"Infinitesimally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glory even upon the instruments of human skill, which elevated man to the Unseen and the Divine. When we examine the most minute organisms, we find clear evidence in their voluntary powers of motion that these creatures possess a will, and that such Will must be conveyed by a nervous system of an infinitesimally minute description. When we follow out such a train of thought, and contrast the myriads of suns and planets at one extreme, with the myriads of minute organised atoms at the other, we cannot but feel inexpressible wonder at the transcendent ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... to speak, pushed against it; but that her entire being was saturated so entirely, that it was but just possible to distinguish her inmost self from it. The understanding no longer moved; the emotions no longer rebelled; memory simply ceased. Yet through the worst there remained one minute, infinitesimally small spark of identity that maintained "I am I; and I am not that." There was no analysis or consideration; scarcely even a sense of disgust. In fact for a while there was a period when to that tiny spot of identity it appeared that it would be an incalculable ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... cells that are in their way while by their side the leucocytes, or white corpuscles, lazily extend or retract their pseudopods of protoplasm. To see all this as it is shown before us here is to realise that we are in the presence of an unknown world, a world infinitesimally small, but as real and as complex as that about us. With the cinematograph and the ultra-microscope we can see what no other forms of photography ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the elect, some writers (e.g. Massillon) represent it as so infinitesimally small that it would almost drive a saint to despair,—"as if the Church had been established for the express purpose of populating hell."(594) Even St. Thomas held that relatively few are saved.(595) But the arguments ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... probable future, a great grief filled his heart. They wee both so lovable, so noble! That they should miss in a great measure the best of life seemed such a grievous pity! The chances that either of them would renounce atheism were, he could not but feel, infinitesimally small. Much smaller for the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... to livingness. Our conscious actions are a drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones. Could we know all the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part consciousness plays in our present existence; yet our unconscious life is as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our other and conscious self, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader. Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure. It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... muscles wither away, so does the soul alter. The infant's soul is different from the boy's, the boy's from the adolescent man's, the young man's from the middle-aged man's, and so on to the end. Now, since every change in the body, no matter how infinitesimally small, is followed by a corresponding change in the soul, then it is plain that, when the body becomes extinct, its 'function,' the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a non-conductor (or, if it respond in any way, however infinitesimally, it does not perceptibly affect my plate, and in no way my argument), leaves me the absolute control of this wood, and I proceed to lay an English lever watch on several places of it, keeping my ear near to that nodal point where I know will come the inner bout, or D of the violin, consequently ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess, by the gift of nature, singular and useful powers. They say they are honest, well-intentioned ladies, some of them embarrassed by their weird inheritance. And indeed the trouble caused by this endowment is so great, and the protection afforded so infinitesimally small, that I hesitate whether to call it a gift or a hereditary curse. You may rob this lady's coco-patch, steal her canoes, burn down her house, and slay her family scatheless; but one thing you must not do: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like talking to these scientific men. They make you feel so infinitesimally small. They go back such a long, long way. They make out that from the Creation (which by the way they do not admit, only considering it another great change in the world springing from natural causes), from the Creation until now, is the space ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... differences in quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of thought, but the language they will speak will still be a living tongue, an animated system of imperfections, which every individual man will infinitesimally modify. Through the universal freedom of exchange and movement, the developing change in its general spirit will be a world-wide change; that is the quality of its universality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a synthesis of many. Such a language as English is a coalesced language; ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... never meet: will be forever ten inches apart. But at the distance of a foot from the base line incline one line toward the other 63/10000000 of an inch, and the lines will come together at a distance of three hundred miles. That new angle differs from the former right angle almost infinitesimally, but it may be measured. Its value is about three-tenths of a second. If we lengthen the base line from ten inches to all the miles we can command, of course the point of meeting will be proportionally more distant. The angle made by the lines where they ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... first; then, seeing that this atomic motion is radiated, the law of force must be directly as the mass, and inversely as the squares of the distances. There may be other atomic vibrations besides those which we call light, heat, and chemical action, yet the joint effect of all is infinitesimally small, when we disregard the united attraction of all the atoms of which the earth is composed. The attraction of the whole earth at the surface causes bodies to fall 16 feet the first second of time; but, if two spheres of ice of one foot diameter, were placed in an ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... corner; four gates, one facing each cardinal point, and set half way between the several towers, permit ingress and egress for its inhabitants. The gates are closed with solid square doors made of African teak, and carved with the infinitesimally fine and complicated devices of the Arabs, from which I suspect that the doors were made either at Zanzibar or on the coast, and conveyed to Simbamwenni plank by plank; yet as there is much communication between Bagamoyo and Simbamwenni, it is just ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... turned to the right, the tension will be increased somewhat before the pin is turned, as this motion, slight as it may seem, pulls the pin upward enough to draw the string through the upper bridge an infinitesimally small distance, but enough to be perceptible to the ear. Now if the hammer were removed, the tendency of the pin would be to yield to the pull of the string; but if the pin is turned enough to take up such amount ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... means comparing lines (they may be bands, but we will call them lines), and the lines are measured only by consecutive eye movements, then the act of comparison evidently includes the co-operation, however infinitesimally brief, of memory. The two halves of this Chippendale chair-back exist simultaneously in front of my eyes, but I cannot take stock simultaneously of the lengths and orientation of the curves to the right ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... presence of geological changes affected neither by shock nor convulsion, nor yet by infinitesimally slow degrees. A few centuries have sufficed to alter the entire contour of the coast and reverse the once brilliant destinies of maritime cities. With the recorded experience of mediaeval writers at hand, we can localize lagoons and inland seas where to-day we find belts of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... important ones. So let us cultivate them the more earnestly the more humbly we think of our own capacity. 'Play well thy part; there all the honour lies.' God, who has builded up some of the towering Alps out of mica-flakes, builds up His Church out of infinitesimally small particles—slenderly endowed men touched by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... or being prompted by some superior intelligence that did know. I will not be so superfluous as to exaggerate the difficulty. Passing over the earlier stages of the process, and confining myself to one or two of the later, I will content myself with showing how infinitesimally small, when magnified to the utmost, are the chances in favour of these having been passed through blindly. I will admit it to be possible that in a society of purely meliponish habits, there might, in virtue of one or other of those inscrutable ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine given at public schools and universities are so big that they overwhelm the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... his grip on his staff infinitesimally. Of a sudden, the end of the staff, now gripped with both hands near the center, moved at invisibly high speed. There was a crack of the wrist bone, and the gun went flying. The other end of the staff flicked out and rapped the C.I.A. operative ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... explanation that he had seen the whole thing in the glass in front of him. The firm of Tutt & Tutt uttered in chorus a groan of outraged incredulity. Several jurymen were seen to wrinkle their foreheads in meditation. Mr. Tutt had sown a tiny—infinitesimally tiny, to be sure—seed of doubt, not as to the killing at all but as to the complete veracity ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... animal parasites, such as the tapeworms and the trichina, which infest men and animals, with deadly results, been cleared up by means of experimental investigations, and efficient modes of prevention deduced from the data so obtained; but the terrible agency of the parasitic fungi and of the infinitesimally minute microbes, which work far greater havoc among plants and animals, has been brought to light. The 'particulate' or 'germ' theory of disease, as it is called, long since suggested, has obtained a firm foundation, in so far as it has been proved to be true in respect ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley |
