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More "Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he bent over to inspect Ichi. A dim idea was at work in Martin's mind; not yet clear cut, not yet a reasoned plan. It concerned Ichi. If only the little wretch were not dead, or badly injured, as he feared. The man had lain there so motionless; he seemed such an inanimate lump as Martin rolled him over ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... later to become one of the hallmarks of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human chain, like those in the animate and inanimate worlds above and below it, is predestined to a specific function for the better ordering of the whole. Lewis Maidwell, for instance, still employs the medieval and Renaissance analogy of the correspondence between the human body and the social organism (An Essay upon the Necessity and ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... The Captain stepped in and examined whether there were any still missing, or whether they were all safe. The surgeon was speedily on the spot, and took charge of the inanimate boy. Charlotte joined them, and entreated the Captain to go now and take care of himself, to hurry back to the castle and change his clothes. He would not go, however, till persons on whose sense he could rely, who had been close to the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... even after the conveyal of an apparently inanimate body downstairs, before his wife first made clear signs of intelligence; and even these were little more than grotesque expressions of fear—rolling eyes and exclamations. It was another quarter of ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... The whole people are the cringing lickspittles of the nobles in turn. Every private in the army is ambitious to please the king by valor. The king is literally monarch of all he surveys. He is proprietor of the land, and has at his disposal every thing animate or inanimate in his kingdom. He has about three thousand wives.[59] Every man who would marry must buy his spouse from the king; and, while the system of polygamy obtains everywhere throughout the kingdom, the subject must have care not to secure so many wives that it would appear that he ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence, thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantial elements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some American languages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must be distinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, they are classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by the bye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign. Reverential particles, again, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear may be taught to dance. While this air of hers lasted, even the inanimate objects in the street appeared to know that she was there; but from a way she had of carelessly overthrowing her dignity by versatile moods, one could not calculate upon its presence to a certainty when she was round corners or ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... genius; what is most gloomy may soften the seeds and relax the fibres of gaiety. We enjoy the solemnity of the spreading oak above us: perhaps we owe to it in part the mood of our minds at this instant; perhaps an inanimate thing supplies me, while I am speaking, with whatever I possess of animation. Do you imagine that any contest of shepherds can afford them the same pleasure as I receive from the description of it; or that even in their loves, however innocent and faithful, they are so free from anxiety as ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... say, of inanimate nature and of brutes, to use the lordly phrase of man; let me hear ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... saw him as a man suddenly stricken with age. His face was grey. He led her to a settee by the high oak fireplace, and there—white, inanimate as a waxen figure—she found ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... little smoking-room in the house in Pemberton Square, three years after Maggie went to live there, on the very sofa where Andre Maggimore had lain, was stretched the inanimate form of another person, stricken down by the same malady. It was Mr. Checkynshaw. The two gentlemen with whom he had been conversing when attacked by the fit had placed him there, and Dr. Fisher had been sent for. From that sofa he was conveyed to ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... being and proceeding to fall into dumb forgetfulness. Men saw their comrades stricken by some dark force that they could not understand. The strong limbs grew lax first, and then hopelessly stiff; the bright eye was dulled; and it soon became necessary to hide the inanimate thing under the soil. It was impossible for those who had the quick blood flowing in their veins to believe that a time would come when feeling would be known no more. This fierce clinging to life had at last its natural outcome. Men found that at night, when the quicksilver current ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... rage indicated by his trumpeting. It seemed scarcely possible that some one of us should not suffer. Yet I felt wonderfully cool. I waited a second; and then taking full aim, fired my second barrel. In an instant the huge monster stopped, and before the smoke cleared away lay an inanimate mass on the ground, within twenty ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... thus we shall begin to be afraid of leading careless, useless, and idle lives. We cannot watch the working of the fairy "life" in the primrose or the bee, without learning that living beings as well as inanimate things are governed by these same laws of nature; nor can we contemplate the mutual adaptation of bees and flowers without acknowledging that it teaches the truth that those succeed best in life who, whether consciously or unconsciously, do their ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... essential part of the equipment of a recreation hut in France. The soldier loves to make music, and it is surprising how many soldiers can make music of a sort. Pity is wasted on inanimate things. Otherwise one's heart's sympathy would go out to those pianos. It would be a dreadful thing for an instrument of feeling to have "Irish Eyes," "The Only Girl in the World," and "Home Fires," played on it every day and all day long. I am not, I am often thankful for it, acutely musical. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... principally rests, are not, perhaps, of a quality which calls for any commanding powers of mind. Her business was with the surfaces of things; her skill consisted in a species of photography, presenting perfect fac-similes of objects, animate and inanimate, in their natural forms and hues. Deep investigations, profound reflections, and laboured and learned disquisitions, would have defeated the very object of her lively sketches, which was to make them, not only faithful and exact, but popular. Of her success in this design, the following testimony ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... calm life,—and it shall be Its own exceeding great reward! No thoughts to vex in all I see, No jeers to bear or disregard;— All creatures and inanimate things Shall be my tutors; I shall learn From beast, and fish, and bird with wings, And rock, and ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... civilized Muskoki or Creeks, as mentioned by Rev. H.F. Buckner, when speaking of the height of children or women, illustrate their words by holding their hands at the proper elevation, palm up; but when describing the height of "soulless" animals or inanimate objects, they hold the palm downward. This, when correlated with the distinctive signs of other Indians, is an interesting case of the survival of a practice which, so far as yet reported, the oldest men of the tribe, now living only remember to have ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... "These will do as curios." Quoth Thomas scornfully, "Curios be blowed, put 'em in the beggars!" Of course, you can guess he did not exactly use those identical words, but they will do. Then having joined in the destruction of a monster hog, and obtained my share of his inanimate form, I, triumphant and perspiring, ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... something which we listen to daily and never notice. I mean the sounds of the visible world, animate and inanimate. Winds blowing, waters flowing, trees stirring, insects whirring (dear me! I am quite unconsciously writing rhyme), with the various cries of birds and beasts,—lowing cattle, bleating sheep, grunting pigs, and cackling hens,—all the infinite discords that ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... Noddin muttered that if their mates did not join, neither would they; whereat Mr Jobson began to fear that he should have his labour for nothing, and calling for a bucket, filled it alongside and dashed it over the inanimate forms placed on deck. At first the shower-bath produced not the slightest effect, but after several buckets had been thrown over the men, one of them began to move and to stretch out his arms as if swimming; then another grunted, and desired ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... gallantly disregarded. If there be effect, it certainly is not in the right place, or rather there is no concentration of effect; it possesses the glare of a coloured print, and that too of a meretricious sort—incidents there are, but no plot—less effect upon the animate than the inanimate. The toilet-table takes precedence of the lady—the couch before the sleeper—the shadow, in fact, before the substance; and as it is a sure mark of a vulgar mind to dwell upon the trifles, and lose the substantial—to scan the dress, and neglect the wearer, so we opine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... acted through his traditions until he was ready to perceive an artificial, in a natural stillness, the others saw nothing to apprehend in a tranquility that, in truth, merely denoted the repose of inanimate objects. The accessories of the scene, too, were soothing and calm, rather than exciting. The day had not yet advanced so far as to bring the sun above the horizon, but the heavens, the atmosphere, and the woods and lake ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... but did not meet her glance: for I was wondering if there was anything in the world she could ask of me that I would not do, and at such a time it is good for anyone as weak as I am to look at inanimate things. ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... patch of coarse grass on the bank against which Winifred Anstice leaned. He remembered to have noted how perfectly her dun-colored dress had harmonized with the environment, so much so, that, but for the patch of red in her hat, he might have passed her as a part of the inanimate nature of the beach. He remembered, too, the touch of her hand on his shoulder there in the light-house, and the sound of her voice as she counted the steps, "One—two—three—four." Then he fell to thinking more closely than he had yet done of the girl herself,—that curious ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the gravel beneath the lowest step. They did not stop to speculate as to what it might be. With a single impulse, Jack and Harold sprang down, and between them they carried back into the hall the inanimate body of ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... that little head is filled quite otherwise. It is not her fault that this is so: is it her misfortune? But to give the history of this being entire, it is necessary to begin seventeen years back, at the very beginning of her life, for in our human nature, as in the inanimate world, a phenomenon is better understood when we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... happiness of a household. One daughter only had they, and we could charm our heart even now, by evoking the vanished from oblivion, and imaging her over and over again in the light of words; but although all objects, animate and inanimate, seem always tinged with an air of sadness when they are past—and as at present we are resolved to be cheerful—obstinately to resist all access of melancholy—an enemy to the pathetic—and a scorner of shedders of tears—therefore let Mary Morrison rest ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the last hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to believe even in the possibility of faith or honor among men, of constancy, or purity, or truth in women, no sooner saw his Melanie, whom he knew to be the wife of another, solitary and in tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form reclining on his bosom, than he was prepared to believe any thing, rather than ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... the bridegroom's house a similar image is made of the bride's totem, and on returning there after the wedding she worships this. Women are often tattooed with representations of their totem animal, and men swear by it as their most sacred oath. A similar respect is paid to the inanimate objects after which certain septs are named. Thus members of the Gawad or cowdung sept will not burn cowdung cakes for fuel; and those of the Mircha sept do not use chillies. One sept is named after the sun, and when an eclipse occurs these perform the same formal rites of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... action; but it can gain them both from a space composition which shall combine unity with a tendency to movement. And this is given by the diagonal and V-shaped type. This type merely allows free play to the natural tendency of the "active" picture; but it constrains the neutral, inanimate landscape. The shape itself imparts motion to the picture: the sweep of line, the concentration of the vista, the unifying power of the inverted triangle between two masses, act, as it were, externally to the suggestion of the object itself. There is always enough quiet in a landscape,— the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations from every thing, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of man in their ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturniug brave,—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... triumphantly. She could relish a bloodless victory over an inanimate rival. Then she said softly, "Arthur, what I am going to tell you ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as of sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes her breath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but to inanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied by the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely than ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... distance from ordinary medical prac- tice to Christian Science is full many a league in the line of light; but to go in healing from the use of 106:1 inanimate drugs to the criminal misuse of human will- power, is to drop from the platform of common manhood 106:3 into the very mire of iniquity, to work against the free course of honesty and justice, and to push vainly ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... time, therefore, a natural cause, the causality of which must be regulated by empirical laws. As such, he must possess an empirical character, like all other natural phenomena. We remark this empirical character in his actions, which reveal the presence of certain powers and faculties. If we consider inanimate or merely animal nature, we can discover no reason for ascribing to ourselves any other than a faculty which is determined in a purely sensuous manner. But man, to whom nature reveals herself only through sense, cognizes himself ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... cleft. In those gigantic surroundings it looked extraordinarily small and lonely, although perhaps because of the intense red light in which it was bathed, or perhaps just because it was human, a living thing in the midst of all that still, inanimate grandeur, it caught and focused my attention. I grew greatly interested in it; I wondered if it were that of man or woman, and what it was doing ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... subtle enigma of charm with which these dumb villas and mute shops were invested, that we walked along as if under the spell of fascination. Perhaps the charm is a matter of sex, after all: towns are feminine, in the wise French idiom, that idiom so delicate in discerning qualities of sex in inanimate objects, as the Greeks before them were clever in discovering sex distinctions in the moral qualities. Trouville was so true a woman, that the coquette in her was alive and breathing even in this her moment of suspended animation. The closed blinds and iron shutters appeared ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... should have made it clear that habit is acquired nature, while instinct is inherited nature. Habit is acquired tendency while instinct is inherited tendency. The possibility of acquiring habits is peculiarly a human characteristic. While inanimate things have a definite nature, a definite way of reacting to forces which act upon them, they have little, if any, possibility of varying their way of acting. Water might be said to have habits. If one cools water, it turns to ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... any material object, such as an animal or inanimate thing, regarded as representative of godship, to which worship is paid and from ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... its way, to do its work. And like it all the rest of the natural world, faithful to the law of its Maker, was stamped with the same signet of perfection. Only man, in all the universe, seemed to be at cross purposes with the end of his being. Only man, of all animate or inanimate things, lived an aimless, fruitless, broken life,—or fruitful only in evil. How was this? and whence? and when would be the end? and would this confused mass of warring elements ever be at peace? would this disordered machinery ever work smoothly, without let ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... is the more immediate environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man, in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his special masculine qualities for her—that is to say, in the long run, for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which Nature has contrived all individuals of both sexes. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... to feel better, she went to Bessie, who pale and inanimate, seemed to be gently fading away, and only now and then raised her little finger to play with her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the long, easy swell, and the starboard supporting-column ground a trifle, as a man grits his teeth under the knife. The forward cylinder was depending on that unknown force men call the pertinacity of materials, which now and then balances that other heartbreaking power, the perversity of inanimate things. ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... boat came to the spot where he had seen her Rand made a long dive overboard, coming up a moment later with the inanimate body of the girl. He was joined almost immediately by Donald, who had followed him overboard, and so aided him in supporting her until Pepper and Jack had reached them ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... are not used in the elementary form these pronouns invariably possess in the English. Inflections are put to them indicating the class of natural objects to which they refer. A noun masculine or feminine, requiring an animate pronoun, a noun inanimate, a ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... the awful silence of the midnight wood, or upon some vast waste of nature, no man can figure to himself the varied shapes the mind can give to terrors based upon the mysterious noises of nature, and the goblin motions of inanimate things. The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly objects. With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds of daily life, even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... getting to be somewhat in fashion again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps, the house door was opened and a ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... plains, Nor cheerful morning song of birds in spring, Nor moonlight soft, that rests on hills and fields, Beneath the limpid sky, will move my heart; When every beauty, both of Nature, and Of Art, to me will be inanimate And mute; each tender feeling, lofty thought, Unknown and strange; my only comfort, then, Poor beggar, must I find in studies more Severe; to them, thenceforward, must devote The wretched remnant of unhappy life: The bitter truth must I investigate, The destinies mysterious, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... reckon you won't go into the telegraph business again very soon!" he growled, as the inanimate body disappeared down the stream, and he coolly re-entered the canoe, which had floated ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... secret. Bok went through three financial panics with the magazine, and while other periodicals severely suffered from diminished circulation at such times, The Ladies' Home Journal always held its own. Thousands of women had been directly helped by the magazine; it had not remained an inanimate printed thing, but had become a vital need in the personal ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... my joyous and extravagant spirits," and many other instances of his laughing are recorded. He himself wrote in 1775 concerning the running away of some British soldiers, "we laugh at his idea of chasing the Royal Fusileers with the stores. Does he consider them as inanimate, or as treasure?" When the British in Boston sent out a bundle of the king's speech, "farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean), without knowing or intending it; for on that day, the day which gave being to the new army, (but before the proclamation ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the offer, the dread of contagion keeping all at a distance, after what had passed. At first I think Madame van Hunker hardly perceived who was with her, but as I spoke a word or two in English, as we tried to accommodate the inanimate form between us, she looked up and said: 'Ah! I should not have let you come, Madame! I do everything wrong. I pray you to leave me!' Then, as I of course refused, she added: 'Ah, you know not—-' and then whispered in my ear, though the poor ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... course, there are sweeping views and opinions which include man and the universe, and which colour all beliefs as to details. And the author of this remarkable book has arrived at such a sweeping view. He holds, that where-as we fancy that we are living creatures, and that inanimate nature is inert, or without life, the truth is just the opposite of this fancy. He holds that man wants life, and that his dwelling-place possesses life. We are dead, and the world is living. No doubt it would be easy to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... tightened its clutches. Each time it made me more and more its own property. Whenever the warnings showed themselves I fled to the refuge of Miss Masters's house. She bought and kept there things on which, when the mania was at its height, it satisfied me to expend my lust. But those inanimate things, though sufficient for that purpose, had no power in themselves to produce an attack of the madness. The capability to do that was reserved to a woman's beauty—the effect of which, so far, I had had no opportunity to experience. That opportunity came to me for the first ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... ask of the world, according to the common signification—that is, in so far as it signifies what is called the universe—I say that, being infinite, it has no dimension or measure, is immobile, inanimate, and without form, notwithstanding it is the place of infinite moving worlds and is infinite space, in which are so many large animals that are called stars. If you ask according to the signification held by the true philosophers—that is, in so far as it signifies every globe, every star, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... phenomena which he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to the other end of the room, where he fell down backwards and lifeless before the bed of Henry III., who, coming to the door of his room and asking "if it was done," contemplated with mingled satisfaction and terror the inanimate body of his mighty rival, "who seemed to be merely sleeping, so little was he changed." "My God! how tall he is!" cried the king; "he looks even taller than when he ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... my raft I was sitting quietly polishing my boots and talking to myself when I became aware of an object floating in the sea close beside the raft. Judge of my feelings when I realized it to be the inanimate body of a girl. Hastily finishing my boots and stopping talking to myself, I made shift as best I could to draw the unhappy girl ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But just there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not yet learned to boast its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbed everything with its emotions, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... makeshifts, no matter how attractive in themselves. Paintings, plates and history come to our rescue here. If you think it dry work, try it. The chances are all in favour of your emerging from your search spell-bound by the vistas opened up to you; the sudden meaning acquired by many inanimate things, and a new ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... dancing joyously forward towards the shore! And the sun, that seems to bring happiness to inanimate things, brought hope and confidence back to the hearts of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... adrersus Math. lib. viii.], though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects, as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. This is also the common reason assigned by historians, for the deification of eminent heroes ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31). {205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge' (i. 57). 'Justice . . . is coincident with utility' ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... liturgies, into petitions, confessions, and aspirations; not forgetting the all-embracing one with which we are perfectly familiar in our native land, in which the preacher commends to the Fatherly care every animate and inanimate thing not mentioned specifically in the foregoing supplications. It was in the middle of this compendious petition, 'the lang prayer,' that rheumatic old Scottish dames used to make a practice of 'cheengin' the fit,' as they stood devoutly through ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... lips. Only words! Only words! But with how deadly a thrust they pierced the heart of the woman who heard them none but herself would ever know. She gave no sign of suffering. She only stared wide-eyed before her as an image, devoid of expression, inanimate, sphinx-like, while that awful constriction grew straiter ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... wait for him in the drawing-room. He lit a cigarette, let it go out again and, at first in a spirit of distraction and then with a growing interest, looked around him, as though he were trying to gather from inanimate objects particulars relating to the man who lived ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... prolonged stay in South America I was pleased, too, to recognise familiar pictures, furniture and china which I had last met in their English Wiltshire home, all of them with the stolid impassiveness of inanimate objects unaware that they had been spirited across the Atlantic, three thousand ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... supernal coffee-pot! Gentle panacea of domestic troubles, Faithful author of that sweet nepenthe which deadens all the ills that married folks are heir to. Cheery, glittering, soul-soothing, warmed hearted, inanimate friend! What wife can fail to admit the peace and serenity she owes to you? To you, who stand between her and all her early morning troubles— Between her and the before-breakfast grouch— Between her and the morning-after ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... whatever, they do not fail to catch on to it with surprising agility. A blade of grass, a bit of straw, the handle of my tweezers which I hold out to them: they accept anything in their eagerness to quit the provisional shelter of the flower. It is true that, after finding themselves on these inanimate objects, they soon recognize that they have gone astray, as we see by their bustling movements to and fro and their tendency to go back to the flower if there still be time. Those which have thus giddily flung ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... minds of the compassionating officers, as they directed their glance alternately from the common to the pale and marble-like features of the younger De Haldimar, who, with parted lips and stupid gaze, continued to fix his eyes upon the inanimate form of his ill-fated brother, as if the very faculty of life itself had been for a period suspended. At length, however, while his companions watched in silence the mining workings of that grief which they feared to interrupt by ill-timed observations, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Then he looked again and the red-light was gone. But caution is a magic watchword with all railroad men, and he stopped. Climbing down out of the cab of the engine, he took his torch, and started out to investigate. He didn't have far to go, when he came upon the limp, inanimate form of Mary Marsh, the extinguished red-light tightly clasped in her ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... laboring under gave this woman new strength. She raised the insensible girl, carried her through the vacant chamber, and laid her on the bed in her own room. She drew the bedclothes over her inanimate form ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... you may see in his public speeches, but I am more completely convinced of it since I have heard him converse. His illustrations are drawn from the workshop, the manufactory, the mine, the mechanic, the poet—from every art and science, from every thing in nature, animate or inanimate. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... our great stay and support under all afflictions and perplexities upon earth—and that there are indications of his power and goodness in all the aspects of the visible universe, whether living or inanimate—every part of which should therefore be regarded with love and reverence, as exponents of those great attributes. We can testify, at least, that these salutary and important truths are inculcated at far greater length, and with more repetitions, than in ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... dress angrily and pushed it on over her head, giving a little impatient scream as she rumpled her hair. Then she reached up and back, straining her arms to push the top snap of the corsage into place. But with the quiet glee of inanimate things the snap immediately snapped out again. Flushing, Madame d'Avala repeated her performance, and the snap repeated its. Madame d'Avala stamped both feet and gave a little gasp of rage. She attacked the belt with no better luck. Chiffon and lace became ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... by the system that he had all but completed, would place at the disposition of man; and at the same time Sir Athelstone could with difficulty be held in leash while he impatiently awaited an opportunity to explain how excessively near he had arrived to the direct production of protoplasm from inanimate matter, and the chemical control of living cells, so that henceforth man could people or unpeople the earth ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... ago, I was strangely handsome. The remains of it are still visible through the rifts of time. I was so handsome that human activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even inanimate things stopped to look—like locomotives, and district messenger boys and so-on. In San Francisco, in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather. Upon one occasion I was traveling in the Sonora region, and stopped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... After enduring the perils of the sea for many days, land was sighted; and, the other boats having disappeared, an attempt was made to land. The boat was capsized, and Miss Montrose alone reached the shore. For a long time she lay upon the sand almost inanimate; but, reviving sufficiently to move, she at length obtained some shellfish, and by degrees recovered her strength. From that time forth until I appeared she never set eyes upon a human being. To attract any passing vessel, and obtain assistance, however, she kept a beacon ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... these into her lap; while the mist itself was so dense that she seemed to be breathing water instead of air. There was no denying that to-morrow would do as well as to-night. But her impatient spirit fretted against delay; and this senseless obtrusion of inanimate things,—angering her, as only the inanimate can,—drowned the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... and this aristocracy, squirearchy, and what not, who now send their empty carriages to pay respect to the fashionable corpse, shall have transferred their empty worship to some other animate or inanimate thing. Well, perhaps after all it was better to have been mighty Milton in his poverty and blindness—witty and ingenious Butler consigned to the tender mercies of bailiffs, and starving Otway; they might enjoy more real pleasure than ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... returned the queen, "will be to say to yourself, 'Am I so poor a maid that I cannot by the very beauty of my dancing keep the eyes of the watchers lifted clear above my shoes? For shoes, what are shoes? Leather and wood. Inanimate, unthinking stuff! They are not worth one heart pang, one moment of misery to me or mine. But I, I am alive. I can see and think and understand. I can go so joyously through the mazes of the dance that the watchers may ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... with himself and displeased with the whole world. People were unkind and unjust. Even inanimate objects were unusually aggravating. He wasted half an hour trying to untie a knot, hunted for a package of papers which were finally found in their proper place, had a vexing ten minutes with ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the material, from the shape, or from the magic rites performed at the time of their preparation. According to a popular belief, which prevailed throughout the East in the earlier centuries of the Christian era, all objects, whether inanimate stones and metals, or brutes and plants, possessed an indwelling spirit or soul, which was the cause of the efficiency of all amulets.