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Immaterial   /ˌɪmətˈɪriəl/   Listen
Immaterial

adjective
1.
Of no importance or relevance especially to a law case.
2.
Without material form or substance.  Synonym: incorporeal.
3.
Not consisting of matter.  Synonym: nonmaterial.  "Ghosts and other immaterial entities"
4.
Not pertinent to the matter under consideration.  Synonyms: extraneous, impertinent, orthogonal.  "The price was immaterial" , "Mentioned several impertinent facts before finally coming to the point"
5.
(often followed by 'to') lacking importance; not mattering one way or the other.  Synonym: indifferent.  "What others think is altogether indifferent to him"



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"Immaterial" Quotes from Famous Books



... Banbury was, we know not; nor indeed have we any proof that the rules called his were penned by a real shepherd. Both these points are, however, immaterial; their truth is their best voucher.... Mr. Claridge published them in the year 1744, since which time they are become very scarce, having long been ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various

... of America appear infinitely higher and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it, as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man, as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... had lived there for some months and was as generous, open-handed, easy-going a boarder as that excellent woman had ever taken into her house. Just what price was paid by Henry Blaine to Mrs. Lindsay for that statement is immaterial to this narrative, but it suffices that Walter Pennold returned to the sharp-tongued wife of his bosom with only one obstacle in his thoughts between himself and a goodly share of the coveted ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander

... pray are incapable of being seen or touched. They are believed to exist in subtile forms. (Really, if a belief in deities divested of gross material forms does no violence to their reason, why should the existence of an immaterial Soul alone do their reason such violence)? Another argument against the sceptic is that his proposition implies a destruction of acts (for if body and Soul die together, the acts also of this life would perish,—a conclusion which no man can possibly come to if he is to explain the inequalities ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... of a shove, for the ice bein' slippy, and us bein' justly enraged, and him bein' as round as a barrel, he may, as I said, have been too fat to save himself from rollin' off the iceberg. The point, however, is immaterial to our story, which concerns this Puddin'; and this Puddin',' said Bill patting him on the basin, 'was the very Puddin' that Curry and Rice invented on ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay

... wondered over it, for it was far superior to anything else she has done since she has been in school, and now, I am sure, though she denies it in a very plausible way, that she has copied a poem, with only a few immaterial changes to make it fit her subject, intending to palm ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... according as the body, sleeping or waking, receives various motions. (2) But one may take any view one likes of the imagination so long as one acknowledges that it is different from the understanding, and that the soul is passive with regard to it. (3) The view taken is immaterial, if we know that the imagination is something indefinite, with regard to which the soul is passive, and that we can by some means or other free ourselves therefrom with the help of the understanding. (4) Let no one then be astonished that before proving the existence of body, and other necessary ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]

... Point of View.—We cannot see the four sides of a house from the same place, though we may wish to have our reader know how each side looks. It is, therefore, necessary to change our point of view. It is immaterial whether the successive points of view are named or merely implied, providing the reader has due notice that we have changed from one to the other, and that for each we describe only what can be seen from that position. A description of a cottage that by its ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... substituted moral beauty, infinitely preferring the expression of the soul to the perfection of the body. Every man was great in its eyes, not by his perishable members, but by his immortal soul. With this religion begins the reign of painting, which is a more subtle art, more immaterial, than the others—more expressive, and also more individual. We will give some proofs of it. Instead of acting, like architecture and sculpture, upon the three dimensions of heavy matter, painting acts only upon one surface, and produces its effects with an imponderable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... of it,—is nothing distinct from it,—is but a mode of viewing it. Hence it follows that, provided we admit, as we cannot help admitting, the phenomena of Nature and the world, it is only a question of words whether or not we go on to the hypothesis of a second Being, not visible but immaterial, parallel and coincident with Nature, to whom we give the name of God. "Allowing," he says, "the gods to be the authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... but my new responsibilities call me back to London and its refracting and distorting atmosphere. If I had dwelt here for fifty years I should have perceived that Carlotta was but a speck in the whirlwind of human dust whose ultimate destiny was immaterial. As my five days' visit, however, has not advanced me to that pitch of wisdom, I am foolishly concerned in my mind as to her welfare, and anxious to dissolve the triumvirate, Miss Griggs, Stenson, and Antoinette, whom I have entrusted ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... impelling towards it, others restraining from it; and any motive may come in conflict with any other motive. It will be found hereafter that in the case of some offences the motive is material in the highest degree, and in others wholly immaterial; in some cases easy, and in ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... quelled by misfortune, and, as dangers thickened around me, I bore up against them bravely, like—like—(was it Julius Caesar or Coriolanus who did that sort of thing?) but never mind—like a Roman brick, we'll say; the particular brick is quite immaterial, but I must beg you to believe the likeness was something striking. To descend to particulars.—Hostilities were commenced by that old ass, Mayor Dullmug, who took out a summons against me for creating a riot and disturbance in the town, and the first day the bench sat I ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... evolve; then, for the reception of those gods who overthrew him from his supremacy, because of their greater freedom from physical restraints, there is opened a logical and historical path—until that god comes who in turn follows these half-embodied ones, and stands as the first immaterial author of the universe—and so one may walk straight from the physical beginning of the Rig Vedic religion to its ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... especially of the finest; the position over the breast of the mummy was occupied by a large winged scarabaeus, moulded apparently, of pasteboard or of successive layers of gummed linen, and then beautifully painted in colors. This was to act as the protector Khepra, of the ka or immaterial vitality of the sahu or mummy. The Egyptians had a complicated psychology which we will refer ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... these are they: there was Divine Life in the Creed, and the Community was perfect in one; insomuch that the brethren quarrelled not among themselves; neither was there jealousy, envy or rivalry among them; neither did they dispute about immaterial things, such as which was the right mode of baptism, or whether the bread should be leavened or unleavened, or whence the Holy Ghost proceeded, whether from the Father or from the Father and Son together; neither did the elders preach for a price, nor forsake a poor flock for a rich one that ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... the face of the court, as by rude and contumelious behaviour, by obstinacy, perverseness or prevarication, by breach of the peace, or any wilful disturbance whatever"; in other words, direct insult to or interference with a sitting court is treated as contempt of the court. It is immaterial whether the offender is juror, party, witness, counsel, solicitor or a stranger to the case at hearing, and occasionally it is found necessary to punish for contempt persons under trial for felony or misdemeanour if by violent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... of this process that erratic firing is likely to occur; sometimes the charge will be successfully fired and sometimes not. It may be as well to mention here that the length of the tube, although to a certain extent immaterial, should neither be excessively long nor abnormally short, the precise length varying with the size of the engine. A 1/4-in. tube, 8 ins. long, may be used successfully on engines ranging from 1/2 to 6 horse-power, provided a suitable burner is fitted enabling the tube to be heated at any required ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman

