upon it, with or without coherence, was, like its circular saws, irresistible. And yet he thought that women can not reason! However, I did not say another word just then, but gave way to him, as behooved a child. And not only that, but ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... it's the same with this purchase. It's summer now, so I've been buying summer things—warmer materials will be wanted for autumn, so you will have to throw these away in any case... especially as they will be done for by then from their own lack of coherence if not your higher standard of luxury. Come, price them! What do you say? Two roubles twenty-five copecks! And remember the condition: if you wear these out, you will have another suit for nothing! They only do business on that system at Fedyaev's; if you've bought a thing once, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... in other words, this province is nothing more than a piece of patchwork, intersected with petty boundary lines, so that every nation is stitched in and quilted in spots, without any harmony, or coherence, or general design. The people of Louisburgh are a kind, hospitable, pleasant people, tolerably well informed for the inhabitants of so isolated a corner of the world; but a few miles further off we come upon a totally different race: a canting, covenanting, oat-eating, money-griping, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... apologizing for themselves the moment they see a woman. His idea of conversing with a girl was to perspire and tie himself into knots, making the while a strange gurgling sound like the language of some primitive tribe. If ever a remark of any coherence emerged from his tangled vocal cords it dealt with the weather, and he immediately apologized and qualified it. To such a man women are merciless, and it speedily became an article of faith with ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... greater detail and with more pungent illustrations. I found particular satisfaction in analyzing the utterances of dignitaries of the Broad-Church party, such as Farrar and Wilberforce, whose plan for rejuvenating the coherence of the Anglican Church was to reduce all its doctrine which savored of the supernatural to symbols. One of them proposed, for example, to salvage the doctrine of the Ascension by maintaining that ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... one movement in the history of the American mind which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in Transcendentalism, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... of us what we are able to receive of it in "wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of our individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As the landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements we construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object or incident ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above his head ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... truth of the Christian Religion on the fact that CHRIST was risen.... The whole system turns upon this central point; the several doctrines gather round it, they depend upon it, they grow out of it; so that without it, Christianity would have no coherence or meaning[638]." ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... dream born of her fever. She could scarcely believe that she had ever left Limasito; the climacteric weeks in New York, the trip to Topaz Gulch and the later scene in Jim Baggott's hotel had alike faded into a vague, nebulous shadow without substance or coherence, and she herself seemed drifting. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... still more unwilling to undertake the task, because, adequately to display the opinions, and fully to enforce the arguments, would require a space wholly disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the human ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermits' staves as Master Shallow. It is a wonderful thing to see the semblable coherence of his men's spirits and his: they, by observing of him, do bear themselves like foolish justices: he, by conversing with them, is turned into a justice-like serving-man: their spirits are so married in conjunction with the participation ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]

... the phrase, in love, as representing his condition in regard of her: he only knew that he worshipped her, and would be overjoyed to die for her. The youth had about as little vanity as could well consist with individual coherence; if he was vain at all, it was neither of his intellectual nor personal endowments, but of the few tunes he could play on his grandfather's pipes. He could run and swim, rare accomplishments amongst the fishermen, and was said to be the best dancer ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... borough Once an eagle used to fly, Making observations thorough From his station in the sky, And presenting the appearance Of an animated V, Like the gulls that lend coherence Unto paintings ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl

... within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense: In so much as the former comming again to take place, and be praedominant, the later followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, is such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... English gentleman who wished to remain loyal, without forfeiting his faith, was taught to see that a sovereign under the Papal curse had no longer a claim on his allegiance. If he disobeyed the Pope, he had ceased to be a member of the Church of Christ. The Papal party grew in coherence, while, opposed to them as their purpose came in view, the Protestants, who at first had been inclined to Lutheranism, adopted the deeper and sterner creed of Calvin and Geneva. The memories of the Marian cruelties revived again. They ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... leaning for five minutes at the open window, he felt a soothing effect from the air, and could think consecutively of the day's events. What had happened seemed to him incredible; it was as though he revived a mad dream, of ludicrous coherence. Since his display of rhetoric at luncheon all was downright somnambulism. What fatal power had subdued him? What extraordinary influence had guided his tongue, constrained his features? His conscious self had had no part ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... frequently lost their former preferred position. The result has been a series of radical agitations on the part of farmers determined to better their lot. These movements have manifested different degrees of coherence and intelligence, but all have had something of the same purpose and spirit, and all may justly be considered as stages of the still unfinished agrarian crusade. This book is an attempt to sketch the course and to reproduce the spirit of that crusade from ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... Mr. Coleridge supped with the writer, when his well known conversational talents were eminently displayed; so that what Pope affirmed of Bolingbroke, that "his usual conversation, taken down verbatim, from its coherence and accuracy, would have borne printing, without correction," was fully, and perhaps, more justly ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... of intellectual life and of civic administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... it advisable to take yet a further step and to lead the legions over the Rhine. He was not without connections beyond the river. the Germans at the stage of culture which they had then reached, lacked as yet any national coherence; in political distraction they—though from other causes—fell nothing short of the Celts. The Ubii (on the Sieg and Lahn), the most civilized among the German tribes, had recently been made subject and tributary by a powerful Suebian canton of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... a man of large designs, but he lacked perhaps the practical gift of embodiment. I looked upon him as a man of high poetical powers, with a great range of hopes and visions, but without the technical accomplishment which lends these their final coherence. He was fully aware of this himself, but he neither regretted it nor disguised it. The truth was that his interest in existence was so intense, that he lacked the power of self-limitation needed for an artistic success. What, however, he gave to all who came in touch with him, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... reason, that the religion of every country should have a relation to, and coherence with, the civil constitution: the Romish religion is best adapted to a despotic government, the presbyterian to a republican, and that of the church of England to a limited monarchy ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... broken country lying between this river and the Pyrenees, and now known as Catalonia, was inhabited by fierce tribes unconquered as yet by Roman or Carthaginian. Its conquest presented enormous difficulties. There was no coherence between its people; but each valley and mountain was a stronghold to be defended desperately until the last. The inhabitants, accustomed to the mountains, were hardy, active, and, vigourous, ready ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes, it was like that, he said wearily to himself—like a second-rate sketch; there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality. The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful illustration of the globe's unity, relieve the pressure on this side. Well, well; the journey would be worth ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... but the accompanying disadvantage of lowering it into a somewhat prosaic and unideal Prudentialism, nor is it saved from this by the tacking on to it, by a sort of after-thought, of the second and higher Ideal—an addition which ruins the coherence of the account without really transmuting its substance The source of our dissatisfaction with the whole theory lies deeper than in its tendency to identify the end with the maximum of enjoyment or satisfaction, or to ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... success or failure depends upon factors external to it, which establish the truth or falsehood of its claims. No such guarantee is offered by the next theory, which is known as the 'consistence' or 'coherence' theory. In order to avoid the difficulty which wrecked the 'correspondence' theory, that of making the truth of an assertion reside in an inexperienceable relation to an unattainable reality, this view ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... fact, as illustrating the tenacity and coherence of the Church of Rome, that while all Protestant endowments were thus indiscriminately swept away, no voice was raised against the retention, by the Roman Catholic clergy, of the vast possessions left to them by the old French ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... Mr. Holden, when the mise-en-scene was quite to his liking, "that a good map, and a few realistic models of the principal buildings dealt with in my discourse, give a lucidity and a coherence ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... closed the door, shutting in the wounded man, Chief Campbell and the others. Then he caught the maid sharply by the arm and shook some coherence ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... unusual want of self-command in a lady of her years, and also at the lack of real strength in one who appeared almost robust—for Mrs. Pryor hastened to allege the fatigue of her walk, the heat of the sun, etc., as reasons for her temporary indisposition; and still as, with more hurry than coherence, she again and again enumerated these causes of exhaustion, Caroline gently sought to relieve her by opening her shawl and removing her bonnet. Attentions of this sort Mrs. Pryor would not have accepted from every one. In general she recoiled from touch or close approach with a mixture ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it in ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... am come to say,' he began, standing by the mantel-shelf, as was his wont in his conferences with Mrs. Edmonstone; and he repeated the same in substance as he had said to Amy in the garden, though with less calmness and coherence, and far more warmth of expression, as if, now that she was protected by her mother's presence, he ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... he could not think. His faculties were in a whirl—he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert, while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without coherence—scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration—a speech of hers, a look, an inflection—then the whole experience suddenly lost its ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... nucleus or sun round its axis produces centrifugal force; that force, by refrigeration, increases beyond the centripetal force of gravity; in consequence rings are formed and detached from the surface, whose unequal coherence of parts mostly causes them to break into separate masses or planets, partaking of the motion of the bodies from which they have been separated, and these primaries in their turn becoming centres of gravitation and centrifugal force, throw off ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... the signs of returning coherence that he could have hugged the doctor, but he only said, "You've had enough for to-night. And you won't get out, because if you try to I'll knock you senseless in the bottom ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as the realizing energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts, not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and coherence. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... was staring at this unearthly vista, still unable to think with any coherence. I heard my name called. I turned to face Stanley and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... Maine's work, like that of most great thinkers, presents a singular coherence and intellectual elegance. It is distinguished also by an extraordinary wide range of vision. He lays under contribution with equal felicity and suggestiveness the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Latin dramatists, the laws of the Barbarians, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... changed, apparently, even in their shape and size. The press of footsteps was as thick here; and the same consideration of the suffering he had had, perplexed and terrified him. He began to fear that all this intricacy in his brain would drive him mad; and that his thoughts already lost coherence as the footprints did, and were pieced on to one another, with the same trackless involutions, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... all these questions had nothing to do with the sudden revelation in which she herself had so painful a part. These broken reflections were in her mind like the falling of snow. They whirled through the vague world of her troubled soul without consequence or coherence; all that had nothing to do with her. Her husband was no villain, and the woman—the beautiful, smiling woman, so much fairer, greater, more important than Lucy, she was no wretched, degraded creature. What was ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... drastic scepticism is reduced to complete silence. You cannot build up anything except illusion from a basis that is itself illusion. If I were not self-conscious there would be no centre or substratum or coherence or unity in any thought I had. If I were not self-conscious I should ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... for mere exclamatory purposes, now reread the fulmination of the absent partner. She scoffed, she sneered, flouted, derided, and one understood that she was including both members of the firm. Then her listener became aware that she had achieved coherence. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... force of this offer in making him punctual at the Hotel de l'Empire Longmore doubtless never exactly measured; and it was perhaps well he was vague, for he found his friend, who was on the point of leaving Paris, so distracted by procrastinating milliners and perjured lingeres that coherence had quite deserted her. "You must find Saint-Germain dreadfully dull," she nevertheless had the presence of mind to say as he was going. "Why won't you ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... rallying-point. The disaster of a single day made an end of the Prussian army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. A great part of the troops was captured by the pursuing enemy during the next few days. The regiments which preserved their coherence were too weak to make any attempt to check Napoleon's advance, and could only hope to save themselves by escaping to the fortresses ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... panic and the impulse to dash after, stayed, she forced herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty for coherence of procedure. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... before her the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to her aid and ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... therefore be responsible for the crudities of its humour. Nevertheless, even with this allowance, Marlowe must be blamed for the utter incongruity of so many scenes with high tragedy. The harmony which rules the construction of Tamburlaine, giving it a lofty coherence and consistency, is lamentably absent from ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... the first person whom they saw at Willow Lawn. Two letters had passed, both so conventionally civil, that her state of mind could not be gathered from them, but her first tones proved that coherence was more than ever wanting, and no one attempted to understand anything she said, while she enfolded Sophy in an agitated embrace, and marshalled them to the drawing-room, where the chief of the apologies were ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... it is a short step to the existence of God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had been previously defined as the 'Ens ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... art grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis with a vital happiness. For two years—day in and day out—she never flagged in her task of giving sight to the ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... where all other feature seems to have lost its stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red, devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never closes over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye never closes, so the hands never rest,—they open and grasp, as if at some palpable object ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... above is only intended to link the various speeches into coherence; it has no resemblance with the French. In the original, "Font ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... strong, and probably deeply attached to the view of their function which they learned from the battle with capitalism. It is not at all unlikely that certain favorably placed trade unions would under a socialist state become the center of coherence and government. But a guild society would inevitably find them a tough problem to deal with, for direct action would have revealed their strategic power, and some of their leaders at least would not offer up this ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... since the war that it has sprung into vastly greater efficiency. The agreement upon uniform courses of biblical study, to be followed simultaneously by many millions of pupils over the entire continent, has given a unity and coherence before unknown to the Sunday-school system; and it has resulted in extraordinary enterprise and activity on the part of competent editors and publishers to provide apparatus for the thorough study of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... had found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed to Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o'-the-wisps, without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather's taste in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day's expedition into the country, when they had missed ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... Katherine had that necessity—in part intellectual, in part practical, and common to all who possess a gift for rule—to resist the confusing importunity of detail, and to grasp intelligently the whole, which alone gives to detail coherence and purpose. Her mind was not one—perhaps unhappily—which is contented to merely play with bricks, but demands the plan of the building into which those bricks should grow. And she wanted, just now, to lay hold of the plan of the fair ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... made it on the spur of an inspired moment! They also told me that I couldn't write a fugue; that my orchestration was overloaded, and my work deficient in symmetry, repose, development and, above all, in coherence. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... downwards, and were compelled to reside in those places capable to receive them; and these were the heavenly spaces, unto which a multitude of these small bodies were hurled, and these being thus shivered fell into coherence and mutual embraces, and by this means the heaven was produced. Then a various and great multitude of atoms enjoying the same nature, as it is before asserted, being hurried aloft, did form the stars. The multitude of these exhaled bodies, having struck and broke the air in shivers, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... result is committed to accident. The actors wear what their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us how a countenance familiar to us is set off by a strange and outlandish costume. It represents no history. Such was ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... will record the deeds of the emperors, with some brief introductory remarks to make clear to those who shall read my history by what steps the Romans passed from aristocracy (or democracy) to the rule of one man, and to impart, in addition, coherence to the narrative. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio

... gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong enough to say to such a weltering sea "Peace, be still"? I dared not think. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... a character, etc. Cf. Maurice Morgann, "On the Character of Falstaff": "But it was not enough for Shakespeare to have formed his characters with the most perfect truth and coherence; it was further necessary that he should possess a wonderful facility of compressing, as it were, his own spirit into these images, and of giving alternate animation to the forms. This was not to be done from without; he must have felt every varied situation, and have spoken thro' ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... that should declare and preserve it as He Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles, her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching, the appeal to men's moral sense—all of them appeals ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... weaken the stability of national temperament? By setting up what in physics would be called a highly increased molecular activity, does it disturb not merely conservative respect for institutions, but respect for coherence and continuity of opinion and sentiment in the character of the individual himself? Is there a fluidity of character in modern democratic societies which contrasts not altogether favourably with the strong solid types of old? Are Englishmen becoming less like ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... and determinate number out of every family, though I do not think it proper to recite particularly the names of those families, that I may not take off the mind of my readers from the connexion of the historical facts, and make it hard for them to follow the coherence of my narrations; but the sum of those that went up, above the age of twelve years, of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, was four hundred and sixty-two myriads and eight thousand [6] the Levites were seventy-four; ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... but He, is educating us; that these seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries, storm following earthquake, and earthquake fire, as if the caprice of all the demons were let loose against us, have in His Mind a spiritual coherence, an organic unity and purpose (though we see it not); that sorrows do not come singly, only because He is making short work with our spirits; and because the more effect He sees produced by one blow, the more swiftly He follows it up by another; till, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... the answer rather faint, in case he should discover from another boy next morning that they were wrong; then producing a Hebrew prayer-book from his inky cotton satchel, he made a mumbling sound, with occasional enthusiastic bursts of audible coherence, for a length of time proportioned to the number of pages. Then he went to bed. After that, Esther put her grandmother to bed and curled herself up at her side. She lay awake a long time, listening to the quaint sounds emitted by her father in his study of Rashi's commentary ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company; accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in Duke Orsino of "Twelfth Night" than he has given us in any play ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... dream of another person instead of one of my own to analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is, however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their connection with ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... all this in her artless way, and with none of the coherence with which I have here written it; her face kindled, and she felt sure that she had convinced me that I was wrong, and that justice was a living person. Indeed I did wince a little; but I recovered myself immediately, and pointed out to her ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men of his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence, and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an impression of continuity, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... before I joined the regiment, to which Wood went ahead of me, I continued as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, trying to get some coherence of plan between the War Department and the Navy Department; and also being used by Wood to finish getting the equipment for the regiment. As regards finding out what the plans of the War Department were, the task was simple. They had no plans. Even ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... dearly have loved to put in a word, but she knew not what to say. Life at Bloomington supplied no parallel to the rapidity of existence in New York that evening. She was aware of statements being made in language which rang familiarly in her ears, but they had no more coherence in her clogged understanding than the gabble ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... the nature of self, and is liberated [Footnote ref 2]. The Nyaya-Vais'e@sika is a pluralistic system which neither tries to reduce the diversity of experience to any universal principle, nor dismisses patent facts of experience on the strength of the demands of the logical coherence of mere abstract thought. The entities it admits are taken directly from experience. The underlying principle is that at the root of each kind of perception there must be something to which the perception is due. It classified the percepts and concepts of experience ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... atavism make it probable that the coherence of the petals has originally arisen by the same method, but by action in the opposite direction. The direct proof of this conclusion is afforded by a curious observation, made by Vilmorin upon the bright and large-flowered garden-poppy, Papaver bracteatum. Like all poppies it has four petals, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... seems more a discoverer of Beauty than an imparter of it. But these