[5:1] They were therefore akin to fetishes, in the present acceptation of the term; for a fetish, as defined in the classification ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... swept over it, and a piece of brie-a-brae had been thrown upon the floor. He got up and replaced it with an attentive air. He rearranged the other pieces on the table mechanically, seeing, feeling another scene, another inanimate thing which must be for ever and for ever a picture burning in his memory. Yet he appeared to be casually doing a trivial and necessary act. He did not definitely realise his actions; but long afterwards he could have drawn an accurate plan of the table, could have reproduced upon it each ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sat beside the stove, his eyes upon the inanimate form of the outlaw. Drowsiness overcame him then, and he rolled into the other bunk. He was awakened several hours later by DeBar, who was filling the ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... pleased with the gratification of their vanity, but incapable of a bold and generous resolution in favor of the man they pretend to love. I will not upbraid you; but from this moment cast you from me as a piece of inanimate clay, a painted thing, alike incapable of ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... chair out of the way, so that it slid along the rough floor a little distance and overturned with a crash. Calumet cursed. He was minded to take the chair up and hurl it down again, so vengeful was the temper he was in, but his second sober sense urged upon him the futility of attacking inanimate things and he contented himself with snarling at it. He stood silent for a moment, a hope in his heart that his father, alarmed over the sudden commotion, would come to investigate, and a wave of sardonic satisfaction swept over him ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... nations-these epochs of humanity-but waves rising and breaking on the great sea of eternity? Mysterious Egypt, haughty Assyria, glorious Greece, kingly Rome;—how spectral they have become. They stand out in no relief. As we recede from them, they sink back, flat and inanimate on the horizon. Each is a tale that has been told. Surely, then, if such is the life of nations, I need not labor to impress upon you a sense of the brevity of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... had passed that way twice a day for years on end—always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a studied insolence—never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with downright relief that presently she turned from ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... him back into the proper channel, and then opened the lock-gates for him. Tom congratulated himself as he entered the lock that there were no other boats going through with him; but his evil star was in the ascendant, and all things, animate and inanimate, seemed to be leagued together to humiliate him. As the water began to fall rapidly, he lost his hold of the chain and the tub instantly drifted across the lock, and was in imminent danger of sticking and breaking ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps, one of the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against living thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... highest, ultimate principle of all existence,—the Tae-keih, or Grand Extreme. This is absolutely immaterial, and the basis of the order of the universe. From this ultimate principle, operating from all eternity, come all animate and inanimate nature. It operates in a twofold way, by expansion and contraction, or by ceaseless active and passive pulsations. The active expansive pulsation is called Yang, the passive intensive pulsation is Yin, and the two may be called the Positive and Negative Essences of all things. When the active expansive ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... looking at her in admiration. Seated there, in the centre of her salon, she was awaiting him and arranging bundles of papers in a basket with gilded feet and lined with pink satin. She extended her hand to him. It was a pale hand, as inanimate as the hand of a dead person, and she languidly asked him why he remained there stupefied without ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... peace without a suspicion of the forces that were lurking beneath her own quiet nature. But to both of them the sense of home-coming was stronger than all else—that strange passion for a particular set of inanimate things—or, at the most, for an association of ideas—that has no parallel in human emotions; and as they rode up the darkening valley and the lights of the high windows of the Hall began to show over the trees on their right, Anthony forgot his treason and Isabel her conflicts, and both felt a ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... contains when opened—photographic portraits, small, yet clear and delicate as miniatures. Lilith's eyes gaze forth, seeming to shine from the inanimate cardboard as though with the love-light of gladness; Lilith's beautiful form, erect in characteristic attitude, the head slightly thrown back, the sweet lips compressed, just a touch of sadness in their serenity, as ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... an odd sensation while I was emptying it. I don't know why I put it off so long. Perhaps I dreaded to find, locked in it, a too vivid recollection of the day I closed it. It may be that I was afraid that, with the perversity of inanimate things, it ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... supplies an ideal—and that is the very best thing love does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... sidewalk as its swinging doors jerked apart; and a form lurched out into the night; there, from a dance-hall came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at the brim of ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... who believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his love of flowing waters, and soft green shadows, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... green fields and forests, the enumerable varieties of flowers, the glowing ruby, jasper, topaz, amethist, and emerald, the brilliant diamond, and all the rich and varied hues of nature, both animate and inanimate. ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... furious struggles, was effected in less space than we have taken to describe it. Then, leaving him in the hands of two of their number, who proceeded to bind him securely, the others rushed after Nathan, who, though encumbered by his burden, again inanimate, her arms clasped around his neck, as they had been round that of her kinsman, made the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming to regard her weight no more than if the burden had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran for a moment with astonishing activity, leaping over bush and gully, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... a thud, striking his head against the marble of the fountain, and to Beryl's horror he did not rise again. He simply lay as he had fallen, with arms flung wide and face upturned, motionless, inanimate as a ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the workshop in which he carried on his affairs and the affairs of the concern which had its foundation in unshaken ideals and high honor. In an intangible fashion its inanimate accessories reflected something of himself. On one wall, from a generous spread of moose antlers, hung a rifle and a pair of restrung snowshoes: reminders of the open woods he loved. There were autographed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... efforts of the young imagination, of which boys and girls of unusual inventiveness are capable, are imitated on a smaller scale by all normal children. They endow inanimate things with life, and play and suffer with them as with their real playmates. The little girl not only talks with her dolls, but weeps with and for them when disaster overtakes them. The boy faces foes of his own making ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Supports"—to animals; whilst to human beings, to figures of angels, and to mythological personages or other figures in human form, when supporting a Shield, they apply the term "Les Tenants." When trees or other inanimate objects are placed beside any armorial shield, and so discharge the duty of Supporters in French achievements, they are distinguished as "Les Soutiens." An old French writer on Heraldry, PALLIOT, however, says that in his time (A.D. 1660), ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... quality of mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather, and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... vengeance that, to some extent at least, is incident to life. The dog is hit with a stick and turns and bites the stick. Animals repel attack and fight their enemies to death. The primitive man vented his hatred and vengeance on things animate and inanimate. In the tribes no injury was satisfied until some member of the offending tribe was killed. In more recent times family feuds have followed down the generations and were not forgotten until the last member ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... heavy fringes of hair on the tibia and having the terminal joints slender. Its color is a soft wood-brown or gray, mottled with white. It has the habit of hanging motionless in the web for hours at a time, swaying in the wind like an inanimate object. The strands of its web are rough and inelastic, so that they are frequently broken; this gives it the appearance of one of those dilapidated and deserted webs in which bits of wind-blown rubbish ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... description (in Pope's phrase) take the place of sense—i.e. of the life which it is the business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840), where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... live who are not to do something. There has in truth been a great change during the last five hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of mankind; formerly they passed their time either in exciting action or inanimate repose. A feudal baron had nothing between war and the chase—keenly animating things both—and what was called "inglorious ease". Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet action. Its perpetual commerce is creating a "stock-taking" habit—the habit of asking each ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... hinted at a weird and mysterious antagonism. All the inanimate things seemed to have conspired to throw in our way this man just enough alive to feel pain. The faint and lamentable sounds we had heard must have come from him. He was looking at me. It was impossible to say whether he saw ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... a short time you will find the nerves becoming quiet and you will be able to go to sleep. Sometimes it is good to picture yourself becoming drowsy to induce sleep, and, again, the most persistent insomnia has been overcome by one thinking of himself as some inanimate object—for instance, a hollow log in the depths of the cool, ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... succeeded. All the songs to "persons of quality" seem to be written on that purest model, "the song by a person of quality;" whose stanzas have not been fabricated in vain. This sedulous imitation extends even to the praise of things inanimate: ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... crutch, nor was the 'quizzing-glass' quite absent. Lower extremities, of the same category as the hands, but slightly superior in point of proportional size, were crammed into patent-leather boots, the latter looking as if they had been stuffed with some inanimate substance—say the halves of a calf's head. Why cannot these men adopt some modification of the Chinese costume, felt hat and white shoes, drawers, and upper raiment half-shirt, half-doublet? It has more common sense than any other in ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... through the blue drawing-room to the next one more faintly lighted. Here she halted, looked around, and, seeing only inanimate ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... yards from that inanimate ragged little body, lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... clearing a five-barred gate. This is the standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker." It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as has not been known since St. Francis called the sun brother and the well sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones left at the "Admiral Benbow," with the knife that Wicks drove through ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... solitary excursions for weeks and even months together, in the wilderness. He was a genuine son of nature, a grown up child of the woods and prairie, which he worshiped with a sort of Pagan adoration. Excluded by his infirmities from cordial fellowship with his kind, he made the inanimate things of the earth his friends, and entered, by the heart's own adoption, into brotherhood with the luminaries of heaven! Wherever there was land or water, barren rocks or tangled brakes of wild, waving cane, there was Deaf Smith's home, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... dolphin that was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." And, as Emil Naumann fancies, there is a moral underlying the myth of ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... confidently infer that Jesus, as the Omniscient Lord of the inanimate creation, knew well that fruit there was none under that pretentious foliage. We dare not suppose that He went expecting to find Figs; far less, that in a moment of disappointed hope, He ventured on a capricious exercise of His power, uttered a hasty malediction, and condemned the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... with Mrs. Cohen had delayed her; she was driven desperate by that and malice of inanimate thing: every 'bus and tram was against her, whisking out of sight just as she wanted them, or blocked by slow crawling carts and lorries. There was a tight, hard pain in her heart, like toothache, round which her whole body gathered, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... now came forward. Great was his amazement to recognize, in this dark object, the negro, Cato! He lay upon his face, as lax and motionless as a piece of inanimate matter. ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... pageant, war in mid-career. Sound, too, had organized. He could have beaten time to the gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting, breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the allies man had devised,—the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the solid shot, grape, canister, shrapnel, minie balls. The shells were fearful, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... a limp, inanimate object, and with a sudden sense of overpowering horror he desisted. He stumbled up, staggering slightly, and drew a long, hard breath. His heart was racing like a runaway engine. All the blood in his body seemed to be concentrated there. Almost mechanically he waited for it to slow down. And, ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... same instant, a man leaped from the bulwark of the frigate, and swam vigorously towards the raft. It was Richard Price, the boatswain of the frigate. He reached Henry before the boat did, and, grasping his inanimate form, supported him until it came up and rescued them both. A few minutes later Henry Stuart was restored to consciousness, and the surgeon of the frigate was ministering to him such restoratives as his condition ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... countenance; but there I lost my identity. Though I was the recipient of these impressions, yet I was not myself separately and distinctively existent and sentient; but my entity was confounded with that of not only the two figures before me, but of the inanimate objects surrounding them. This state of compound existence I can no further describe. While in this state I composed the "Fratricide's Death," or rather it composed itself and forced itself upon my memory without any activity or volition ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... here described for use with history may be used simply as a diversion in describing animals or any inanimate objects; or it may be used to correlate with English ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... think and to speak of gravitation as a law of matter; while every quality of matter, in and of itself, is inert, inanimate, and non-intelligent. The assertion that matter is a law, or a lawgiver, is [25] anomalous. Wherever law is, Mind is; and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... in this way, if thought advisable it can be played informally and simply, with no attempt at costuming or theatric effects. It will often add to the interest of the play to have some of the children represent certain of the inanimate objects of the scene, as the forest, the town gate, a door, etc. Occasionally, for the "open day," or as a special exercise, a favorite play may be given by the children with the simplest kind of costuming and stage-setting. These can well be ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... person cuts down, with an axe, a tree in forest, it is the person that incurs the sin and not the axe by any means. Or, if it be said that, the axe being only the material cause, the consequence of the act (of cutting) should attach to the animate agent (and not to the inanimate tool), then the sin may be said to belong to the person that has made the axe. This, however, can scarcely be true. If this be not reasonable, O son of Kunti, that one man should incur the consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities—the sky, the rock, and the ocean—the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... that sense of complete detachment from all but her whose body they had laid to rest on the windy hill overlooking the broad water. His father, Aunt Barbara, the cousins and relations who thronged the church were no more than inanimate shadows compared with her whose presence had come last night into his room, and had not left him since. The affairs of the world, drums and the torch of war, had passed for those hours from his knowledge, as at the centre of a cyclone there was a windless calm. To-morrow ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... not go now; I may be wanted at any moment"—Lord Dashville had very fine taste, but it was not the inanimate beauties of Springhaven that he cared a dash for—"and I fear that I could never see the roses there. I think there is nothing in all nature to compare ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... expressed one look of stupid and yet agonized desire—all eyes were turned upward toward the summit wreathed with lightning. There those who had just gained their goal, lightly touched by the tips of the rose-colored bolts, sank back inanimate, went tumbling down the slope with astonishment frozen on their faces, scattering broadcast from their hands a cascade of treasures—jewels, scraps of paper, purses, images of gold and ivory, wreaths of laurel or of lilies, scepters, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... that "there are certain corners of the great city and certain aspects of Parisian manners, there are some physiognomies that perhaps no one has been able to render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle and patient art which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... counters, where glimmered and flashed jewels of every size and lustre for the adorning of the children of this world,—slowly and carefully, step by step, they reached the upper floor,—and there, in a luxurious apartment furnished with almost feminine elegance, they lifted the inanimate form from the stretcher and laid it down, still shrouded, on a velvet sofa, removing the last number of Truth, and two of Zola's novels, to make room for the heavy, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... mesmerizer could so affect another living being, can you suppose that a mesmerizer could also affect inanimate objects: ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... perfectly clear notion in the case of answers to questions, but in other cases it is much more obscure. We may say generally that an object whether animate or inanimate, is "sensitive" to a certain feature of the environment if it behaves differently according to the presence or absence of that feature. Thus iron is sensitive to anything magnetic. But sensitiveness ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... that could be called human could fail to discriminate between living things and, let us say, the rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelligence, then, must have made a tacit classification of the natural objects about it into the grand divisions of animate and inanimate nature. Doubtless the nascent scientist may have imagined life animating many bodies that we should call inanimate—such as the sun, wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on the other hand, he may quite ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to make the best possible use of his eyes; and, being a very shrewd fellow, he was not long in arriving at the conclusion that the gigantic monster on whose back he stood was, after all, nothing more nor less than an inanimate, though unquestionably wonderful, vehicle of some sort; and that the fair-skinned beings to whom he was talking, though they claimed to be the four Spirits of the Winds, were very similar in many respects to certain white men ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... island, and bound, while he uttered loud howls, toward what appeared to be a human form lying extended upon the sand. They made all possible haste, and soon saw beyond a doubt that it was a man who was lying there, and this man was Mr. Hersebom; bloody, pale, cold, inanimate—dead, perhaps. Kaas was licking his hands, and uttering ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... elementary treatise on ethics. I ought not, however, to leave any doubt as to my own opinion. I believe, then, the rest of the Sabbath a necessity of man's constitution, physical and mental, of that of the beasts subservient to his use, and, in some measure, even of the inanimate agents under his control, while the sequestration of the day from the course of ordinary life is equally a moral and religious necessity. The weekly Sabbath I regard as a dictate of natural piety, and a primeval institution, re-enacted, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... exactly in the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people. It would be cruel to prescribe the same law for the sick as for the sound. It would be absurd to apply to the healthy the restrictions required for the sick. Further, these sweated trades are not inanimate abstractions. They are living, almost sentient, things. Let the House think of these sweated trades as patients in a hospital ward. Each case must be studied and treated entirely by itself. No general rule can be applied. There is ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... have already mentioned, so large a portion of the beauties of inanimate nature, has at no time been without its own share of those charms which are at once more interesting and more transient. To be called the Fair Maid of Perth would at any period have been a high distinction, and have inferred no mean ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... accomplishment of a purpose possesses the same negative merit or demerit, whether it be a thing without a will or an unwilling human being. If we are not free, have no choice in the matter, must consent, we differ in nothing from all brutish and inanimate nature that follows necessarily, fatally, the bent of its instinctive inclinations and obeys the laws of its being. Under these conditions, there can be no morality or responsibility before God; our deeds are alike blameless and valueless ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Limited in Browning on the side of simple human nature; of the family; of the civic community; of myth and symbol 266 VIII. Joy in Soul. 2. Supported by Joy in Light and Colour; in Form; in Power. 3. Extended to (a) sub-human Nature, (b) the inanimate products of Art; Relation of Browning's poetry to ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... opinion, for after carefully covering up the inanimate body he lay down again on his ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there. Like the Egyptians, who held wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen garments. They abstained from bloody sacrifices; and lived on fruits or vegetables or inanimate things. They imitated the life of the contemplative Sects of the Orient; thus approximating to the tranquility of the first men, who lived exempt from trouble and crimes in the bosom of a profound peace. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... calm, calm life,—and it shall be Its own exceeding great reward! No thoughts to vex in all I see, No jeers to bear or disregard;— All creatures and inanimate things Shall be my tutors; I shall learn From beast, and fish, and bird with wings, And rock, and stream, and tree, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... juggling tricks which my brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore. 'A convenient thing enough,' said Dr. Abell to me, 'if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.' 'As if the axe should move itself against him that lifts it; something of that kind?' 'Well, I don't know that that was in my mind so much; but if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the Task in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence—in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation—in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference—in divine ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... has made all things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... and the ropes that bound my limbs, and yet I hardly thought of the pain, so intense was my curiosity as to what was to follow. After the savages were all on board, the first quarter of an hour passed in making their dispositions, Smudge, the stupid, inanimate, senseless Smudge, acting as leader, and manifesting not only authority, but readiness and sagacity. He placed all his people in ambush, so that, one appearing from below, would not at once be apprized of the change that had taken place on deck, and thus give the savages time to act. After ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the metaphor consists in speaking of inanimate things or animals as if they were human. This is called the figure of personification. It raises the lower to the dignity of the higher, and so gives ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... descended the companion-way with their apparently inanimate burden, the young sailor could not help furtively kissing the floating tresses of dark brown hair that swept across his face as he tenderly supported Kate's head on his shoulder, guarding it jealously in the passage below. His anxiety was soon afterwards relieved by Mr Meldrum coming ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... pregnant moment 257 VII. Joy in Soul. 1. Limited in Browning on the side of simple human nature; of the family; of the civic community; of myth and symbol 266 VIII. Joy in Soul. 2. Supported by Joy in Light and Colour; in Form; in Power. 3. Extended to (a) sub-human Nature, (b) the inanimate products of Art; Relation of Browning's poetry to his interpretation ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... should—on the whole. Pulse is poor. That's the worst sign." She picked up the hand lying outside the coverlet and put her finger-tips to the wrist, doing it with the easy nonchalant carelessness with which she might have seized an inanimate object, yet knowing exactly what she was about. "H'm! Fifty-six! That's pretty low. If we could get it above sixty—but still!" Dropping the hand with the same indifference, yet continuing to know what ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... other. In our day multitudes of people fall victims to all kinds of dreadful disasters, explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings. Never before, perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the spirit of the times. Fred found a superb placard, the work of Cheret, a pathetic scene in a mine, banners streaming in the air, with the words 'Bazar de Charite' in gold letters on a red ground, and the courtyard ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture without insisting on the importance of accuracy of style ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... faintest thought of resentment or surprise, he turned back, stooped over the balustrade and looked down into the kitchen. Nothing there was visible but a narrow strip of the white table, on which lay a black cotton glove, and beyond, the glint of a copper pan. What made all these mute and inanimate things so ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... their mistress, and that they might be ready to wait upon her when she wanted them. The very spits at the fire, as full as they could be of partridges and pheasants, and everything in the place, whether animate or inanimate, fell asleep also. ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... crossed the southern provinces of that kingdom bounded by the Baltic, and those on the vast silver basin of Lake Milar, seen Stockholm in all its pride, Upsal, the city of the ancient gods, and Gebel, the active and industrious, he found himself amid a region entirely silent, inanimate, and wrapped in a snowy pall. Soon he penetrated the bosom of a long pine forest, the shafts of which seemed, as it were, giants wrapped in cloaks of white. Now he ascended steep hills, then rapidly hurried to the Gulf, the shores of which the waves had ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... As to inanimate nature, certain lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains, are held in high reverence. In the Kalevala the oak is called Pun Jumalan (God's tree). The mountain-ash even to this day, and the birch-tree, are held sacred, and peasants plant them by ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living people into the reports of the day's news. If a man falls and breaks his neck, a bald recital of the facts deals with him only as an animal or an inanimate name. The fact is interesting as one item in the list of human misfortunes, but no more. And yet there are many people to whom this man's accident is more than an interesting incident—it is a very serious matter, perhaps a calamity. To his family he was everything ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... 'Shaping so well?' With her glance she took in the little cheerless bedroom, and herself and George Cannon within it, overwhelmed. In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark, forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon's bedroom—the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Being must be our great stay and support under all afflictions and perplexities upon earth—and that there are indications of his power and goodness in all the aspects of the visible universe, whether living or inanimate—every part of which should therefore be regarded with love and reverence, as exponents of those great attributes. We can testify, at least, that these salutary and important truths are inculcated at far greater length, and with more repetitions, than in any ten volumes of sermons that we ever ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... we ever met with. Certainly nothing else in London, from St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey and the Tower to our Picture Galleries and Crystal Palace, not even the Duke of Wellington's Equestrian Statue, elicited such praise from him as "very nice," at least as applied to any inanimate object. ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... story has been read in this way, if thought advisable it can be played informally and simply, with no attempt at costuming or theatric effects. It will often add to the interest of the play to have some of the children represent certain of the inanimate objects of the scene, as the forest, the town gate, a door, etc. Occasionally, for the "open day," or as a special exercise, a favorite play may be given by the children with the simplest kind of costuming ...
— Children's Classics in Dramatic Form - Book Two • Augusta Stevenson
... have by some writers been interpreted to be the seven mountains on which the city of Rome is situated. For proof of this interpretation they quote Rev. 17:9. How that inanimate, literal mountains can represent heads, since the head contains the power of intellect and authority, lies beyond ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed—if a chair ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... on a life-long feud with inanimate things," a pure Cerebral friend remarked to us recently. "I have a fight on my hands every time I attempt to use a pair of scissors, a knife and fork, a ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... being meant to dilute it with nothingness. This declension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining some vestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greater proportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, below them man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere, as it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection; yet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinity would still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only a beauty in the whole, to whose existence and order ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... principle of vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... capture. We left him with the lantern, stowing away the decoys, live and inanimate, in the Invigorator. Within fifteen minutes thereafter I was sleeping the sleep of the moderately ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... vision, before the soul can soar above the delicious but inanimate charms of earth, into the glowing region of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... indulge in a remarkable variety of sports is well known even to the novice in the study of their habits. Beginning when very young, they gambol, tussle, leap, and run together, chase one another, play with inanimate objects, as the kitten with the ball, join in the games of children and adults, as the dog which plays hide and seek with his little master, and all with a knowingness and zest which makes them the best of companions. The volumes devoted to the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... than usual, came out of the dim interior of the adjoining room, carrying a yet more limp and inanimate bundle which she exchanged with Miss Lady for hers, and silently retired into the inner room where she was followed by ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... of his council, the most absolute powers might be trusted to a magistrate who was annually chosen by the votes of the people. The rules and precautions of freedom have required some explanation; the order of despotism is simple and inanimate. Before the age of Justinian, or perhaps of Diocletian, the decuries of Roman judges had sunk to an empty title: the humble advice of the assessors might be accepted or despised; and in each tribunal the civil and criminal jurisdiction was administered by a single magistrate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Winnifred, still half inanimate with fright, turned to her rescuer, and saw before her the form and lineaments of the Unknown Stranger, who had thus twice stood between her and disaster. Half fainting, she fell swooning ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... This may seem fanciful to one who regards these things as matters of formalism. But inasmuch as, to the studious eye of affection, they suggest human action and human sympathies, this is a proof that they had their birth in some corresponding affection. It is the inanimate body of Geometry made spiritual and living by the Love of the human heart. And when a later generation reduced the Ionic volutes to rule, and endeavored to inscribe them with the gyrations of the compass, they have no further ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... to the actions of men; he was an exact surveyor of the inanimate world; his descriptions have always some peculiarities, gathered by contemplating things as they really exist. It may be observed that the oldest poets of many nations preserve their reputation, and that the following generations of wit, after a short ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... third of the century, were now getting to be somewhat in fashion again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps, the house door was opened ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... waters was almost deafening. The masses would assume, too, all sorts of fantastic shapes, which one, with a slight exertion of fancy, might imagine bears, and lions, and castles, and ships under sail—indeed all sorts of things, animate and inanimate. As I looked up the stream, my attention was drawn to a large black object, which I soon made out to be a vessel of the largest size which navigates those waters. She came gliding rapidly down—now stem, now stern foremost; now whirling ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... in a few moments Leopold landed her on the narrow beach beneath the lofty rock. The maiden left the boat, climbed the high rock, and wandered about among the wild cliffs and chasms, all alone, for Leopold could not leave the inanimate Rosabel—which the rude sea might injure—to follow the animate and beautiful Rosabel in ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... as quiet in our prison as in a sepulchre. I looked long and attentively at the features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully from the wall beside Him. And with my habit, formed during the long years of solitude, of addressing inanimate things aloud, I said to the ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... resent, That for its own supply was meant? That merits, in a kind mistake, A pardon for th' offence's sake. Or if it did not, but the cause 125 Were left to th' injury at laws, What tyranny can disapprove There should be equity in love; For laws that are inanimate, And feel no sense of love or hate, 130 That have no passion of their own, Nor pity to be wrought upon, Are only proper to inflict Revenge on criminals as strict But to have power to forgive, 135 Is empire and prerogative; And 'tis ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... he would not be able to carry the inanimate figure, so he hurriedly put on his clothes and set out on a run for Colonel Zane's house. The first person whom he saw was the old negro slave, who was brushing one ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... as I have intimated, exceedingly frail and unobtrusive in appearance; yet when we came upon this scene, the group of men about the inanimate form of her lover parted involuntarily as if a spirit had come upon them; though I do not think one of them, until that moment, had any suspicion of the relations between her and their young pastor. Being close behind her, I pressed forward ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... left the plain, and I took an everlasting farewell of the Temple of Genii. Poor inanimate Rock! which should so much bewilder man's crazy brain, and fill the desert travellers with such strange fancies. We turned to the north-west into a gorge of the chain of Wareerat. In this gorge, besides the usual black sandstone, with ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... regulated by empirical laws. As such, he must possess an empirical character, like all other natural phenomena. We remark this empirical character in his actions, which reveal the presence of certain powers and faculties. If we consider inanimate or merely animal nature, we can discover no reason for ascribing to ourselves any other than a faculty which is determined in a purely sensuous manner. But man, to whom nature reveals herself only through sense, cognizes himself not only by his senses, but also through pure ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... opened into maturity; storm and blight and death had passed over, and destroyed all. While yet very young, I had reached the position of an aged person, driven back on memory for companionship with the beloved, and now I looked on the inanimate objects that had surrounded me, which survived the same in aspect as then, to feel that all my life since is an unreal phantasmagoria—the shades that gathered round that scene were the realities, the substances and truth of the soul's life which I ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... in the hall when Miss Preston passed through the hall to dinner, and, unless suddenly stricken with ophthalmy, she could not fail to see the flaring notice. "Ah," she said, softly, to herself, "you have a triple mission, you inanimate bit of the carpenter's skill: first, to teach my girls a lesson in longitude and time, second, to mutely ask my permission for a frolic to-night, and, third, to suggest that when birthdays arrive it would be a most auspicious time for the "C. C. C.'s" ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... [Sext. Emp. adrersus Math. lib. viii.], though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects, as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. This is also the common reason assigned by historians, for the deification of eminent heroes ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... no longer the leisure for these little eccentricities of language and suffer them to pass from common use. If the Latin races would only meet in convention and agree to bestow the comfortable neuter gender on inanimate objects and commodities, how popular they might make themselves with the English-speaking nations; but having begun to "enrich" their language, and make it more "subtle" by these perplexities, centuries ago, they will no doubt continue them until ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... without a priest and altars? The temples are inanimate, and know not What vows are made in them; the priest stands ready For his hire, and cares not what hearts he couples; Love ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... objective knowledge comes first Physics, including the whole body of the relations of inanimate unorganised bodies; secondly, Physiology. Including the structure and functions of animal bodies, including language and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... among many, may be found in the fact that the now civilized Muskoki or Creeks, as mentioned by Rev. H.F. Buckner, when speaking of the height of children or women, illustrate their words by holding their hands at the proper elevation, palm up; but when describing the height of "soulless" animals or inanimate objects, they hold the palm downward. This, when correlated with the distinctive signs of other Indians, is an interesting case of the survival of a practice which, so far as yet reported, the oldest men of the tribe, now ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... day was declining, and Moscow continued dull, silent, and seemingly inanimate. The anxiety of the emperor increased, and the impatience of the soldiers could scarcely be repressed. Some officers ventured within the walls of the city. ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... than a landscape or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to their long journals—which though so living to them, are so dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else—a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see it. They say at once, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... sacrifice to God they took a lamb or some other animal, which they slew and burned its flesh, acknowledging by this act that the Lord was the supreme Master of life and death. The ancients offered to God two kinds of sacrifices, viz., living creatures, such as bulls, lambs and birds; and inanimate objects, such as wheat and barley, and, in general, the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... direction of his finger, and saw suspended from a tree the inanimate body of a man, the features livid and distorted, and wearing an expression of terror and dismay, as if his fate had come upon him without time ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... those points. On the other hand, if in the blackest midnight I should come to her, she would not need to ask who the comer was. It is by the mind, not the eye, that these people know one another. It is really only in their relations to soulless and inanimate things that they ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... that passed through the minds of the compassionating officers, as they directed their glance alternately from the common to the pale and marble-like features of the younger De Haldimar, who, with parted lips and stupid gaze, continued to fix his eyes upon the inanimate form of his ill-fated brother, as if the very faculty of life itself had been for a period suspended. At length, however, while his companions watched in silence the mining workings of that grief which they feared to interrupt by ill-timed observations, even of condolence, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... was like a section of an orange; it cast a warm, low radiance through the room. His gaze rested on the photograph of Lettice's mother in her coffin. He imagined that paper effigy of inanimate clay moved, turned its dull head to regard him. "I'm getting old," he told himself contemptuously, repressing an involuntary start of surprise. His heart rested like a lump of lead in his breast; it oppressed ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he was! He gave a hopeless, desperate tug at the chrysalis in vain. Sheet, blanket, and spread were firmly wound around Jacob's inanimate form. ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... at Susy d'Orsel's apartment in company with the young companion he had picked up at Raxim's and the subsequent supper, and then he broke into a cold sweat as his mind flashed to the picture of Fandor's return with the inanimate body of his mistress in his arms—dead. ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... creatures have souls, not only men and women, but brutes, vegetables, nay, even the most inanimate things, as stocks and stones. They believe the same of all works of art, as of knives, boats, looking-glasses; and that, as any of these things perish, their souls go into another world, which is inhabited by the ghosts of men and women. For this reason ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... 'Comparative Psychical Research,' and on 'Savage and Classical Spiritualism') may be accounted for with ease. Like other myths, equally uniform and widely diffused, they represent the natural play of human fancy. Inanimate objects are stationary, therefore let us say that they move about. Men do not float in the air. Let us say that they do. Then we have the 'physical phenomena' of spiritualism. This objection had already occurred to, and been stated by, the author. But the difficulty ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... from the stern and stretched out his arm to seize the inanimate body of his friend. But the movement was too much for the equilibrium of the frail boat and for the balance of the boy. Out into the water shot George, overturning the craft until its keel was ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... division into "animate" and "inanimate"—the good man gave the human race only one soul—followed a system that looked like a pyramid. On the top was God with the angels and spirits and other accessories, while the oysters and polyps and ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... he took her hand and, drawing her nearer to the bed and to himself, placed it upon her dead brother's breast, she recoiled at the touch of the inanimate body, so unlike anything she had ever touched before, but she obeyed her father without any question, and listened to his words as to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... err who believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his love of flowing ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... excepting those to which tradition or classical authors had given fixed forms and attributes—as the mermaid, harpy, phoenix; consequently, a device representing a winged tortoise, the motto, Amor addidit (Love has added them), was improper. Qualities ascribed to animate or inanimate bodies by the ancients, were considered legitimate, though known by the moderns to be fictitious. Thus the dolphin, from the story of Arion, appears in devices as the friend of the distressed; the salamander, living ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... were constantly with him, however, and when her work ended for the day, and she walked homeward across the hills to Braley Brook, she connected many an inanimate object she passed with some look or word of his. These looks and words had always been so kind, so gentle, that as the brook, where the forget-me-nots grew in summer, or the bank in the hollow where the primroses grew thickest in spring, or the fallen tree, which, as the weeks passed, would ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... shop, and still it seemed that the remarkable figure was standing there fingering the books, pondering, deciding. Her emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old man, and his eyes twitched, and he gave her a little happy sidelong nod. She wanted to tell ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... but these are inanimate substances. Glass does not breathe, air does not breathe. This thing has a heart that palpitates,—a will that moves it,—lungs that play, and ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression, as I relaxed to her—almost like something inanimate.