... seem strange, that when it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure. You feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial; and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God. Can you explain ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... strange to note, too, how the ebb of this wave of scepticism upon questions relating to the immaterial world is only recoil that adds force to a succeeding wave of cynicism with regard to the physical world around. "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Othello" give place to "Lear," "Troilus and Cressida," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Timon." So true is it that "unfaith ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust—this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... of immaterial agents which cannot be explained, may be considered that of allegorical persons, which have no real existence. To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... return his bonds to the government, take out the corresponding amount in greenbacks and lend it to the producer on his private note or mortgage. This would involve, of course, the possible inflation of legal tender currency to the amount of outstanding bonds. But inflation was immaterial, since all prices would be affected alike and meanwhile the farmers, the workingmen, and their cooperative establishments would be able to secure capital at slightly more than three percent instead of the nine or ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... otherwise," he said slowly. "A judge might well hold that in a small vessel like the launch you were entitled to make for the nearest land. But I grant you that point; it is really immaterial. If I fail, you lose everything. Accept my offer, and you have a reasonable chance of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities—a God that made all things—man's immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... formations of the two areas, and have as yet been found (except perhaps Anchitherium) in no deposit of earlier age. Whether this connection took place by the east, or by the west, or by both sides of the Old World, there is at present no certain evidence, and the question is immaterial to the present argument; but, as there are good grounds for the belief that the Australian province and the Indian and South-African sub-provinces were separated by sea from the rest of Arctogaea ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... into heaven. I have often, indeed, seen white sails climbing up there, and fishing-boats, at secure anchor I suppose, riding apparently like balloons in the hazy air. Sea and air and land here are all kin, I suspect, and have certain immaterial qualities in common. The contours of the shores and the outlines of the hills are as graceful as the mobile waves; and if there is anywhere ruggedness and sharpness, the atmosphere throws a friendly veil over it, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... indivisibility of the three. And he adds, that this being, who fills the universe, has reduced himself to the body of a man; and has assumed material, perishable, and limited organs, without ceasing to be immaterial, infinite, and eternal. The Mussulman who does not comprehend these mysteries, rejects them as follies, and the visions of a distempered brain; though he conceives perfectly well the eternity of the Koran, and the mission of the prophet: ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... store, while the Serb was a small trader. The Croat would naturally like to introduce the big-store system into Yugoslavia, but this the Serb does not understand. He has a greater sense of responsibility and is more careful with regard to the expenses. To the Croat, in the old Empire, it was immaterial whether the officials were more or less costly. The bill was paid by Austria, who was the foe. For some time the Croat found himself forgetting that he was in Yugoslavia. When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... the subject of this book, it may not be immaterial to add, that I saw the ORIGINAL PAINTINGS from which the large wood blocks were taken for the well known work entitled "the Triumphs of the Emperor Maximilian" in large folio. These paintings are in water colours, upon rolls of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may trace its action on the material elements through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... American affairs. As the Presidential election in America came nearer, attention was diverted from military events. Anti-slavery societies began to hold meetings urging their friends in America to vote for Lincoln[1235]. Writing from Washington, Lyons, as always anxious to forestall frictions on immaterial matters, wrote to Russell, "We must be prepared for demonstrations of a 'spirited foreign policy' by Mr. Seward, during the next fortnight, for electioneering purposes[1236]." Possibly his illness made him unduly nervous, for four ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... as, if the delivery of the letter at this moment, and in the altered state of things, was wrong, it could not ever be recalled; while, if you thought me wrong in withholding it, the error could be productive only of a short delay—certainly not wholly immaterial, but I should hope not very important. At the same time I own that I felt much difficulty in withholding it, as it appeared to me so admirably drawn up, and so well calculated to produce the effect intended by it, and so very unexceptionable in all its ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... that it is immaterial, I think, to make the distance from Hawkshead of either of the four crags or vantage grounds a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... and others familiar with the social customs of Nippon, through a nakodo, a marriage broker or matrimonial agent. M. Loti called his man Kangourou; Mr. Long gave his the name of Goro. That, however, and the character of the simple proceeding before a registrar is immaterial. M. Loti, who assures us that his book is merely some pages from a veritable diary, entertains us with some details preliminary to his launch into a singular kind of domestic existence, which are interesting as bearing on the morals of the opera and as indicative ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... material causes. And as it is not a healthy thing for a man to be always feeling his pulse, and fearing that it shows something amiss; it is not a healthy thing to follow the analogous course as regards our immaterial health and development. And I cannot but regard those religious biographies which we sometimes read, in which worthy people of little strength of character record particularly from day to day all ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... things. He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse. He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other. Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and shake down ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... too. With her usual impudence, my companion then made some attempts to get up a conversation; but the monosyllables 'yes,' or 'no' or 'humph,' were the utmost her several remarks could elicit from me. At last, on her asking my opinion upon some immaterial point of discussion, I answered,—'Why do you wish to talk to me, Lady Lowborough? You must know ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... forty shillings, when a quarter's notice is sufficient. Either of these notices may be given verbally, if it can be proved that the notice was definite, and given at the right time. Form of notice is quite immaterial, provided it is definite ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... haven't had the pleasure of a previous acquaintance with this gentleman, the easiest way to escape gracefully from the sacred edifice is to backsheesh him along with the others. These backsheesh considerations are, of course, small and immaterial matters, and one ought to feel extremely grateful to all concerned for the happy privilege of feasting one's soul with ever so brief a contemplation of the things in the cabinet, and more especially on the bristle-like yellow hair. These joy-inspiring objects, ramshackled ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... philosophic France, as well as of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, was charged with inquiries into the origin of things material, though more especially of things immaterial. It was a period of energetic thinking. Whether Lamarck had read the works of these philosophers or not we have no means of knowing. Buffon, we know, was influenced ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... subjects who may have acquired another nationality. So far as this position is founded on national sovereignty and asserts a claim to the allegiance and service of the subject not to be extinguished save by the consent of the sovereign, it finds precedent and warrant which it is immaterial to the purpose of this instruction to discuss. Where such a claim exists, it becomes the province of a naturalization convention to adjust it on a ground of common advantage, substituting the general sanction of treaty for the individual permission of ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf

... these estimates include allowance for contingent and immaterial damage as well as for direct ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... suit the taste of a later age, as has been done with King Arthur in Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' And when work of this sort has been finely executed, the question whether the details are untrustworthy or even fictitious is immaterial, particularly in cases where the precise facts can never be recovered. We do not know exactly how the battle of Marathon, or, indeed, the battle of Hastings, was fought, but we have in the chronicles something of great ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... thought of her with a fantastic longing that seemed to him beautiful, immaterial, and innocent. He said to himself, "I don't shirk my punishment. I'm going to take it. But fair's fair—There's no occasion to make myself out worse than I really am. Norah has taken hold of me a great deal more by my ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... the entire Church has decided that the soul is immaterial. These saints fell into an error at that time universal; they were men; but they were not mistaken over immortality, because that is clearly ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... the subject of some accidents to be somehow the principle of individuation: for it is of the very notion of an individual that it cannot be in several; and this happens in two ways. First, because it is not natural to it to be in any one; and in this way immaterial separated forms, subsisting of themselves, are also individuals of themselves. Secondly, because a form, be it substantial or accidental, is naturally in someone indeed, not in several, as this whiteness, which is in this body. As to the first, matter is the principle ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... its completion, and the gas corresponding with it is evolved at a gradually diminishing speed which may cause the reaction to continue for hours—a circumstance that may be highly inconvenient or quite immaterial according to the design of the apparatus. When, however, it is desired to construct an automatic acetylene generator, i.e., an apparatus in which the quantity of gas liberated has to be controlled to suit ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... occurred some years ago at the Colony of Labuan, serves to shew how immaterial it was whether a friend, or foe, or utter stranger was the victim. A Murut chief of the Trusan, a river on the mainland over against Labuan, was desirous of obtaining some fresh heads on the occasion of a marriage feast, and put to sea to ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher

... Union men endeavoring to make that question, I have purposely forborne any public expression upon it. As appears to me, that question has not been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and that any discussion of it, while it thus remains practically immaterial, could have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet, whatever it may hereafter become, that question is bad as the basis of a controversy, and good for nothing at ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... the thoughts of the people. There was as much thought and said about Kongstrup and his wife as about all the rest of the parish put together; they were bread to so many, their Providence both in evil and good, that nothing that they did could be immaterial. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... the facts, Brenton correcting him now and then on little points where he was wrong. Speed seemed to think these points immaterial, but Lecocq said that attention to trivialities was the whole secret of the ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr

... living? If they were so powerful, then why are they now extinct? The past is gone, but the future is yet to come, it still holds tangible pleasures, not memories, it has promise and potential, while the past is only the ruins of the same. When the past is looked back upon, it is small and immaterial, it is like time crumpled up into a wad of memories, and a time yesterday or a thousand years ago looks the same, for it is past, it is no more. Life is not short, but in retrospect it seems to be, and its ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... identification, presupposing, as it does, a different view of the destiny of the soul after death. The men who burned the bodies of their dead believed that the soul had no further use for its body after death, but departed into a distant, shadowy, immaterial region, so that the body, if it had any connection with the soul, acted rather as a drag and a defilement, from which it was well that the soul should be released. Therefore they dematerialized the body, and often the things used by the body during life, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... disposed, and as a wolf shows a distinct blending of the beast with the passions, subtle ingenuity, and reasoning powers of the human being. From this it is obvious, then, that the werwolf is a hybrid of the material and immaterial—of man and Elemental, known and Unknown. The latter term does not, of course, meet with acceptance at the hands of the Rationalists, who profess to believe that all phenomena can be explained by perfectly natural causes. They suggest that belief in the werwolf (as ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... she, when, from things particular, She doth abstract the universal kinds, 10 Which bodiless and immaterial are, And can be only lodg'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... together with ease. To his unfettered and questioning thought the real seems unreal, the unreal real; he moves in a world of shadows, cast by the lurid light of his own emotions; they take grotesque shapes and beckon to him, or terrify him. All realities are immaterial and insubstantial; they shift their expressions, and lurk in many forms, leaping forth from the most unlikely disguises, and vanishing as suddenly ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... which flow into the illimitable future. As in the vast city we seek some enclosure of our own—some place of shelter for our heads, of sympathy for our hearts; so, respecting the destiny of the soul. In spite of all our philosophy, we cannot be satisfied with the conception of a mere immaterial essence floating hither and thither in immensity. The intellect looks eagerly forward to a boundless and excursive state; but the affections, the sentiments, yearn for some locality—some spot of residence and repose. We cannot help cherishing ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... his consternation in the prospect of that world's blowing foul on him? Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage it brings him;—more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be, show them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Sonnets. In the first place nowhere in Shakespere's work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of the commentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered the mind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part of the matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H." have had volumes written about them; the Sonnets themselves have been twisted and classified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they are addressed, or to whom they refer, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... not a lover of argumentation. "His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it is useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man understands or not." And the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... testamentary document, or by its destruction or attempted destruction, animo revocandi, or by marriage. Subject to these formalities required by the law, the form of the document—provided that its meaning is clear—is immaterial. Now, do the tattoo marks on the back of this lady constitute such a document, and do they convey the true last will or wish of the testator? That is the first point that I have to decide, and I decide it in ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard

... individually during that session charge Young with ill-treatment towards them? Would not this have been perfectly easy if true? Why do they blink the question, and tell a long story about a conversation which they held with Mr. Bunce, which whether it was true or untrue, is totally immaterial? What do they mean in a later stage of their certificate, by the unsuspecting and unguarded conversation, they had held with Mr. Bunce, and which they were afraid he would make mischief of? Do they call the conversation which they detail an unguarded one? Or was it some other conversation ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector

... that I have often had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally known to the initiated to be the warmest man who had anything ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... many husbands, sons, and brothers, driven and driving, through life in the absorbing excitement of a professional or mercantile career, can testify to the arresting, reposeful, humanizing atmosphere of a home where the wife, mother, or sister exerts her kindly sway; and it is as necessary to the immaterial interests of a nation, to the prevention of the legislative mind and executive hands being completely swallowed up in the actual, the present, the mechanical, the sensible, that some counteracting influence ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... that they ought long ago to have been considered as sufficient proof that no organised being could ever have been called into existence by other agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind. This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of an immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence and superior endowments places man so much above the animals; yet the principle unquestionably exists, and whether it be called sense, reason, or instinct, it presents in the whole range of organised beings a series of phenomena closely linked together, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... call hard—very hard. When you book a bet at Newmarket you never have to consider the rank of your opponent, save as regards his solvency. He may be a peer—he is very probably a publican—it is perfectly immaterial to you; but not so here. The company is positively staking against the incommensurable. They have no means of knowing whether that large broad-shouldered man yonder is or is not a royal duke; and when the telegraph announces a collision, it may chance that the news has declared ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... have arisen ere this: Are syllables, i.e., do, re, mi, etc., to be used, or the vowel-sounds? It is immaterial from the standpoint of tone-production, whether either or both are used. Until children are thoroughly accustomed to sing softly, they will be kept upon the thin register more easily when singing with a vowel-sound, than when using the syllables. The reason is that the ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard

... because I never had them. I never kissed Margarita but once and then very quickly, because I was convinced that upon my subsequent speed depended my ever seeing her alive again. And she did not struggle at all, because, as a matter of fact, it was perfectly immaterial to her whether I kissed her or not. But that was not the case with ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... closer knowledge and study of the immaterial reality does not lead away from the earthly life and coperation with all striving humanity, as the fanatics and ascetics in the misconception of their idle and defective ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... something of the same way to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... pay to go behind the scenes and see the angel-voiced tenor beat his wife. Well, I'd been behind, and I was paying for it. Or else I was a fool. It is immaterial which was my situation. The situation is what counts, and the situation was that social intercourse for me was getting painful and difficult. On the other hand, it must be stated that on rare occasions, on very ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... moral. The organ for reception of the Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no qualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is immaterial. The one condition is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... desired her as one desires an object for its rarity and preciousness; but this, as she had told him, was not enough. Behind her physical and mental attributes, and half revealed by them, there was something deeper: the real personality of the girl. It was elusive, mystic, with a spark of immaterial radiance which might brighten human love with its transcendent glow; but, as he dimly realized, if he won her by force, it might recede and vanish altogether. He could not, with strong ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... with vigor and effect. Some of the penal regulations were copied from the edicts of Diocletian; and this method of conversion was applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of oppression, and pleaded for the rights of humanity. Two immaterial circumstances may serve, however, to prove that the mind of Constantine was not entirely corrupted by the spirit of zeal and bigotry. Before he condemned the Manichaeans and their kindred sects, he resolved to make an accurate inquiry into the nature of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... said I, though whether with a smile or a groan is immaterial; they would have meant the same thing. Should I put the book back on its shelf? I asked, and she replied that I could put it wherever I liked for all she cared, so long as I took it out of her sight (the implication was that it had stolen on to her lap while she was looking out ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie

... passions, splendours, sorrows, will leap out of darkness into the conscious being of thought, when this interwoven net of brief, small sounds will form the centre of a web that will hold together in its threads the universe, the All, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, real and imagined, of a human mind. And if we are to make the best of a child, it is in no way secondary to its physical health and growth that it should acquire a great and thorough command over speech, not merely that it should speak, but, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... It is immaterial what year we select for examination, the numbers which follow will be found to bear about the same relative proportions in every year. I quote from the Trustees' Report for 1866 merely because it is the latest document at hand which furnishes the numbers in the different ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... only to the Heavens of Sensuous Pleasure,—not to the Paradise of Amida, nor to those heavens into which one enters by the Apparitional Birth. But even in the highest and most immaterial zones of being,—in the Heavens of Formlessness,—the cessation of effort and of the pain of effort, involves the penalty of rebirth in a lower state ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... or taking part in the work of the Society, that is immaterial. Darwin never did either, though he did once come to one of the evening receptions, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... true, and there will be a great upheaval shortly. But not a word to a soul. I never gossip, but in this instance I feel it my duty to warn you. How and where I learned the truth is immaterial. I have learned it, and that is sufficient. It is frightful; it makes my blood boil when I think of it. And she goes everywhere, as if she had a ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... must also be opaque to any wave whatever, propagated through air or through ether, clear down to cosmic rays. Behind it, we would be blind and helpless, so we can't use it at all. It drives me frantic! Think of a barrier of pure force, impalpable, immaterial, and exerted along a geometrical surface of no thickness whatever—and yet actual enough to stop even a Millikan ray that travels a hundred thousand light-years and then goes through twenty-seven feet of solid lead just like it was so much vacuum! That's what we're ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... before me, in the poet's handwriting, presents two or three immaterial variations of this ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... ordinary shaver, the safety shaver, and the extraordinary-safety shaver, who buys each safety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as when about to try a new one. To a shaver of this class, cost is immaterial. A safety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and a guaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stir his active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for a hundred dollars, with one ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren

... "It's immaterial anyway," he snapped, frowning at me. "You can't make any fool mystery out of it. The point is that Mr. Felderson put on his brakes rapidly, perhaps for a dog or a rabbit, and skidded into ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... an equal chance of getting them; and whose legs are his only means of locomotion? That old philosophic enemy, matter, the inherently and essentially evil, still hangs about the neck of the poor and strangles him: but to the rich, matter is immaterial; the elaborate organisation of his extra-corporeal system ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... narrated at length the various thefts, swindles and forgeries charged against Lupin. Sometimes he questioned the prisoner, but the latter simply grunted or remained silent. The examination of witnesses commenced. Some of the evidence given was immaterial; other portions of it seemed more important, but through all of it there ran a vein of contradictions and inconsistencies. A wearisome obscurity enveloped the proceedings, until Detective Ganimard was called as a witness; then ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... artist himself. He above all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not analytic. From his contact ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... Lancry—you know, where they have chamber music. Oh! my boy, some of Schumann's machines! You haven't an idea of them! They clutch hold of you at the back of your head just as if somebody were breathing down your back. Yes, yes, it's something much more immaterial than a kiss, just a whiff of breath. 'Pon my honour, a fellow feels as if he were ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... immaterial in the present case, but answered, the witness went on to say that, O'Mara called at his lodgings and said, if he (Wright) could not persuade Mr Mackenzie to come from London, he was not to leave him, but write to him (O'Mara), and he would go to town, and win all his money. He had, on a former ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... forces of disorder and destruction which we are seeking to keep down. I am not here to insist on class differences, to foment class hatred. Those differences exist, they always will exist; but they are immaterial to our big purpose. This is a question of principle, the great principle of British liberty. Are we going to submit to the tyranny of one class over all other classes, of one interest over all other interests in the country? Are we ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair

... obvious that the current may rise quickly in intensity and fall slowly, or the reverse, or may rise and fall irregularly. All such phases may be shown by the curve, and a curve drawn to correctly represent these variations is called the characteristic curve of such current. It is immaterial whether the ordinates of the curve be taken as representing current strength or electromotive force. If interpreted as representing electro-motive force, the usual interpretation and best, the ordinates above the line are taken as positive ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... sentient, seething world Is, after all ideal, Or in the Immaterial furl'd Alone resides the Real, FREED ONE! there's wail for thee this hour Through thy loved Elves' dominions[33]; Hush'd is each tiny trumpet-flower, And droopeth Ariel's pinions; Even Puck, dejected, leaves his swing[34], ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... like Seward and Chase and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent to the rear; while this comparatively unknown and fantastic figure was brought by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is entirely immaterial whether we believe in what he said or did, whether we are for him or against him; but for us to admit that during four years, carrying with them such a pressure of responsibility as the world has never witnessed before, he filled the measure of the vast space allotted him in ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... "Certainly. But what an immaterial part in the glory of this joint is the dinner! Who cares about dinner? No one comes here to eat; that's what you always claimed.—Well, there, at last they are throwing him out. I hope he lands on his head.—Really, you know, Billie, it is such a fine thing being in ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane

... she said, "that of all philosophies the essence is to command one's thoughts, to brush away the immaterial, the unworthy, the unhappy. Try and think that life starts with you from to-day. You are one of those few, those very few people, Douglas Jesson, who have before them a future. Try and keep ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... adoration for Shakespeare's genius did not deter him, any more than Ducis was deterred by his more subdued veneration, from working havoc on the English text. Shakespeare's blank verse was necessarily turned into Alexandrines. That was comparatively immaterial. Of greater moment is it to note that the denouement of the tragedy was completely revolutionised by Dumas. The tragic climax is undermined. Hamlet's life is spared by Dumas. The hero's dying exclamation, "The rest is silence," disappears from Dumas's version. At the close of the play ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... spirit, that is, a simple, incorporeal, immaterial being, possessing higher capacities than man in his present state. Of created spirits, the human spirit, soul, after its departure from the body and as existing in a separate state. Hebrews xii, 23; ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... evolutionist. How can a brute mind comprehend spiritual things? It makes a tremendous difference what a man thinks about his origin whether he looks up or down. Who will say, after reading these words, that it is immaterial what man thinks about his origin? Who will deny that the acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis shuts out the higher reasonings and the larger conceptions ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... influenced by some metaphysical potencies whereof we know next to nothing), the seemingly miraculous powers exhibited, however weakly and childishly, in numberless seances, privileged to possess among the company an ecstatic medium between (as is assumed) themselves and beings immaterial. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... settlement, and, in fact, indispensable to its existence. The river Mudiboo is deep and rapid, and said to swarm with alligators, though I have heard but of three being seen at one time, and none of those above eighteen feet long: this, however, is immaterial, as we do not use the river fluid, which is thick and dirty, but draw all our water from natural wells and tanks. Poisonous springs are rather common, but are easily distinguished by containing no fish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various

... you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me; think what you like of me—I don't care a straw." At the moment, however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... words are immaterial, madame, when their sense has been conveyed. You have rejected my brother, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas

... of this paper lies in two statements, advanced with the utmost solemnity as "basic principles" and "basic reasons," whereas they might both be dismissed by sweeping legal exclusion as "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial." ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... "how people wreck their lives just because they don't know the difference between appearance and reality! Now we do know. We're poor; but we don't care a rap, because we know, you and I, that that doesn't matter. It's the immaterial that matters." ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair

... deeply moved with high ideals as to subject matter, who neglects the form and colour through which he is expressing them, will find that his work has failed to be convincing. The immaterial can only be expressed through the material in art, and the painted symbols of the picture must be very perfect if subtle and elusive meanings are to be conveyed. If he cannot paint the commonplace aspect of our mountain, how can he expect to paint any expression of the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... "It is really immaterial who I am, but since the matter seems to interest you, Mr. Von Bork, I may say that this is not my first acquaintance with the members of your family. I have done a good deal of business in Germany in the past and my name is probably ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... certain age in dungeons, upon the ground that if he did not, many of the cells he had built must remain empty?" The answer of Bishop Law to this remark is by no means satisfactory. He says it assumes that more misery than happiness exists. Now, in this view of the question, the balance is quite immaterial. The existence of any evil at all raises the question as much as the preponderance of evil over good, because the question conceives a perfectly good Being, and asks how such a Being can have permitted any evil at all. Upon this part of the ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham

... looked at one another, and Harris said: "Isn't it rather absurd to expect an immaterial mouth to speak through a tin tube, like ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... reached the place at dusk. It was a raw, black day. We have a couple of good rooms, close to the savage sea. I am nevertheless afraid I have made a mistake. It would perhaps have been wiser to go inland. These things are not immaterial: we make our own heaven, but we scarcely make our own earth. I am writing at a little table by the window, looking out on the rocks, the gathering dusk, and the rising fog. My wife has wandered down to the rocky platform in front of the house. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... immaterial," said he. "Bear ye this in mind, that, though gentle born, ye have had a country rearing. Dinnae shame us, Davie, dinnae shame us! In yon great, muckle house, with all these domestics, upper and under, show yourself as nice, as circumspect, ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... unless I had seen it. These things are not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly—for I can't go through the catalogue—I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... these views that we have named there is no occasion for preserving the body. It is the ba that is fed in the cemetery, not the body. It is an immaterial body that takes part {17} in the kingdom of Osiris, in the sky. It is an immaterial body that can accompany the gods in the boat of the sun. There is so far no call to conserve the body by the peculiar ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... railway on the 28th was a long and trying one, variously computed at from twenty-one to twenty-three miles. Whatever its exact length may have been is immaterial; it was the method in which it was conducted that was so desperately trying. After the usual sketchy apology for a breakfast, the column moved off with the Somersets as advance-guard, and 'F' and 'G' company of the Dublins as ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring

... the number and power of the persons connected with these corporations or placed under their influence give them a fearful weight when their interest is in opposition to the spirit of the Constitution and laws. To the people it is immaterial whether these results are produced by open violations of the latter or by the workings of a system of which the result is the same. An inflexible execution even of the existing statutes of most of the States would redress many evils ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... of this Poem is located on the banks of the Eden, a pleasant river in Cumberland. It is founded on facts, but the names and some other immaterial points are imaginary. ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar

... power, or whatever it may be, worth $5,000,000 per annum. I have assumed for the sake of simplicity that we shall still be reckoning in terms of money, though possibly the executive may have substituted Marxian labor units; but it is quite immaterial to the present argument what the measuring rod may be. The point to be observed is, that it is impossible to tackle the problem at all without the conception of a rate of interest. For suppose that you tried to do without it, and said, "We shall take a long view. The interests of the future are ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... out. Yes, it was the work of an incendiary. The actual damage is immaterial." Varr's answers were curt. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... Do they belong strictly to the domain of physics or of metaphysics? How nearly are they allied to insanity? May there not be a species of spiritual intoxication created by immaterial alcohol, producing, through the medium of the mind, the same bodily absurdities as your fluid alcohol produces through the directer agency of the body itself? How far can they be urged as extenuating or even defending misdemeanors and crimes? ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... quite immaterial to Mr. Camp whether he got an answer to his remarks to Hiram, or not. He went on muttering to himself, all through the meal, sometimes commenting upon what the others said at the table—and that quite shrewdly, Hiram ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... one German town—I forget which; it is immaterial; the incident could have happened in any—noticing an open gate leading to a garden in which a concert was being given. There was nothing to prevent anyone who chose from walking through that gate, and thus gaining admittance ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair

... egotist, so that it did not matter to him in the least with whom he flirted, and sat at the feet of old Canon Morpheu, who was so crazy about the discoveries that he had made in the life of Ezekiel that it was quite immaterial to him to whom ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole

... still as far as the ear could reach. The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. The chill air of the night seemed to lie on my limbs as heavy as a slab ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... is a popular household condiment. It is made by soaking the seed in good vinegar for a few days before using. The quantity of ingredients to use is immaterial. Only a certain amount of the flavor can be dissolved by the vinegar, and as few samples of vinegar are alike, the quantities both to mix and of the decoction to use must be left to the housewife. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... of his long series of discoveries a fair percentage were valuable and are producing-properties to-day. Yet he confessed his bank balance to be less than five hundred dollars. Why was this? Simply and solely because he did not care. At heart it was entirely immaterial to him whether he ever owned a dollar above his expenses. When he sold his claims, he let them go easily, loath to bother himself with business details, eager to get away from the fuss and nuisance. The few hundred dollars he received ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... and metal, and timber; and muscles, bones, thews, and sinews, with life in them, to any extent. It can go a step further—it can purchase brains, intellect, genius; and, throwing the whole together, material and immaterial, it can cut, and carve, and mould the world to such an extent that its occupants of fifty years ago, were they permitted to return to earth, would find it hard to recognise the scene of their brief existence. But there are things and powers which gold cannot ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

... them. He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was exhausted, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... with entire efficiency. That he had no initiative at all and by no chance did anything he was not told to, even when most obvious, that he was lacking in any characteristic of interest, that he was moreover a supreme coward, afraid to be left alone in the woods—these things were after all immaterial, for, as John pointed out, we didn't really need to ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... Species, have a positive, permanent, specific principle, maintained generation after generation with all its essential characteristics. Individuals are the transient representatives of all these organic principles, which certainly have an independent, immaterial existence, since they outlive the individuals that embody them, and are no less real after the generation that has represented them for a time has passed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... conceive it to be within the line of propriety or duty, for him to bear evidence against a declaration, which, whether made to him or others, is perhaps immaterial; he therefore declines interfering in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... itself. The play had very likely been acted at court some years earlier, but the document mentioning such a performance, printed by Cunningham, is of doubtful authenticity, while Fleay contradicts himself upon the subject. The question is, happily, immaterial to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... majority of the members present, the organization made under his call was the only regular one. Nothing can be determined as to which is the true story from the records kept of the two bodies, because they are each made up to show strict regularity, and as it is utterly immaterial in any substantial point of view, I will not venture any opinion, although I was one of the actors in the drama,—or farce,—as the reader may see fit ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... and reflect on the strangeness of life that a people so remote from our times should have lived and loved and died, as we live and love and die to-day. Whether Treves lie on the right or left bank of the Moselle is immaterial except to the tiresomely precise or to those who pin their faith to guide-books and such shallow teachers. There is a more valuable lesson to be learnt of the place than that of its exact situation; and no Baedeker or Murray can help you to appreciate Treves ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... thought, as he presented himself, that he had never before seen such an immaterial living figure. Lichfield Stope was like the shadow of a man draped with unsubstantial, dusty linen. Into his waxen face beat a pale infusion of blood, as if a diluted wine had been poured into a semi-opaque goblet; his sunken lips puffed out ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... here cease. There are beyond the limits of our system, beyond the visible forms of matter, other principles, other powers, higher orders of beings, an immaterial world which we cannot yet know; other modes of existence which we cannot comprehend; yet however inscrutable to us, this spiritual world must be guided by its own unerring laws, and the harmonious order which ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... forty horse power motor is available, our 300 square feet of surface may be put into two planes, each having 150 square feet of surface, which would make each 5' by 30' in size; or, it may be decided to make the planes narrower, and proportionally longer. This is immaterial. The shorter the planes transversely, the greater will be the stability, and the wider the planes the less ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***

... and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created this visible world, heaven and earth and sea, which also he made glorious with light and richly adorned it; the heavens with the sun, moon and stars, and the earth with all manner of herbs and divers living ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus

... exertions proceeded from a real endeavour to promote the cause of the Jacobites, or whether they were, as it has been supposed, the result of a political scheme of the Duke of Queensbury's, it is difficult to determine, and immaterial to decide; because his perfidy in disclosing the whole to that nobleman has been clearly discovered. It seems, however, more than probable, that he could not go on in the straightforward path; and that he was in the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

... material process which the nerve fibre conveys from the organ of hearing to the brain must travel through my brain as an actual and material process before it can reach the nerves which will act upon my organs of speech. It cannot, on reaching a given place in the brain, change then and there into an immaterial something, and turn up again some time afterwards in another part of the brain as a material process. The traveller in the desert might as well hope, before he again goes forth into the wilderness of reality, to take rest and refreshment in the oasis with which the Fata Morgana ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... forces were set in motion by a feverish yearning for immaterial pleasures, beauty, power, and immortality. The Renaissance has been called an intellectual bacchanalia, and when we examine the features of the bacchantes they become distorted like those of the suitors in Homer, who anticipated their fall; for this society, this Church, ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... in another sense than you intimate. Now the bodily eyes see material objects, and the mind, receiving their testimony, is in no doubt as to the existence, quality, and relation of things in the outer world. The eyes of our spirits, on the other hand, see immaterial objects or truths; and presenting them to the rational and perceptive faculties, they are recognized as actual existences, and their quality as surely determined as the quality of a stone or metal. If you ask me how I know that this is quartz, or that iron; I answer, ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur

... "That's immaterial to me." Lanko flicked switches and the ship rose from the ground, swung, and started westward. "I was merely describing the capabilities ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole

... the bread and butter," said Constance; "eating is immaterial, with those perfect little things right opposite to me. They weren't like any you ever saw, Fleda—the sugar-bowl was just a little plain oval box, with the lid on a hinge, and not a bit of chasing, only the arms on the cover; like nothing I ever saw but an old-fashioned silver tea-caddy; ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility; and reasoned of as if it had been some composite, divisible and reunitable substance, some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of logical joinery,—began to lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine though invisible character: it was tacitly figured as something that might, were our organs fine enough, be /seen/. Yet who had ever seen it? Who could ever see it? Thus by degrees it passed ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... veil Before the world of spirit drawn) remove The dim material hindrance, and illume; That human thought again may dare behold The shape and port of spirits, and once more Hear voices in that distant, shadowy world, To which ourselves, and this, are shadows, they The substance, immaterial essence pure— Souls that have freed their slave, and given back Its force unto the elements, the dread Manes, or the more dread Archetypes of men: Like whom in featured reason's shape—like whom Created ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... in Abstinence, the sole remedy for plethora Abydos, Lord Byron's swimming feat from Sestos to See Bride of Abydos Abyssinia, Lord Byron's project of visiting Academical studies, effect of, on the imaginative faculty Acerbi, Giuseppe Acland, Mr., Lord Byron's school-fellow at Harrow Acting, no immaterial sensuality so delightful Actium, remains of the town of Actors, an impracticable race Ada See Byron, Augusta-Ada Adair, Robert, esq. Adams, John, the Southwell carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, Joseph, his character ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... pleasures, and should have continued in my natural sphere, without meeting with any temptation to go beyond it. Having an imagination sufficiently fertile to embellish with its chimeras every situation, and powerful enough to transport me from one to another, it was immaterial in which I was fixed: that was best adapted to me, which, requiring the least care or exertion, left the mind most at liberty; and this happiness I should have enjoyed. In my native country, in the bosom of my religion, family and friends, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... "Immaterial," said Ukridge with a grand gesture. "That doesn't matter. The point is that the letters were written. It shows we are solid and practical. Well now, can you get your things ready by ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse

... not is immaterial for the moment. The fact remains that some one who was anxious to get rid of incriminating evidence was so clumsy that he threw it where any one could pick it up. Not one man in a thousand would have done that, no matter what state of agitation he ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... and that "the priests did not shut their eyes to this doctrine, but strove to grasp the idea of the one God, divided into different persons by poesy and myth.... The priesthood, however, had not the courage to take the final step, to do away with those distinctions which they declared to be immaterial, and to adore the one God under the one name."[13] It was left to Amenhotep IV, later known as Ikhnaton, to proclaim this doctrine openly to the people. Professor Breasted has described the hymns of praise to the Sun ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... be compared. But I regard another point as important, and will here confess that it was on account of this very point that I have just undertaken this entire discussion concerning the two psychic systems, their modes of operation, and the repression. For it is now immaterial whether I have conceived the psychological relations in question with approximate correctness, or, as is easily possible in such a difficult matter, in an erroneous and fragmentary manner. Whatever changes may be made in the interpretation of ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... land, the sea, and the sky produce, as soon as they are caught by any one become at once the property of their captor by the law of nations; for natural reason admits the title of the first occupant to that which previously had no owner. So far as the occupant's title is concerned, it is immaterial whether it is on his own land or on that of another that he catches wild animals or birds, though it is clear that if he goes on another man's land for the sake of hunting or fowling, the latter may forbid him ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... thing which kept women in degradation. Paganism did not recognize the immaterial and immortal soul: it only had regard to the wants of the body. Of course there were exceptions. There were sages and philosophers among the men who speculated on the grandest subjects which can elevate the mind to the regions of immortal truth,—like Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,—even ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... the discovery of sentiments which before he had been careful to conceal; now urged his objections against religion, when OMAR gave him opportunity, without reserve. 'You tell me,' says he, 'of beings that are immortal, because they are immaterial; beings which do not consist of parts, and which, therefore, can admit no solution, the only natural cause of corruption and decay: but that which is not material, can have no extension; and what has no extension, possesses ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth

... sir. My story is already known to so many people that privacy is immaterial. Let me, instead, ask permission to light a cigarette,—that is, if you do not object to smoking and are sufficiently at leisure to ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... it is realized that the most extreme principle of aesthetic can never be of value to the future, but only to the past. No such theory of principle can be laid down for those things which lie beyond, in the realm of the immaterial. That which has no material existence cannot be subjected to a material classification. That which belongs to the spirit of the future can only be realized in feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road. Theory is the lamp which sheds light on the petrified ideas ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... Christian.] The conception of a purely immaterial Being, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, which is that of the Bible regarding God, is entirely foreign to the Hindu books. Their doctrine is various, but, in every case, erroneous. It is absolute pantheism, ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... never say that, except of course in private. There may be some truth in it, but it would be laughed at in the present condition of the public mind. History may do me justice; but after all it is immaterial. A man who does his duty should be indifferent to the opinion of the public, which begins more and more to be formed less by fact than by the newspapers of the day. But let us return to more important ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... Jews that came from James. Peter's weak attitude endangered the principle of Christian liberty. It is the deduction rather than the fact which Paul reproves. To eat and to drink, or not to eat and drink, is immaterial. But to make the deduction "If you eat, you sin; if you abstain you are ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... it all, and like all laws of nature, a liberal interpretation is the one nearest the truth. What part of these supplements are opposites? What part of substance is manner? What part of this duality is polarity? These questions though not immaterial may be disregarded, if there be a sincere appreciation (intuition is always sincere) of the "divine" spirit of the thing. Enthusiasm for, and recognition of these higher over these lower values will transform a destructive iconoclasm into creation, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial. I therefore spent the day at my club and did not return to Baker Street until evening. It was nearly nine o'clock when I found myself in the sitting-room ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle



Words linked to "Immaterial" :   materiality, corporality, unreal, physicalness, intangible, irrelevant, insubstantial, unimportant, nonphysical, unembodied, unbodied, discorporate, spiritual, disembodied, material, corporeal, bodiless, unsubstantial, corporeality



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