discoveries, these devotions to aims, these struggles toward the absolute, do not these in themselves, impart something, if not all, of their own unity and coherence—which is not received, as such, at first, nor is foremost in their expression. It must be remembered that "truth" was what Emerson was after—not strength of outline, or even beauty except in so far as they might reveal themselves, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... new hat, and to the young girl the coherence was perfectly plain. Miss Tibbs looked at "it" severely. It would not do for a protegee ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... propositions can be deduced. It is also not difficult, by dropping or altering some of these axioms, to obtain a more general or a different geometry, having, from the point of view of pure mathematics, the same logical coherence and the same title to respect as the more familiar Euclidean geometry. The Euclidean geometry itself is true perhaps of actual space (though this is doubtful), but certainly of an infinite number of purely arithmetical systems, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... may be placed many sets of inquiries, each of them extensive—(a) The degree of generality of the ideas; (b) the degree of abstractness of the ideas; (c) the degree of definiteness of the ideas; (d) the degree of coherence of the ideas; (e) the extent to which there have been developed such notions as those of class, of cause, of uniformity, of law, of truth. Many conceptions which have become so familiar to us ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... abstract of the contents of these fascinating volumes, for everybody is reading them. Most are probably wishing for more personal details, especially of the American life; but the editorial work is so deftly and delicately done, and "the story of an intellectual life marked by rare coherence and unity" is so well arranged to tell itself and make its impression, that we may thankfully accept what has been given us, though the desired "fulness of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... called on Pope, who inquired from him, what news there was in the learned world, and what new pieces were brought to light? The visiter replied, that there was little or nothing worthy notice; that there was, indeed, a thing called an Essay on Man, shocking poetry, insufferable philosophy, no coherence, no connexion. Pope could not repress his indignation, and instantly avowed himself the author. This was like a clap of thunder to the mistaken bard, who took up his hat and never ventured to show his unlucky face there again." It is generally supposed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... the coherence among the systems of modern theology, we may observe, that the doctrine of absolute decrees has ever been intimately connected with the enthusiastic spirit, as that doctrine affords the highest subject of joy, triumph, and security ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... conversation lost its coherence in Pop's ears. It was mingled with a curious buzzing and a dizziness that made him grip his chair lest it pitch him to the floor. Chills, in which his bones were a mere rattlebox, alternated with little rushes of prairie fire across his skin. Throes ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... methods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another—that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in the mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that these experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance. The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. The inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the possibility of ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... copied in his own handwriting. On the other hand, when Bach, at the age of nineteen, became organist at Arnstadt, he found Luebeck within easy distance, and there, in October 1705, he went to hear Buxtehude, whose organ works show so close an affinity to Bach's style that only their lack of coherence as wholes reveals to the attentive listener that with all their nobility they are not by Bach himself. Bach's enthusiasm for Buxtehude caused him to outstay his leave by three months, and this, together with his [v.03 p.0125] habit of astonishing the congregation by the way ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... bravery on the enemy's part, but the discipline of the little civilised division with its strong coherence was too much for the loose dashes, ambushes, and traps ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn

... two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong's qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among the air-pilots of England. For many years he has been ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... got home she endeavoured to collect her thoughts, and took up a pen in order to address those dear parents, whom, spite of her errors, she still loved with the utmost tenderness, but vain was every effort to write with the least coherence; her tears fell so fast they almost blinded her; and as she proceeded to describe her unhappy situation, she became so agitated that she was obliged to give over the attempt and retire to bed, where, overcome with the fatigue her mind had ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... was not, it must be admitted, a very efficient force. It lacked coherence and training; it was deficient both in arms and in discipline; it could not be kept together for long campaigns. The Kings, therefore, from the first supplemented it by means of a band of personal followers, a bodyguard of professional warriors, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... the question is unnecessary; for the new system ignores romance, which is the truth of nature not of fact. A pre-Raphaelite story, taken from real life, might be romantic in its incidents and striking in its catastrophe; but it would want coherence in the design, and therefore produce no sustained emotion; and its characters being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite more disgust than interest. The drama?—but there the new theory of art becomes too ridiculous: a tragedy on such a plan would be received with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various

... by Leoni had had its effect, giving the sufferer temporary energy and to some extent restoring the reeling senses, so that by the time the al fresco surgery was at an end, Francis began to speak with a fair amount of coherence. ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn

... three. I conclude, therefore, that they are all three of the same nature. This is what a consideration of the superstitions of savages would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes fragmentary, and the attributes of these various orders of supernatural beings begin to be differentiated. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland



Words linked to "Coherency" :   coherent, incoherence, continuity, cohere, connectedness, connection



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