"Imponderable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into contact with its pasturage, the green cabbage-leaf. Here, there, in its immediate neighbourhood, each grub emits from its spinning glands short cables so slender that it takes an attentive lens to catch a glimpse of them. This is enough to ensure the equilibrium of the almost imponderable atom. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... signalizing the inaccuracy of the terms in which they are taught, I neither accept, nor assail, the conclusions respecting the oscillatory states of light, heat, and sound, which have resulted from the postulate of an elastic, though impalpable and imponderable ether, possessing the elasticity of air. This only I desire you to mark with attention,—that both light and sound are sensations of the animal frame, which remain, and must remain, wholly inexplicable, whatever manner of force, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... seemed to be separated from her frame. The spirits of all things, of which mankind in general have no perception, were perceptible to and operated upon her, more particularly the spirits of metals, herbs, men, and animals. All imponderable matters, even the rays of light, had an effect upon her when she was magnetised." The smell of flint was very agreeable to her. Salt laid on her hand caused a flow of saliva: rock crystal laid on the pit of her stomach produced rigidity of the whole ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... affinities of different substances may draw them together into such compounds as albumen and fibrin, which are the proximate principles of organic tissues. The action of electricity, heat, light, or some other mysterious imponderable agent, on these proximate principles, may produce globules, or germinal vesicles. These germs, multiplying themselves by fissiparous generation, will constitute a stock of animals of a low type, such as a tribe of infusory animalcules. Then "this simplest and most primitive type, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... day upon the trace of a great many important facts relating to the imponderable agencies employed in nature. Light, heat, and electricity are no longer the simple matters, or effects of matter, that they have aforetime seemed to be. New wonders point to more beyond. In magnetism, the researches of Faraday, and others, are beginning to open, in our own day, the Book of Nature, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... supposed to be liquid because they possessed something in common; this hypothetical something was called the Element, Water. Similarly, the view prevailed until comparatively recent times, that burning substances burn because of the presence in them of a hypothetical imponderable fluid, called "Caloric"; the alchemists preferred to call this indefinable something an Element, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... is an inter-penetration of the particles of different kinds of matter, and that all matter is susceptible of infinite division. This has proved to be altogether a mistake. If matter were infinitely divisible in this sense, its particles must be imponderable, and a million of such molecules could not weigh more than an infinitely small one. But the particles of that imponderable matter, which, striking upon the retina, give us the sensation of light, are not in a mathematical sense ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... of that imponderable ether in which the stellar universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out the heavens as "thinness," when the wise men of that hour were teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... question, let us consider the parallel relation of other imponderable forces to matter. Take, for instance, electricity. A galvanic battery is set in action. Chemical decomposition is in progress; one or more new compounds are produced; the quantitative differences are exactly accounted for. But there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... later he was out in the open air, walking with a strange new activity. His very body seemed imponderable. He crossed the railway near the Kimball House and went on to Decatur Street. Along this street he walked for a few blocks and then turned off. Before long he was in the most dilapidated, sordid part of the city. He knew where Henderson lived. ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used—and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown—as unknown as ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... firmly in mind the preceding conclusion—a conclusion which is neither exclusively my own, nor very new—we shall find a certain satisfaction in watching the discussions of physicists on the essence of matter, on the nature of force and of energy, and on the relations of ponderable and imponderable matter. We all know how hot is the fight raging on this question. At the present time it is increasing in intensity, in consequence of the disturbance imported into existing theories by the new discoveries of radio-activity.[8] ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... that an idea is something, yet it is not a substance. Thought, which is so potent a factor in this world, is not a substance, yet it cannot be called nothing. It is a condition—it is the result of brain-atoms in action. Electricity is sometimes described as an 'invisible imponderable fluid,' but that is not quite correct, because a fluid is a substance. It is a better definition to say that electricity is a manifestation of energy—a result of substance ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... of her features or the gift of the spirit that informed them—had held her loveliness intact, preserving the clear lines of youth after its bloom was gone, and making her seem like a lover's memory of herself. So she appeared at first, a bright imponderable presence gliding toward him out of the past; but as her hands lay in his the warm current of life was renewed between them, and the woman ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... While James, our youngest (spoilt), proceeds to cram His ample crop with plum and rhubarb jam. No more when twilight fades from tower and tree Shall I conceal what still remains of thee Lest that the housemaid or, perchance, the cat Should mischief thee, imponderable pat. Ah, mine no more! for lo! 