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Complex   Listen
adjective
Complex  adj.  
1.
Composed of two or more parts; composite; not simple; as, a complex being; a complex idea. "Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such as beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe."
2.
Involving many parts; complicated; intricate. "When the actual motions of the heavens are calculated in the best possible way, the process is difficult and complex."
Complex fraction. See Fraction.
Complex number (Math.), in the theory of numbers, an expression of the form a + b*sqrt(-1), when a and b are ordinary integers.
Synonyms: See Intricate.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books



... or aspect of savage religion. I shall not trench on the sphere of the higher religions, not only because my knowledge of them is for the most part very slight, but also because I believe that a searching study of the higher and more complex religions should be postponed till we have acquired an accurate knowledge of the lower and simpler. For a similar reason the study of inorganic chemistry naturally precedes the study of organic chemistry, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... the highly complex system of astronomy ascribed to Claudius Ptolemy, which assumed that the earth was the centre of a sphere which carried the heavenly bodies along in its daily revolution, accounted for the revolutions of the sun and moon by supposing ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... individualities meet and become one to some extent in our common experience of this great universe, which is at that same time the expression of God. The real universe must be infinitely greater and more complex than the one which is apparent to our physical senses. This becomes probable, even on material grounds, the moment we begin to examine into the nature of sense perception. The ear is constituted to hear just so many sounds; beyond that limit at either end of the scale ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... of these essays is to trace back to its source, or to some of its sources—for the soul of France is far too complex to be measured by one system—the spirit of gallantry which inspired the young French officers at the beginning of the war. We cannot examine too minutely, or with too reverent an enthusiasm, the effort of our great ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... Church. Had a real estate and insurance office and drug store on W. Broad St. facing the present Brown's Hardware at 100 W. Broad St. Note windmill. On site of the George Mason Square complex, now under construction. (See p. 89 for more ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart

... quite large enough to stand the pressure of political disappointment nor quite elastic enough to develop rapidly under the tremendous urgency of absolutely new requirements. It is in evidence that more than once in the management of the complex and serious difficulties of the State Department during the years of war, Seward lost his head. It is also on record that the wise-minded and fair-minded President was able to supply certain serious gaps and deficiencies in the direction of the work of the Department, and further that ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam

... rapid and easy toilet, Mrs. Delarayne had faced herself with this determined and defiant expression on her features, resolved to overcome every difficulty and every undesirable innovation of time. Slowly the complex equipment had grown up. Now it was so extensive, that it required all the dexterity and knowledge that habit alone can impart, in order to master and understand ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism", "the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The shortcomings ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... breakfast near a stream of this kind, under the shade of a large group of the pandanus. This was evidently a favourite haunt of the natives, who had been feeding upon the almonds which this tree contains in its large complex fruit, and to give a relish to their repast had mingled with it roasted unios, or fresh-water mussels, which the stream produced in abundance. The remains of some old spears were also lying about, but the natives themselves were ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... altogether, but compromise matters by putting on, in addition to their long gown, a European hat and shoes, which, if anything, looks worse still. The ladies have not yet adopted the European style which, perhaps, they have sense enough to see, is far more complex and inconvenient than their own. Of this much I am certain that no mysterious production of Worth would be more becoming, or suit them better than their own ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... third case, intermediate between the two preceding, and rather more complex, which I shall at present merely indicate, but the importance of which in political economy is extremely great. There are commodities which can be multiplied to an indefinite extent by labor and expenditure, but not by a fixed amount of labor and expenditure. Only a limited quantity ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... who talked vaguely of the spirit world,—all these voices were at the mind of the boy pleading, insisting, demanding, not that Christ's simple message that men love one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be accepted, but that their own complex interpretation of his word be taken to the end that souls ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... nomadic, builds houses of stone and mortar, terrace upon terrace,—walled and fortressed against the enemy,—when he has fields of growing grain, textile fabrics, decorated pottery, a government that is a republic, a priesthood trained in complex ritual, a well stocked pantheon, a certain understanding of astronomy and psychic phenomena, he may withal be called barbarian, even as was Abraham on Moriah barbaric when the altar of his god called for sacrifice of his only son. But a people of ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan

... spite of all his faults and failings, in spite of the strange tissue of complex aims and motives which swayed his course, Lodovico Sforza was a man of great ideas and splendid capacities, a prince who was in many respects distinctly in advance of his age. His wise and beneficial schemes for the encouragement of agriculture and the good of his poorer subjects, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... the 1993 constitutional revision that furthered devolution into a federal state, there are now three levels of government (federal, regional, and linguistic community) with a complex division of responsibilities; this reality leaves six governments each with its own legislative assembly; for other acronyms of the listed parties see ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... forms of vassalage. To be the servant of love, to have offended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of reconciliation—the religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets just there, as in Rousseau, the delicacies of the earthly love. Here, under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them. ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... Studying is evidently a complex and taxing kind of work. Even though the above discussions reveal the main factors in the study of adults, what light does it throw upon the work of children? Is their study to contain these factors also? The first of these two questions, therefore, is, Can children from six ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... be true, and the people in general will accept them. Experience teaches that the public will accept, without question, almost any maxim or problem, provided it be formulated in such a manner as to convey some specific meaning that does not demand reflection or complex examination. For the same reason no small portion of the public will reject anything that at first sight seems to exceed the measure of their understanding. Knaves and charlatans, knowing this, impose on the public by flattering their intelligence, that they may accomplish their own ambitious ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... work to get up his Forsytes therein before attacking this; otherwise he may risk some discouragement from the plunge into so numerous a clan, known for the most part only by Christian names, with their complex relationships and the mass of bygone happenings that unites or separates them. This stage of the tribal history is called In Chancery (HEINEMANN), chiefly from the state of suspended animation experienced by the now middle-aged Soames ("Man of Property") with regard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various

... tries your wrists, you will find, to manipulate them so, yet all the most graceful exercises have this for a basis. Soon you will gain the mastery of heavier implements than you begin with, and will understand how yonder slight youth has learned to handle his two heavy clubs in complex curves that seem to you inexplicable, tracing in the air a device as swift and tangled as that woven by a swarm of gossamer flies above a brook, in the sultry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviously his pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour boy complex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which will require them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; the smartest of them will fall for ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton

... a soldier, and did service as a fighter and engineer in the wars of his time. Of high personal courage, he was a braggart and a ruffian, who used the dagger as freely as the tools of his craft. His many qualities and complex personality are revealed in his "Autobiography"—one of the most vivid and remarkable records ever penned. He began the work in 1558. In its history his account is accurate, but his testimony regarding his martial exploits ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... rich voice, an air of command, plain features, abundant gray hair, imported clothes, wonderful, keen, dark eyes overlapped by a fold of the crumpled eyelid,—a personage, a character, a life, full of complex energies and domineering good sense. With gold eye-glasses astride her high-bridged nose, knees crossed, one large, well-shod foot extended, this mother in Israel sat absorbed like a man in the daily paper, and wroth like a man at its contents. Occasionally she ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... so complex as Mr. Gladstone's requires the grasp of genius. We speak of "the duality of the human mind," but here are half a dozen spirits in one. They rule in turn, and occasionally several of them struggle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... hauled line ahead, and kept their formation throughout the day. After two days' manoeuvring the English gained the wind, and kept it in spite of all their enemy could do, and the various accounts of the action certainly give the impression that the evolutions of the English were smarter and more complex than those of the Dutch. It is true that about the middle of the action one of the new signals, that for the rear to tack first, threw the fleet into some confusion, and that later the van and centre changed places; still, till almost the end, the duke, or rather Penn, ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... other in his copy, shows that he does not enjoy those relations in the original—that is to say, that all appreciation of noble design (which is based on the most exquisite relations of magnitude) is impossible to him. To give him habits of mathematical accuracy in transference of the outline of complex form, is therefore among the first, and even among the most important, means of educating his taste. A student who can fix with precision the cardinal points of a bird's wing, extended in any fixed position, and can ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... furnaces, the construction of a new spur to the little railway which bound the old plant together with its shining steel rails. There were questions of supplies and shipping and bank credits to face, the vast and complex problems of the complete new munition works, to be built out of town and involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbers of employees. He scrawled figures and added them. Even with the size of the foreign contract their magnitude startled him. He leaned back, his mouth compressed, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... to be at that moment bad policy. They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the Union in 1851, she would go alone and the solidarity of the South would be broken. They were not lacking in sectional patriotism, but their conception of the best solution of the complex problem differed from that advocated by Rhett. Their position was summed up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede now is to secede from the South as well as from the Union." On the basis of this belief they defeated Rhett and put ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... probably nowhere in the world are the intellectual depths of a German symphony and the passionate declamation of an Italian recitative more thoroughly appreciated. This is the natural musical exposition of our complex and various life. This wondrous variety, which indicates possibilities not yet revealed, pleases us without being always clear to our feelings and intellect. Still, we shall not ask, with the Frenchman, "Sonate, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... of social organisation appears to be comparable, not so much to the process of organic development, as to the synthesis of the chemist, by which independent elements are gradually built up into complex aggregations—in which each element retains an independent individuality, though held in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... matter of fact, I do believe that to be the case," said the Chemist earnestly. "I believe that every particle of matter in our universe contains within it an equally complex and complete a universe, which to its inhabitants seems as large as ours. I think, also that the whole realm of our interplanetary space, our solar system and all the remote stars of the heavens are contained within the atom of some other universe ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... rolling green hills were seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere complex of buildings that housed the ...
— A Filbert Is a Nut • Rick Raphael

... demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... Russian letters, Ivan Turgenef is the most complex figure. Nay, with the exception of Shakespeare he is perhaps the most complex figure in all literature. He is universal, he is provincial; he is pathetic, he is sneering; he is tender, he is merciless; he is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... The philosophical group throw light on Campanella's relation to his predecessors and his antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian scholasticism of the middle ages. They furthermore explain his conception of the universe as a complex animated organism, his conviction that true knowledge can only be gained by the interrogation of nature, his doctrine of human life and action, and his judgment of the age in which he lived. The political sonnets fall into two groups— those which ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... horses of Elberfeld, so greatly extolled and so much discussed in their day, are not in the same field with Lola. And yet I am convinced that it is not a dream. It is another kind of psychological reality, but it is a reality probably too complex to be reduced to a single formula. Let us then try ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... the Salmon River lies just above the twin glaciers. Scenically, these are by far the more impressive, and they present a more complex engineering problem; yet the canon itself was the real strategic point in the struggle between the railroad-builders. The floor of the valley immediately above Garfield glacier, though several miles ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... represented by the nucleus (the point, unity) of its germinal cell; then it takes the vegetable form—a radicle, crowned by two cotyledons (duality); afterwards it becomes a fish (multiplicity), which is successively transformed into a batrachian, then a bird, afterwards assuming more and more complex animal forms, until, about the third month of foetal life, it appears in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... the brink, and looking sheer To where the slope ceased in the level stretch Of country, I sat down to lay my head Backwards into a single ivy-bush Complex of leaf. I lay there till the wind Blew to me, from a church seen miles away, Half ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... factors of a productive and progressive civilization—food, raw materials, machinery, fuel, transport, finance, and adequate supplies of skilled labor. The services which countries near or distant rendered to one another were becoming constantly more numerous, more complex, and more urgent. The obstructions and stoppages of war has driven home the lesson painfully to the inhabitants of every European country, belligerent or neutral. What lesson? That we have erred in permitting ourselves to grow dependent on the industry, ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson

... unsightly view of crossing legs, how he arranged hands, arms, shoulders, legs, head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. He repeated his illustration again and again, Susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. She had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. When he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. But it was only after more than an hour's practice that she moved him ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... foppish sense of propriety. Between them these portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time; and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we try ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... this in time," observed Monte Cristo; "you know that human inventions march from the complex to the simple, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the future. That vision revealed border warfare, kindred converted into enemies, onerous taxes, death on the field and in the hospital, and conscription to maintain opposing forces. "It will then appear that the question of dissolving the Union is a complex question; that it embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand and slavery be removed by gradual, voluntary effort, and with compensation, or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation. We ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... nature, thus stated, the evolutionists go on to infer genealogy, the birth descent of the larger from the smaller, and of the more complex from the simpler forms, as the only scientific explanation. But it is by no means the only scientific explanation of the order of nature. The best naturalists, from Moses to Agassiz, have regarded the order of nature as the development of the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... Burgess and Miss Dorothy Stanbury. It is rather hard upon readers that they should be thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence, to the preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the nature of a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards its close. In this little history there are, we fear, three or four more to come. We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh Stanbury's treachery, or death,—or the possibility that he after ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... be as cynical as you please," I muttered, with my hands pressed over my eyes. "I am not responsible for the complex nature of the human brain, nor can I simplify it. I know what I am going to do now. Having secured the work, I am going to gain Lucia too, if it is in the power of any man—whether, as you put it, her virtue, or her health, or her inclination, or the whole lot together, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... Professor Benjamin Pierce, of Harvard, and it was satisfactorily demonstrated that the stability of a system of actual rings of solid matter required so nice an adjustment of so many narrow rings as to render the system far more complex than even Laplace had supposed. 'A stable formation can,' he said, 'be nothing other than a very great number of separate narrow rigid rings, each revolving with its proper relative velocity.' As was well remarked by the late Professor Nichol, 'If this arrangement or anything ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... complex mechanism. Each element is alone a fitting subject for a lifetime's study. Do not lose sight of the whole in the study ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton

... and these last had by degrees, as suited their convenience but without perceiving it, gradually discovered in him every attribute, good, bad, or indifferent, which they found in themselves, thus ascribing to him a nature of a highly complex and most extraordinarily inconsistent kind, less that of a God than of a demon. To them he was still a great shape like a man, but a shape to be loved as well as feared; a God of peace who patronized ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... magazine, it is necessary to visit three or four libraries. A record has been kept as to where the individual volumes are, but as useful as this information might be for those working in the same or in a kindred field it has been found too complex to be indicated in the list of magazines given in Part V.[15] The material here included is based on a personal examination of about three hundred volumes representing one ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it required a complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity. That the present was not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days' futile labor upon it. Mr. Shackford had been killed—either with malice prepense or on the spur of the moment—for his money. The killing ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Rufus produced a huge complex knife, out of the depths of which a pair of scissors burst on touching a spring. Mrs. Payson cut off the address, and placed the photograph in her pocket-book. "Now," she said, "Sally will be happy, and no harm ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... them manfully, must shoulder them and stand up and walk. These problems are the mothers of progress and instead of trying to turn from them or to dodge them, we should rejoice because we live at a time when we can help in the solution of such complex problems, whose results will have such far reaching and lasting effect upon the social and economic life of ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards

... remedies given in this book were largely for the diseases of the day. Physicians and parsons, lords and ladies, combined to furnish complex and elaborate prescriptions and perfumes to cure and avert the plague; and the list includes one plague-cure that the Lord Mayor had from the Queen, and I may add that it is a particularly unpleasant and revolting one. A ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... complex ways of life His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled; And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife, Ignored the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... things, and conveyed their intelligence to him with no qualified fidelity. The arrival of Colonel Colleton and his daughter had been made known to him within a few hours after its occurrence, and the feelings of the outlaw were of a nature the most complex and contradictory. Secure within his den, the intricacies of which were scarcely known to any but himself, he did not study to restrain those emotions which had prompted him to so much unjustifiable outrage. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... of March he submitted his modified plan to the adjutant-general of the army. [Footnote: Id., p. 744.] It had grown more complex with the passage of time. The eastern line of the department had been moved forward so as to bring the South Branch of the Potomac and the Cow-pasture branch of the James River under Rosecrans's command. He now planned four separate columns. The first was to move ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... studied that complex question very earnestly and for some time, and to his mind it had resolved itself to this: not how to suppress vagrancy, but how to make of the vagrant an honest and useful citizen. Repressive laws were easily passed, but it appeared to him that the only result achieved by them was ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... worthy of that high name,—surely to him, as to every living man, in every conceivable situation short of the Kingdom of the Dead—there is something possible; some plan of action other than that of standing mildly, with crossed arms, till he and we—sink? Complex as his situation is, he, of all Governors now extant among these distracted Nations, has, as I compute, by far the greatest possibilities. The Captains, actual or potential, are there, and the million Captainless: and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... so inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there's no escaping. Many persons of to-day are in the same mental state as one Mr. Boggs, told of in a magazine story, a rural gentleman ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its greater force, plasticity, and freedom. The Spenserian stanza, again, is a new and original metre peculiar to our literature; though it is possible that but for the complex structures of Italian lyric verse, it might not have been fashioned for the 'Faery Queen.' Lastly, the so-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is in no way related to Italian metre. Therefore ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... a branch of anthropology, the great science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and searches after the conditions which have determined his presence in the world. And anthropology is a section of zoology, which again is the animal half of biology—the science of ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... be either complex or simple in design, that is to say, each tool may form a complete design with enclosing border, as the lower ones on page 323, or it may be only one element of a design, as at fig. 100. Lines may be run with a fillet (see fig. 88), or made with ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... Posterity is apt to regard the women whom poets have sung as chance pegs on which they hung their garlands; but Mrs. Anerton's mind was like some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle's imagination had rooted itself and flowered. Danyers began to see how many threads of his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then I refuse to respect him. A man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function only in this complex world. Some, indeed many, of the greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also, and have not been ashamed of the double role. To read the correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... so elementary. He secretly imagines that he's one of the most complex of men. But in a good many things he's as simple as a child. And I love him for it, although I believe I do like to bedevil him a little. He is dignified, and hates flippancy. So when I greet him with "Morning, old boy!" I can see that nameless little shadow ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... morning in London's City the seed of the Story was lightly sown. Within the directors' room of the Aasvogel Syndicate, Manchester House, New Broad Street, was done and hidden away a deed, simple and commonplace, which in due season was fated to yield a weighty crop of consequences complex and extraordinary. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... minutes' intelligent explanation. Pontius Pilate could have been saved his blunder by far, far, far less than five minutes of intelligent explanation. But—mark ye!—but who has ever heard five minutes of intelligent explanation? The complex interwoven mesh of life constantly, eternally, prevents people from giving intelligent explanations. You sit in the theatre, and you say to yourself: 'Well, I could mount the stage, and in a short talk to these people I could anticipate a further continuation of the drama.' Yes, you could; but ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... all foods are complex substances, and they differ from one another in what is known as their value, which is measured by the work the food does in the body either as a tissue builder or as a producer of energy. However, in considering food value, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... guard, more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile projector—a projector whose magazine exploded at the touch of that frightful field of force, liberating instantaneously its thousands upon thousands of kilowatt-hours of stored-up energy. Through the delicately adjusted, complex mechanisms the destroying beams tore. At their touch armatures burned out, high-tension leads volatilized in crashing, high-voltage sparks, masses of metal smoked and burned in the path of vast forces now seeking the easiest path to neutralization, ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... This deed of hers was an act of devotion great as death. I knew it from experience consonant to Ottilia's character; but could a princess, hereditary, and bound in the league of governing princes, dare so to brave her condition? Complex of mind, simplest in character, the uncontrollable nobility of her spirit was no sooner recognized by me than I was shocked throughout by a sudden light, contrasting me appallingly with this supreme of women, who swept the earth aside for truth. I had never before received ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... was complex where Macdonald's was simple. John A. was as great a Canadian as Laurier; but in the simpler times in which he lived he had less cause to be puzzled by the web of fate and of political cross-currents at home and abroad, even though he was immensely more ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... quite well, Rosa Tilofsky Oswald says that Hainfeld bores him to death and that he shall get a friend to invite him somewhere. Nothing will induce him to spend the whole holidays here. His name for Ada is: "Country Simplicity." If he only knew how much she knows. Rosa T. he calls a "Pimple Complex" because she has two or three pimples. Oswald has some fault to find with every girl he comes across. He says of Dora: She is a green frog, for she always looks so pale and has cold hands, and he says of ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl

... rare imagination. Above all, he escapes the rhetoric of the schools. His apprehension of character is that of sympathetic genius. He divines the emotions, especially in those souls made melancholy by sorrow; uneasy, complex, feverish souls; them that hide their griefs, and souls saturated with the ennuis of existence—to all he is interpreter and consoler. He has pictured the Weltschmerz of his age; and without morbid self-enjoyment. A noble soul, an elevating example to those artists who ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... is of the most complex nature, and the engineers who have studied it have not been able to come to an agreement except as regards a small number of points. It may even be said that unanimity exists upon but a single ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... said, "although we have simplified our lives a great deal from what they were, and have got rid of many conventionalities and many sham wants, which used to give our forefathers much trouble, yet our life is too complex for me to tell you in detail by means of words how it is arranged; you must find that out by living amongst us. It is true that I can better tell you what we don't do, than what we ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... eye takes in only this impression of a great city over a green abyss, then the complex scene begins to define itself. All around are the outer lines of ramparts, walls beyond walls, their crenellations climbing the heights, their angle fortresses dominating the precipices. Almost on a level with us ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... profound, more subtle, than either your spoken Word. or, your written, your printed Thought. You were infinitely better than the Very Best that you ever did! High Praise, but True! Your nature was strangely Complex: ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley

... statements in a compound or complex sentence are called clauses. In a complex sentence the independent statement is called the main clause and the dependent statement ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge

... and West would have gone had they not been hampered by the depression after 1857 cannot be stated. These regions had suffered most from the panic, since in them railroads and banks, factories and cities, and all the agents of a complex industrial organization had been most active. The industrial disturbance had disarranged for the time the elaborate Northern system. The simpler South, with its staple crops, its rural population, and its few railways, had suffered less. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... false. Savage peoples can never understand our philosophy, our complex springs of action. They may ape our manners, wear our ornaments, and seek our company, but their souls remain indifferent. They laugh when we are stolid. They weep when we are unmoved. Their gods and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... new, so complex and artificial, was to be consolidated, in the midst of difficulties at home, and of dangers abroad. The constitution had been adopted only upon convictions of absolute necessity, and with evanescent dispositions of compromise. By nearly half of the people it was thought too feeble to sustain ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place, out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds! How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds—the ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the subterranean tombs at Perugia; ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... underground dwellings of the land—had struck its roots in the popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the Vius of Melanesia, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... briskly out toward a certain quarter of the town, a complex of narrow streets and little houses with stuffy rooms, where glasses are filled and emptied freely, and men sit with half-intoxicated women on their knees, ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski

... erroneous assertion of the allness of God; but as the whole subject of the reality of evil will come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our members"—whence come the wrongful desires and harmful passions of whose power ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... engineers to the directors of the Western Railroad show an exceedingly thorough appreciation of the complex problem presented to them, and a much better understanding of the principles involved in establishing the route than seems to have been shown in many far more recent works. In these early reports made in 1836 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various

... said to depend measurably upon the music, or the use to which the band is to be put. Neither in instruments nor in numbers is there absolute identity between a dramatic and a symphonic orchestra. The apparatus of the former is generally much more varied and complex, because of the vast development of variety in dramatic ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... more in the after-struggle for existence, the feeble-minded find themselves the butts of their fellows, and the "inferiority complex" thus developed tends to make them sink lower in the scale both in ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews

... the smaller creature, greater by position, to whom she was going for her chance. He alluded to his experience of the earl's kindness in relation to himself, from a belief in his 'honesty'; dotted outlines of her husband's complex character, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... operation. The human body is made capable of taking raw material of most varied kinds and transforming it into nutriment capable of being absorbed by the system and made over into cell tissue. It will be worth while to indicate the steps of this complex process. ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... and with the advice and consent of the Senate, from among persons who have— (A) extensive executive level leadership and management experience in the public or private sector; (B) strong leadership skills; (C) a demonstrated ability to manage large and complex organizations; and (D) a proven record in achieving positive operational results; (2) enter into an annual performance agreement with the Secretary that shall set forth measurable individual and organizational goals; and (3) be subject to an annual performance evaluation by the Secretary, ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives

... somewhat complex, and in order to facilitate debate, I propose that we first occupy ourselves only with ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various

... the prospect's mental conclusion that it is better to buy than not to buy; better to accept than to refuse. The process of securing decision is not complex; it is very simple. As has been said, the salesman needs only to weigh before the mind's eye of the prospect the favorable and unfavorable ideas of the proposal. Any weighing of two mental images always results in a judgment as to which ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins

... self-interest. This head may be compared to a disoblezeance; for there is but one seat in it, and that is not the seat {41}of understanding: yet it is wonderful how much more rapidly this will move in the high road of preferment than one of your thinking, feeling, complex, English heads, in which honour, integrity, and reason, make such a pother, that no step can be taken without consulting them. This head, if I may be allowed to speak with an Irish accent, was a long ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens

... ruled at Tiryns and Mycenae are known to us by their remains. The palace of Tiryns occupied the entire southern end of the citadel, within the massive walls above described. Its ruins were uncovered in 1884- 85. The plan and the lower portions of the walls of an extensive complex of gateways, open courts, and closed rooms were thus revealed. There are remains of a similar building at Mycenae, but less well preserved, while the citadels of Athens and Troy present still more scanty traces of an analogous kind. The walls of the Tirynthian palace were not built of gigantic ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... wide modification to suit it to specific uses. The questions asked may require but a short and simple answer, such as can be given by a primary pupil. They may also require a long and complex answer which will test the powers of the most advanced student. The questions may be detailed and searching, covering every point of the lesson, as when we are testing preparation. They may deal only with certain related truths, as when we "develop" ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... soon after that, leaving her still in her chair, swathed in furs, her round anxious face bent forward in thought. He had rarely seen her so troubled, so uncertain of her next move, and he surmised, knowing her, that her emotions were a complex of anxiety for himself with Elizabeth, of pity for David, and of the memory of Dick ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... "What they need is an expert repair technician—a man who knows how to build and repair complex research instruments. He doesn't have to know anything about the purpose of the team itself, all he has to do is keep ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett

... finished, there came the laborious work of installing the power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the circuits to the relays—a thousand complex circuits. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... the cruelties and the horrible torture complex of the young male, they had once burned a cat alive, and the passion of their father and their cries under flaying had beat about in her brain for weeks after. Jealousies, each of the other, burned fiercely, and, aged three, they scratched blood from one another ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one reason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found in crow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... Lockhart's—as you were pretty sure to do, as Henson knew—you are told of the sale only to the American. Depend upon it, that American was Henson himself or somebody in his pay. David, that man is too cunning, too complex. And some of these days it is ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... group I have seen less genuine lack of money than fretful stupidity which was expressed in poor management. A lack of imagination and resourcefulness often paves the way to tragedy. We are living in a fascinating age, but under a complex economy that makes many demands on our spirit of pioneering ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... or Analgesin, is a complex benzene derivative prepared from aniline, aceto-acetic ether, and methyl iodide. It is in colourless, inodorous, scaly crystals, which have a bitter taste. It is soluble in its ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... care much about the human minds with which they were paired for the journey. The Partners seemed to take the attitude that human minds were complex and fouled up beyond belief, anyhow. No Partner ever questioned the superiority of the human mind, though very few of the Partners were much ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith

... of ether of such and such a length, we see no reason why it should do so. We may, no doubt, make a still wider generalization, and say that every event in Nature is invariably preceded by some definite complex of conditions, {34} and so arrive at a general law of the Uniformity of Nature. And such a law is undoubtedly the express or implied basis of all inference in the Physical Sciences. When we have once accepted that ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... perfect gift, they may be excused for mentioning three characteristics of your writings regarding slavery, which awakened their admiration—a sensibility befitting the anguish of suffering millions; the graphic power which presents to view the complex and hideous system, stripped of all its deceitful disguises; and the moral courage that was required to encounter the monster, and drag it forth to the gaze and the ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... by a spontaneous rearrangement of the elementary particles of clay and sand? And yet the difficulties in the way of these beliefs are as nothing compared to those which you would have to overcome in believing that complex organic beings made themselves (for that is what creation comes to in scientific ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... Riverby in those days and again comparing that with the life to-day, one cannot but wonder what will be the final outcome. In a primitive society every individual knows everything about everything that he has in life; as civilization becomes more complex we become more and more specialists, more and more the thing that the economists call the "division of labour" becomes operative, and individuals go through life to-day knowing how to do but a very few of the things necessary ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... Paris, which had done little harm to his morals, but which had decidedly influenced his artistic sensibility. The brilliant city had not smirched his soul, but it had helped to form his taste. That was very modern, and very un-British. Alston had a sort of innocent love for the strange and the complex in music. He shrank from anything banal, and disliked the obvious, though his contact with French people had saved him from love of the cloudy. As he intended to make his career upon the stage, and as he was too young, and far too enthusiastic, not to be ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... character, the world is very apt to think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism; we have all seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery. She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody. She has chosen a plain one, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... no foundation. This is rather a large universe in which we live, and it is improbable that any man's thought of it at any time should be adequate. Intellectual progress means the assimilation of new truths. The Christian Religion is a large and complex phenomenon, and any individual's thought of it at any time must be, in the nature of things, an inadequate thought. Progress in religion means the constant assimilation of new truths—new, that is, to us. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... complex mission requires a coordinated and focused effort from our entire society—the federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the American people. This plan, in concert with the National Strategy for Homeland ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States

... were burned in the kiln. The latter are of more than one shape and quality. Some are square, others are oblong. Those from the Birs Nimroud are generally of a dark red color, while those from the Mujelibe are mostly of a light yellow. A large number of them have inscriptions in a complex cuneiform character peculiar to Babylon. These superscriptions have been impressed upon them by a stamp, on which the whole inscription was cut in relief. Each character was not made singly, as on the Assyrian bricks, and this is the distinction between them. Almost all the bricks brought ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... a point of flame. It hung in the air above the safe for an instant, described a strangely complicated set of curves; then, as it hung for an instant in mid-air, it became a great flare. In an instant this condensed to a point of intensely brilliant crimson fire. This described a complex series of curves and touched the top of the safe. In an inconceivably short time, the eight-inch thickness of tungsto-iridium alloy flared incandescently and began to flow sluggishly. A large circle of the red flame sprang out to surround the point of brilliance, and this blew the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex thing—as startled emphatic denial. "Have I believed THIS!" And I was also, you must remember, just beginning love-letters ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... encouragingly in an astonishing sequence. The woman with six children must both physically and mentally travel at a tangent, and when a husband has to be badgered or humored into the bargain, then the life of such a woman is more complex ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... cutting in its sarcasm, but not bitter—from "The Captain's Vices," which suggests at once George Eliot's Silas Marner and Mr. Austin Dobson's Tale of Polypheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always as ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... that either we did not attend to, or that lay out of our Sight when we first beheld it. As we look on any Object, our Idea of it is, perhaps, made up of two or three simple Ideas; but when the Poet represents it, he may either give us a more complex Idea of it, or only raise in us such Ideas as are most apt to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele



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