'tis noised around How thou wilt soon cost seven bob a pound. As well demand thy weight in radium As probe my 'poverished poke for such a sum. Wherefore, farewell! No more, alas! thou'lt oil These joints that creak with unrewarded toil; No more thy heartsick votary's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... admission should be free. In similar lectures the great military problems might be discussed from the standpoint of military philosophy, and the hearers might gain some insight into the legitimacy of war, its relations to politics, the co-operation of material and imponderable forces, the importance of free personality under the pressure of necessary phenomena, sharp contradictions and violent opposition, as well as into the duties of a commander viewed from the ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... of the room they came from. In fact, there was a nest of young mutineers just there, which must be broken up by a coup d'etat. This was easily effected by redistributing the seats and arranging the scholars according to classes, so that a mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious imponderable, should find himself between two non-conductors, in the shape of small boys of studious habits. It was managed quietly enough, in such a plausible sort of way that its motive was not thought of. But its effects were soon felt; and then began a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... that you know that I am Steering," smiled the visitor, sinking into a chair adaptably, though he realised that, for two men who had never seen each other before, the meeting had been unusual. He also realised that, off somewhere in the sphere of imponderable influences, the effect when his hand clasped the big man's hand had been exactly that of the clashing ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the illustrious names of Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer, of Grove, Faraday, and Tyndall, may be fitly named beside those of the leading thinkers of past ages. The physical forces are no longer to be looked upon as inscrutable material entities,—forms of matter imponderable, and therefore inconceivable; but they have been shown to be diverse, but interchangeable modes of molecular motion, omnipresent, ceaselessly active. The wondrous phenomena of light, heat, and electricity are ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... whole, however, these people with a sense of the imponderable human value of natural ways and natural things may constitute the most powerful support available for thoughtful planning and conservation. In a precipitate and voracious society plunging on into its future, they look back and seek to retain the best of what has always been, ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... forces, which regarded them as material entities, may now be regarded as abandoned. Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, etc., which have hitherto been considered under the self-contradictory designation of "Imponderable Elements," or immaterial matter, are now, by common consent, beginning to be ranked as pure forces; having passed through their material stage, they are regarded as kindred and convertible forms of motion in matter itself. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Tereu, and comforted her. Then, finding her quite willing to be comforted, Jurgen sat for a while upon the dark steps, with one arm still about Queen Sylvia. The effect of the potion had evidently worn off, because Jurgen found himself to be composed no longer of cool imponderable vapor, but of the warmest and hardest sort of flesh everywhere. But probably the effect of the wine which Jurgen had drunk earlier in the evening had not worn off: for now Jurgen began to talk ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... them, requiring only the proper conditions of temperature to bring it into action? Again I answer for myself in the affirmative. I am, however, quite willing to discuss with Mr. Martineau the alternative hypothesis, that an imponderable formative soul unites itself with the substance after its escape from the liquid state. If he should espouse this hypothesis, then I should demand of him an immediate exercise of that Vorstellungs-faehigkeit, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... gesture revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity of structure—the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... family of children, and the whole course of my life might have been greatly changed. It frightens me now to think that I might have missed the Washington life, and Whitman,... and much else that has counted for so much with me. What I might have gained is, in the scale, like imponderable air. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... immanent, imminent, immobile, immure, immutable, impalpable, impeccable, impecunious, imperturbable, impervious, implacable, implicit, impolitic, imponderable, importunate, imprecation, impromptu, improvise, imputation, inadvertent, inamorata, inanity, incarcerate, inchoate, incidence, incision, incongruent, inconsequential, incontinent, incorporeal, incorrigible, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Science has no grounds for supposing that light is in any way absorbed or destroyed merely by its passage through the "ether," that imponderable medium which is believed to transmit the luminous radiations through space. This of course is tantamount to saying that all the direct light from all the stars should reach us, excepting that little ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... ghost of a great house with many solemn windows for eyes. It looked blank, uninhabited, lifeless. Between the house and the river moonlight smoothed the lawns. The moon made that cold stone phantom imponderable, a grey mirage. Radway could not believe, for a moment, that it was real; but the sense of Gabrielle's cold cheek against his lips, her fingers twined in his, and her soft, unhurried breathing recalled him, telling him that he was a lover, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... goes on: 'The mother, convinced by her reading, as well as by messages in writing, believes that the spirits of her dead are trying to communicate with her, and so sits night after night terrified yet hoping, waiting for further instructions from the imponderable ones.'" Britt turned a few pages rapidly. "Listen to this. Here is the key to the old man's change of heart: 'To-night the child began to speak to me in the voice of a man. Hoarse words rose from deep in her throat, a voice and words impossible to her in her normal condition. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... floor of the largest Time-cage. The giant mechanism which had captured us sat at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... thought that nothing is so unfavorable to the working of the wheels as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and, generally, all the imponderable and uncatchable essences that float about in the air; and these, it is thought, are generated and diffused by these villanous newspapers. Certain kinds of books are also forbidden, as being electric conductors. Most of the books allowed in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my Soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids are perfect; Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and surely they ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... the first stage of visible existence, between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer—as he will answer—So much the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life, death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible, unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... rare moments. His mood-versatility was reproduced in his endless colorings and capricious rhythms. The instrument vibrated with these new, nameless effects like the violin in Paganini's hands. It was ravishing. He was called the Ariel, the Undine of the piano. There was something imponderable, fluid, vaporous, evanescent in his music that eluded analysis and illuded all but hard-headed critics. This novelty was the reason why he has been classed as a "gifted amateur" and even to-day is he regarded by many musicians as a skilful inventor of piano ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, Screams in her travail, and the planets hark Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades, Wrenching the night's imponderable arc. ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke |