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You are not very ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the Heath, infused a new feeling, a realization of unalloyed happiness; we were rapidly hastening toward scenes for which the soul was yearning, and hope, bright, young hope, lent wings and a charm to every object, animate and inanimate. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Whether it was a lion or a snake in him that fascinated, it is certainly true that he impressed every one who knew him. In some respects his influence was very singular. He seemed to throw out a strange devitalizing force that acted as well upon inanimate as upon animate things. The new buffet had not been in the dining-room six months before it looked as ancient as the Louis XIV. pier-glass in the upper hall. This subtle influence of Mr. Maddledock had wrought a curious effect upon the whole ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... respective position as to amount at spring and at neap. But the necessary result of such a view is no other than the admission of the astrological influence of the heavenly bodies; first, as respects inanimate nature, and then as respects the fortune and fate of men. It is not until the vast distance of the starry bodies is suspected that man begins to feel the necessity of a mediator between him and them, and star-worship ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Latin word nomen, signifies name. The name of any thing [1] that exists, whether animate or inanimate, or which we can see, hear, feel, taste, smell, or think of, is a noun. Animal, bird, creature, paper, pen, apple, fold, house, modesty, virtue, danger, are all nouns. In order that you may easily distinguish this part of speech from others, I will give you ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... tell me?" I said, scarce able to command my words, under the power of association, or memory, which was laying its message on my heart, though it was a flower that bore the message. Inanimate things do that sometimes - I think, often, - when the ear of the soul is open to hear them; and flowers in especial are the Lord's messengers and speak what He gives them. I knew this one spoke ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to us as flesh and blood, show him as flesh and sap; show him as a living cell; show him as protoplasm. Lower than this we should not fairly go; it is not in the bond or nexus of our ideas that something utterly inanimate and inorganic should scheme, design, contrive, and elaborate structures which can make mistakes: it may elaborate low unerring things, like crystals, but it cannot elaborate those which have the power to err. Nevertheless, we will commit such abuse ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... branch of his subject, the Doctor observed that, interesting as were these proofs of the accuracy of their histories, and of the great revolutions of inanimate nature, there was another topic connected with St. Helena, which, he felt certain, would excite a lively emotion in the breasts of all who heard him. At the period of his visit, the island had been selected as a prison for a great conqueror and disturber of his fellow-creatures; ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... had Rollo's old Oxford friend, Dr. Drewitt, here for two nights—the very cheerfulest of guests. He is head of the Victoria Hospital for Children, and what with keen interest in his profession, and intense love of nature, animate and inanimate, I don't think he would know how to be bored. Hard-worked men have far the best of it here below, although we are accustomed to look upon "men of leisure" as those to be envied; but how seldom one finds a man or woman, who lives a life in earnest, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... organized efforts of the young imagination, of which boys and girls of unusual inventiveness are capable, are imitated on a smaller scale by all normal children. They endow inanimate things with life, and play and suffer with them as with their real playmates. The little girl not only talks with her dolls, but weeps with and for them when disaster overtakes them. The boy faces ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... protection of Shakespeare it would have liberty to attempt anything, scarcely ventures at the present day even to try timidly to follow him. Meanwhile England, France, and the whole of Europe demand of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist. The classical system had its origin in the life of its time: that time has passed; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced. Near the monuments of past ages, the monuments ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... Christians' Christmas was not far off, the soft airs seemed to be whispering all the sweet messages of the ardent spring that smiles over Eastern lands. This was a world of young rapture, not careless, but softly intense with joy. All things animate and inanimate were surely singing a love-song, effortless because it flowed from the very core of a heart ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... and he seemed destined to be her Phaon. During his long absences with the Emperor she would long to see him—nay, even with tears; but, as soon as he was by her side again, and she could look at his inanimate beauty and into his weary eyes, when she heard the torpid "Yes" or "No" with which he replied to her questions, the spell was entirely broken and she honestly confessed to herself that she would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... ... it had ceased to beat! To all appearances Alwyn was DEAD—any physician would have certified the fact, though how he had come by his death there was no evidence to show. And in that condition, ... stirless, breathless ... white as marble, cold and inanimate as stone, Heliobas left him. Not in indifference, but in sure knowledge—knowledge far beyond all mere medical science—that the senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion; that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,—and that the jewel itself, the Soul of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... attracted their attention was the dead body of a female, reclining on a bed in an attitude of deep interest and attention. Her countenance retained the freshness of life: but a contraction of the limbs showed that her form was inanimate. Seated on the floor was the corpse of an apparently young man, holding a steel in one hand and a flint in the other, as if in the act of striking fire upon some tinder which lay beside him. In the fore-part of the vessel ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... through the narrow gate-way, standing beside a group of the guard that surrounded Clary, who, kneeling beside a panting and reeking pony, held the inanimate form of Henry Burton in ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... greyhounds. Mocking bravos encouraged him. And he, carried away with enthusiasm, jigged about with such frenzy that suddenly, carried away by a wild spurt, he pitched head foremost into the living wall formed by the audience, which opened up before him to allow him to pass, then closed around the inanimate body of the dancer, stretched out ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Distance from his Body: Which made him take a fatal Resolution of returning to Seville in Disguise, where he wander'd about the Convent every Night like a Ghost (for indeed his Soul was within, while his inanimate Trunk was without) till at last he found Means to convey a Letter to her, which both surprized and delighted her. The Messenger that brought it her was one of her Mother-in-Law's Maids, whom he had known before, and met accidentally one Night as ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... The inanimate body, wrapped in linen, was deposited in a spacious,[44] cool rock chamber, the entrance of which was closed, not by a well-fitting door, but by a stone rolled against the opening, which would of course ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... girl was stretched upon the damp flag-stones, scarcely visible in the gloom of the apartment, which was lighted only by means of a narrow window, protected by bars, and completely shaded by creeping plants. She was alone, inanimate, cold as the stone ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... however, have a variety corresponding to that of the subjects on which they are occupied. A sagacity applied to external and inanimate nature, forms one species of capacity; that which is turned to society and human affairs, another. Reputation for parts in any scene is equivocal, till we know by what kind of exertion that reputation is gained. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... eagerly scanned her features, and being positive of her identity I took the inanimate form of Arletta in my arms and kissing her tenderly, was overcome ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... were stretched on the rock, inanimate, and no longer conscious of what passed around them. Ayrton alone, by a supreme effort, from time to time raised his head, and cast a despairing glance ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... departments—from angelic life, human life, animal life, and inanimate creation. But in every case there is in the selection and use of the symbol a proper correspondence of ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... beneath the resistless force of the other's huge muscles, she heard the crack that announced the parting of the vertebrae and saw the limp thing which had but a moment before been a man, pulsing with life and vigor, roll helplessly aside—a harmless and inanimate lump ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Hades. It is also called "the steed-necked incarnation of Vishnu", the "Preserver" of the Hindu trinity who rode on its back. The hymn referred to lauds Garuda as "the bird of life, the presiding spirit of the animate and inanimate universe ... destroyer of all, creator of all". It burns all "as the sun in his anger ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the chair, passed his arm under it, and turned a screw. The springs opened and loosed their hold upon the inanimate body. ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... M'seur Howland," he said; and as he staggered out on the ice with his inanimate burden, he spoke softly to himself, "The saints preserve me, but what would the sweet Meleese say if she knew that Jean Croisset had come so near to losing the life of this M'seur le engineer? Ce monde ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... It is not merely a record of two interesting episodes in the prophet's later days, but it also aims at a definite religious object. That object is to throw contempt on idolatry, whether directed to inanimate or animate things; to honour Daniel as vindicator of the true worship; and to shew that the adoration of heathen deities is lying and deceptive, and ought to be supplanted by ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... they looked, dancing joyously forward towards the shore! And the sun, that seems to bring happiness to inanimate things, brought hope and confidence back to the hearts of those ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the bird ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... in stone or rocks and is, they say, the oldest god of all—he is grandfather of all living things. I think, however, that the stone is merely the symbol of the everlasting, all-pervading, invisible Ta-ku Wa-kan—the essence of all life,—pervading all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S.R. Riggs, who for forty years has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions, etc., says, Tahkoo Wahkan, p. 55, et seq.: "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the warmth of life and love that has put them into the world that they may be forever the witnesses of the past for posterity! No matter, for when they have been made sufficiently to resound like an inanimate cymbal, there comes an hour when they revive under the breath of a true and living being, and they depart to spread life. Then they fulfil their role as educators. To educate is to explain a being to itself. And this is the benign service that the voice performs. It tells us ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... but the chair bound to his legs tripped him up and he fell sprawling on the floor. He apparently regarded the chair as some sort of German infernal machine clutching him, and he lay there wrestling with his inanimate antagonist as though it were a demon. As soon as the victim understood the joke he joined in the burst of merriment that ran round the room; but it was of short duration. The gloom got us again, despite all that de Burgher ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... and came there from the city to live years before. He was a strange man; indeed, I know now that all the possessors of the Ferry farm must have been strange men. One often hears of the influence of climate upon character; there is a strong influence of place; and the inanimate things which surround us indoors and out make us follow out in our lives their own silent characteristics. We unconsciously catch the tone of every house in which we live, and of every view of the outward, ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... seeming absurdity of their interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the inanimate scene itself. But what was at least excusable, on this footing, in the antients, would be an unpardonable ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... body, leaning on her hands and knees, her hair disheveled, her clothes dripping with water, she contemplated the unhappy child, extended, almost expiring on the ground. Pale, inanimate, her eyes half open and without expression, her beautiful flaxen hair falling flat over her forehead, her blue lips, her small hands, already stiff and icy—one would have thought her dead. "La Goualeuse!" repeated La Louve, "what chance! I who came to tell my Martial the good and evil ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... time at any rate measure his ruin—with three fantastic mortgages on his house, his shop, his stock, and a burden of interest to carry under which his business simply stretched itself inanimate, without strength for a protesting kick, without breath for an appealing groan. Customers lingering for further enjoyment of the tasteful remarks he had cultivated the unobstrusive art of throwing in, would at this crisis have found plenty ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... this direction is given by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study entitled "Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History". Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to animation in the male and female, but the canon law ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... he says, is not in things which exist; a good tree cannot bear evil fruit; it must, therefore, have another origin. But this is dualism, and must be rejected.[163] Nor is evil in God, nor of God; nor in the angels; nor in the human soul; nor in the brutes; nor in inanimate nature; nor in matter. Having thus hunted evil out of every corner of the universe, he asks—Is evil, then, simply privation of good? But privation is not evil in itself. No; evil must arise from "disorderly and inharmonious motion." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and all dispositions? would subvert rather than promote the true purpose of the Divine counsels; which is, not to produce obedience by a force little short of mechanical constraint, (which obedience would be regularity, not virtue, and would hardly perhaps differ from that which inanimate bodies pay to the laws impressed upon their nature), but to treat moral agents agreeably to what they are; which is done, when light and motives are of such kinds, and are imparted in such measures, that the influence of them depends upon the recipients themselves? "It is not meet to govern rational ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... contemplation was directed. For both of them it was something more than a ruin, something more than a relic out of the tragic past. It had become, above all for the Colonel, a part of their lives, a piece of inanimate destiny to which they felt themselves tied by all the bonds of possession. It was theirs, and they in turn were possessed by the influence it exercised over their lives. Their dear ones had died within its walls, and some intuition, feeling blindly through the lightless passages of the future, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... in the development of personal morality, the hostility of inanimate nature, coupled with the urgency of inner needs, has also played its part in the socialization of man. The satisfying of hunger, protection against storm, flood, and other physical calamities, is greatly ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... impitoyable, pitiless. implacable, implacable, unappeasable. implorer, to implore, beseech. important, important, weighty. importer, to be of importance; il n'importe, no matter. imposteur, m., impostor. impuissant, powerless, impotent. impur, unclean, foul. imputer, to ascribe. inanim, inanimate, lifeless. inconnu, unknown. inconstance, f., inconstancy, restlessness, fickleness. Inde, Indus (river). Indien, m., Indian. indigne, unworthy, shameful. indompt, wild, untamed, indomitable. invitable, unavoidable. inexorable, inexorable, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... thinking will be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... of inanimate objects the rope flipped in a loop around Sundown's foot. The horse bucked, just once, and Sundown was launched on a new and promising career. The ground shot beneath him. He clutched wildly at the bunch-grass, secured some, and took ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... connects itself with my very childhood, fifty years back. The fancy of those who wrote the songs which I was obliged to hear in infancy was a very inanimate and sleepy fancy. I could enumerate a dozen songs at least which all described sleeping shepherds and shepherdesses, and, in one instance, where they both went to sleep: this is not fair certainly; it is not even ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... pilot-house on to the deck. He almost stumbled over the body of Malvoise as he did so. It lay as inanimate as in death where it had been thrown against the railing by the impact of the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the half-inanimate form seemed suddenly inspired with life and vigor, and, bounding to her feet with a shriek of rage, she dealt him a blow with her open hand on the side of his head, which made him see more stars than can usually be discerned on the clearest ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... what my father would call 'the aggravation of inanimate things'! Those grapes knew that you wanted them, that I wanted to get them for you, and see how they act? But I'll have them yet. Don't fear. That old fellow I camped-out with this last summer told me it was a coward who ever gave ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... regular police, safety, plenty, and cleanliness; and as a proof of the attention of government to preserve the splendor and ornaments of the capital, a particular inspector was appointed for the statues; the guardian, as it were, of that inanimate people, which, according to the extravagant computation of an old writer, was scarcely inferior in number to the living inhabitants of Rome. About thirty years after the foundation of Constantinople, a similar magistrate was created in that rising metropolis, for the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Prof. having decided that the descent of the remainder of the canyon, considering all the circumstances, was for us impracticable and unnecessary, we prepared to leave for Kanab. We unpacked the good old boats rather reluctantly. They had come to possess a personality as such inanimate objects will, having been our faithful companions and our reliance for many a hundred difficult miles, and it seemed like desertion to abandon them so carelessly to destruction. We ought to have had a funeral pyre. The flags of the boats, which Mrs. Thompson had made and which had been ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent: but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... a great friend of Mr. Fleet," she said, studying and sketching him as if he had been an inanimate object. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... father," she said. "I know that spirits often dwell in inanimate objects. At night some articles of furniture talk, either by giving knocks at regular intervals or by emitting little flashes of light as signals. And even more. Have you remarked, my father, at the entrance ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... hut which hid the giant black. The fellow did not see the huge form which silently loomed behind him. The knob-stick swung upward in a curve, and downward again. There was the sound of a dull thud, the crushing of heavy bone, and the sentry slumped into a silent, inanimate lump ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... relic of the Konigstrasse had been the headquarters of one of the branches of these numerous societies; and the students still held to those ancient traditions. But men and epochs pass swiftly; only the inanimate remain. This temple of patriotism is simply an inn to-day, owned by one Stuler, and is designated by those who patronize it as "Old Stuler's." It is the gathering place of the students. It consists of a hall and a garden, the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... (I call it the Burial of the Book, since the Latin name he has given it is unpronounceable, even if it were possible to recollect it), charmingly humorous, and which is also remarkable for impersonating an inanimate object in verse as Dickens does in prose, there occur ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... said St. Guenole, "one might baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by aspersion or immersion, not only a bird or a quadruped, but also an inanimate object, a statue, a table, a chair, etc. That animal would be Christian, that idol, that table would be ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... define the class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to their long journals—which though so living to them, are so dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else—a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see it. They say at once, 'Now we know the sort of thing'. The sketch has hit ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... by the growing movement of the time. But however we may gild the case by a cheering illustration, or by the remembrance that the provision is one called for only by our excess of wealth, it can hardly be contemplated without a shudder at a process so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects. ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... wrought, and has lain many years on the surface, is now thought capable of yielding a second crop; and when I was at Lima, they were actually turning it up, and milling it over again with great success. This is a proof that these minerals generate in the earth like all other inanimate things;[3] and it likewise appears, from all the accounts of the Spaniards, that gold, silver, and other metals are continually growing and forming in the earth. This opinion is verified by experience ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... stretching out her arms to fold thee fast, She found her useless bolster in her arms. [1] Think, think, on that.—Oh! think, think well on that. I do remember also to have read [2] In Dryden's Ovid's Metamorphoses, That Jove in form inanimate did lie With beauteous Danae: and, trust me, love, [3] I fear'd the bolster ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... apply himself more resolutely to public business, he remarked it as an unreasonable and absurd thing that artificers, using vessels and instruments inanimate, should know the name, place, and use of every one of them, and yet the statesman, whose instruments for carrying out public measures are men, should be negligent and careless in the knowledge of persons. And so he not only acquainted himself ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... most important, and will principally account for the superiority of modern travels over those which were published a century ago, or even fifty years since. It is plain that our knowledge of foreign countries relates either to animate or inanimate nature: to the soil and geology, the face of the surface, and what lies below it; the rivers, lakes, mountains, climate, and the plants; or to the natural history, strictly so called:—and to the manners, institutions, government, religion, and statistics of the inhabitants. Consequently, as ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... sides of our little cove there was one deserted wigwam, and it alone reminded us that man sometimes wandered into these desolate regions. But it would be difficult to imagine a scene where he seemed to have fewer claims or less authority. The inanimate works of nature—rock, ice, snow, wind, and water, all warring with each other, yet combined against man—here ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... ripped it from its nail, and, raising it over his head, smashed frame and glass, cursing all saints, all priests, and churchly people. Havoc followed him as he raged about the place wreaking his fury upon inanimate objects. When he had well-nigh wrecked the contents of the room, and when his first paroxysm had spent its violence, he hurled himself into a chair, writhing in agony. He bit his wrists, he pounded his fists, he kicked; finally he sprawled full length upon the floor, ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You are not ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... that a white moving shadow which approaches through the gloom? There arises a shriek, a heavy body falls, 'tis a lacquey who has seen and recognised The White Lady of the Grand Ducal House, that walks before the deaths of Princes. Burkard and Sauerbeck spurn the inanimate body of the menial witness. The white figure, bearing in her arms a sleeping child, glides to the tapestried wall, and vanishes through it, into the Chamber of the Crown Prince, a babe of fourteen days. She returns carrying another unconscious infant form, she places it in the hands of the ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... this book in your pocket there would be no excuse if you neglected to find out at a wedding the names of the bride and bridegroom. It also gives—and I think this is very friendly of it—a list of useful synonyms for the principal subjects, animate and inanimate, of description. The danger of calling the protagonists at the court of Hymen (this one is not from the book; I thought of it myself just now)—the danger of calling them "the happy pair" more than once in a column is that your readers begin to suspect that you are a person of extremely limited ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... mill work is behindhand and they are kept over hours. They are usually beyond speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... to detach from its position a piece of colored bunting. But it is the animus that characterizes the act. An insult offered to a mere symbol of authority becomes, under critical circumstances, an unpardonable crime. If the symbol, instead of being an inanimate object, be a human being—a high officer of the Government—does not such an outrage as that committed by Terry exceed in enormity the offense denounced by General Dix? And if so, why should the punishment ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... into two classes, which do not correspond either with the Aryan genders or with the distinctions of animate and inanimate which prevail in the Algonkin tongues. These classes have been styled noble and common. To the noble belong male human beings and deities. The other class comprises women and all other objects. It seems probable, however, that the distinction in the ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... quadruped endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most admirable non-resistance. No wonder that May's discernment was at fault, I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have said that the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a bowl or a cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid of sensation and of will. At last my poor pet, thoroughly perplexed and tired out, fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly away, turning back once or twice to look at the object of her curiosity, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... possible," I asked, "that the growth of love in the heart will so transform a world and make even inanimate things more beautiful? The earth is full of selfishness and I fear will be so for a long time, and yet we think we have a few things that are perfect. I cannot conceive, for instance, how anything could ever grow, sin or no sin, that would surpass ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... corresponds in religion some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... resemblance to the Jewish Talmud, combining, with aphorisms and maxims, philological explanations of the divine text, stories illustrative of its doctrines, into which not only saints and heroes, but also animals and inanimate objects, are introduced, and not a few of the fables that pass as AEsop's are to be found in the Jatakas of Ceylon. There are translations into Singhalese of the greater part of its contents, and so attractive are its narratives that the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... creature, abhors the whole thing most cordially, and when I think what wondrous revelations are flowing to her hourly through those five gates of knowledge, her senses, I am not surprised that she despises and detests the inanimate dead letter of mere ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... marvel—from my very birth My soul was drunk with love, which did pervade And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth; Of objects all inanimate I made Idols, and out of wild and lovely flowers, And rocks whereby they grew, a paradise, Where I did lay me down within the shade Of waving ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an inanimate thing should start into feverish life. "A private entrance into Dr. ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the other—that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a 'safety barber's ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... eyes, gay and debonnaire. One could see that he played cricket and polo, and any other game that came along, and that not a muscle of his frame was out of condition. He had "soldier" written upon him—young, gallant, cavalry soldier. Verisschenzko appreciated him; nothing complete, human or inanimate, left him unconscious of its meaning. They knew one another very well—they had been at Oxford and later had shot bears together in ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... increased every day. I think that we began to be influenced by this peculiar trait in his character. It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain. It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words. How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement have gone mad—simply because ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... a man of the nature of the Abbe Gerard particularly enjoyed. The idea of finding himself the successful reviver of an inanimate doctrine, while secretly conscious that he was, in reality, a skeptic in matters of dogmatically vital importance, was to a mind so prone to delight in paradoxes eminently agreeable. It pleased him to see the letter of the Archbishop lying upon a volume of Strauss, and to read ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... from that curious old relic again, and see Dan advertising it for sale for the benefit of a benevolent object. Dan is not treating that present right. I gave that pipe to him for a keepsake. However, he probably finds that it keeps away custom and interferes with business. It is the most convincing inanimate object in all this part of the world, perhaps. Dan and I were roommates in all that long "Quaker City" voyage, and whenever I desired to have a little season of privacy I used to fire up on that pipe and persuade Dan to go out; and he seldom waited to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... labor, wood-chopping, and such other toils as were imposed on his brothers. Elnathan was indebted for this exemption from labor in some measure to his extraordinary growth, which, leaving him pale, inanimate, and listless, induced his tender mother to pronounce him a sickly boy, and one that was not equal to work, but who might earn a living comfortably enough by taking to pleading law, or turning minister, or doctoring, or some such ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of humanity-but waves rising and breaking on the great sea of eternity? Mysterious Egypt, haughty Assyria, glorious Greece, kingly Rome;—how spectral they have become. They stand out in no relief. As we recede from them, they sink back, flat and inanimate on the horizon. Each is a tale that has been told. Surely, then, if such is the life of nations, I need not labor to impress upon you a sense of the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... the dawn of the centuries watched the traders of the ancient world sail down from the horizon to barter in its ports. As with Gujarat and the Coast of Kathiawar, so with the Konkan it is a broken tale of strange arrivals, strange building, strange trafficking in human and inanimate freight that greets the student of ancient history and bewilders the ethnologist. The Konkan, in which in earliest days "the beasts with man divided empire claimed," and which itself is dowered with a legendary origin not wholly dissimilar in kind from the story of Rameses ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... she bent over the inanimate form, closed the eyes, and kissed the lips and brow. The weeping Charmian did ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... instant he made the one effort for which he had husbanded his strength. He gathered his legs up under him, and he stood. The water was only half-way up his thigh, and he stood. "Now for you, my friend!" he cried. Paul came by, quite inanimate now to all appearance, floating broadside to the current. Leaning forward, the Captain caught him by the leg, throwing his own body back in an intense strain of exertion. He lost his footing and fell. "I must let him ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... too, with the depravity of inanimate things, had taken that occasion to leap all bounds and run wild where never before it had ventured. Not being content in carrying its legitimate burden of logs to the lower towns, it bore away, one black night, more than half of the lumber that Jude ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but I fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men and even of inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... floor before the grate; a bath, still full of mineral water had not been taken away. The sense of coming dissolution pervaded all the details of an unsightly chaos. Signs of death appeared in things inanimate before the Destroyer came to the body on the bed. The Comte de Restaud could not bear the daylight, the Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... with this principle of illusion, Brahman is enabled to project the appearance of the world, in the same way as a magician is enabled by his incomprehensible magical power to produce illusory appearances of animate and inanimate beings. Maya thus constitutes the upadana, the material cause of the world; or—if we wish to call attention to the circumstance that Maya belongs to Brahman as a /s/akti—we may say that the material cause of the world is Brahman in so far as it is associated with Maya. In this latter ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... attracted by every other particle with a force proportioned inversely to the square of their distances. Vague ideas of some such principle had long been floating in the minds of some men; had probably been thus floating since ever men began to think seriously over the phenomena of inanimate nature. But the discovery of the principle was, however, as distinctly the achievement of Newton as "Paradise Lost" is the work of Milton. We find it hard now to form to ourselves any clear idea of a world to which Newton's principle was unknown. It would be almost as easy to realize ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Temple stepped out upon the slippery, blackened ladder, grasping the inanimate form of a little child. Loud cheers rent the air. But they pierced the hearts of those who bent over the senseless forms of the deliverer and the child. Most of their clothing, their hair, and eyebrows were burned, they were fearfully ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... at her. "You never could live in Alaska," he said. "You feel too much this personality of inanimate things. That was David Weatherbee's trouble. You know how in the end he thought those Alaska peaks were moving. They got to ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... clear as the noonday, yet mild and gentle as the morning, even in age, in the life and character of that great and venerable man, around whose precious, but, alas! inanimate form we all press in gratitude, admiration, and love, those high virtues derived from faith in God, and nurtured by his revealed truth, this bereaved Congress, and, I may add, this nation witnesses. * * * ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... business was transacted in a kind of chat with the judges: what room for eloquence, and that commanding action which springs from the emotions of the soul, and inflames every breast with kindred passions? The cold inanimate orator is described, by Quintilian, speaking with his hand under his robe; manum intra pallium ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... left behind, and he is once more surrounded by dew-gemmed hedges and silent slumbering trees. Broad meadows, or pasture land, with drowsy cattle, or low bleating sheep, lie on either side. But what to Turpin, at that moment, is nature, animate or inanimate? He thinks only of his mare—his future fame. None are by to see him ride; no stimulating plaudits ring in his ears; no thousand hands are clapping; no thousand voices huzzaing; no handkerchiefs are waved; no necks strained; no bright eyes rain influence upon him; no eagle orbs watch his motions; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it, as an achievement. When I look back and see my former activity, I wonder if that was myself, and am almost ready to doubt my identity. But every thing in its course; first rising into life, then decaying. The world itself is not to stand forever; and of course the things animate and inanimate which are upon it, must partake of ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... the back of the dam, and in cows with a drooping abdomen. The feet have been supposed to catch beneath the brim of the pelvis, and being retarded while the head advances into the passages, they get bent at the knee and the nose and knees present. (Pl. XVI, fig. 2.) The calf, however, is not an inanimate body advanced by the mere contraction of the womb, but it moves its limbs freely under the stimulus of the unwonted compression, and in moving the feet as they are advanced they slip down over the pelvic brim and finding no other firm ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... EDMUND! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! 50 And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world, allow'd To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 55 Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... room which had been the scene of so many singular happenings. The detective and I seated ourselves, but the Scotsman, holding the Chinaman by the neck as though he had been some inanimate bundle, stood just within the doorway, one of the most gigantic specimens of manhood I ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... is communicative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as the holy faith, well declaring that it was the same God that gave the Christian law to men, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake of before; for we read that the elected saints of God have wished themselves anathematised, and razed out of the book of life, in an ecstasy of charity, and infinite feeling ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the only lines along which the moral problem can be grappled with. A perfectly "pure" public school is as impossible as a perfectly satisfactory Marriage Law. A few incorrigibly bad boys there will always be—incorrigible, that is, when they have reached public school age. Hopelessly inanimate and feeble boys there will be also, doomed to become the victims of the bad. But the present moral average might be immensely raised, and the plain way to raise it is to provide other adventures for the soul. A boy once said to me, speaking of the matter in hand, "You see, it's the only ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... under the protection of Shakespeare it would have liberty to attempt anything, scarcely ventures at the present day even to try timidly to follow him. Meanwhile England, France, and the whole of Europe demand of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist. The classical system had its origin in the life of its time: that time has passed; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced. Near the monuments of past ages, the monuments of another ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... favors as pure benevolence. You no longer have any rights, and no longer can lay claim to any. There can be no limit to my power over you. Remember, that you won't be much better than a dog, or some inanimate object. You will be mine, my plaything, which I can break to pieces, whenever I want an hour's amusement. You are nothing, I am everything. Do you understand?" She laughed and kissed me again, and yet a sort of cold ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... off some of Dudley's clothes, and began to apply friction with his hands to the inanimate body. He had scarcely begun, when Carrie came in with an armful of dry towels and a ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... that he was ignominious. Nobody could have made it clear to him. He did not know that there were men who had gained distinction, popularity, and fame by doing nothing in particular but hitting things animate and inanimate with magnificent precision ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... which may be divided into two sorts. 1. The society of the sexes, which answers the purpose of propagation; and next, that more general society, which we have with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world. The passions belonging to the preservation of the individual turn wholly on pain and danger: those which belong to generation have their origin in gratifications and pleasures; the pleasure most directly belonging to this purpose is of a lively character, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not enough in artistic drawing to portray accurately and in cold blood the appearance of objects. To express form one must first be moved by it. There is in the appearance of all objects, animate and inanimate, what has been called an emotional significance, a hidden rhythm that is not caught by the accurate, painstaking, but cold artist. The form significance of which we speak is never found in a mechanical reproduction like a ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... scuttle away as he came nearer, and then for the first time Nat discovered that they, like the inanimate things about them, were completely sheathed in ice; so much so, in fact, that they ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... "but pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees; spoil my lady's window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in the house with your stupid, inanimate countenance." ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not being fed. And the creative fire requires fuel. Fanny Brandeis fed on people, not things. And her work at Haynes-Cooper was all with inanimate objects. The three months since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful. Haynes-Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom of her wit and resourcefulness. In return it gave—salary. Not ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... With ease my partial heart beguil'd, Who knew no sorrows when he smil'd. And ah! my friends, your downcast eyes, Your pensive air, and smother'd sighs, All tell me you lament the fate, Of him, whom yet you cannot hate. And shall I bear then to behold, That form inanimate and cold, His smiling lips depriv'd of breath, His eyes for ever clos'd in death! Ah no! my heart with anguish swells, And every throbbing vein rebels. Let sorrow weep, or anger thrill, Yet ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... unfastened the straps, and the limp thing which was once human, with a brain to think and a capacity for life and love, slipped out of the chair in an inanimate heap ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... feminine by the suffixes chireuda and curireuda. There were many words which were used unaltered for either gender. In the case of animals, the additional words medo, male, or aredo, female, clearly defined the sex in specific cases where the names would otherwise be ambiguous. Inanimate objects had no sex, and were ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... applause. There are many of his best works in the Dusseldorf Gallery. He painted all kinds of birds and fowls in an inimitable manner; the soft down of the duck, the glossy plumage of the pigeon, the splendor of the peacock, the magnificent spread of an inanimate swan producing a flood of light, and serving as a contrast to all the objects around it, are so attractive that it is impossible to contemplate one of his pictures of these subjects without feeling admiration and delight at the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... thought. Look at God's ways of doing with all His creatures. The animate and the inanimate creation are appealed to, the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field, the one in reference to food and the other in reference to clothing, which are the two great wants already spoken of by Christ in the previous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "that the more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature." And after ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... him to hear, but not to see, all that was going on in the room. "Why don't you add, he speculates, he whittles, he chews tobacco, he is six feet two in his stockings, he knows the market value of every article and object, animate and inanimate, on the face of the earth, and is a living illustration of the truth of the proverb, that the cents being cared for, no apprehension need be entertained as to the ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... we sat in dusk shadow, pretending to stitch away, but scarcely able to see. The lamp was placed on the stove, near which my husband, for it was he, stood and warmed himself. By-and-by he turned round, and looked all over the room, taking us in with about the same degree of interest as the inanimate furniture. Amante, cross-legged, fronting him, stooped over her work, whistling softly all the while. He turned again to the stove, impatiently rubbing his hands. He had finished his wine and galette, and wanted to ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... exemplified by uniformity of practice, or theoretically defined. Ship-delineators profess the art as a mystery, and arbitrary forms are assumed as the result of science. These lines ought to be, by an axiom, founded on a law imposed by Infinite Wisdom for the perfect guidance of inanimate matter. Projectiles, thrown obliquely, take their flight in convex parabolic curves, wherein resistance is overcome by a minimum of force; and elastic surfaces obey the converse of that law in opposing certain ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... comes to moral questions we are still dominated by the idea of the fatalistic power of inanimate things. We cannot think it possible to be just or good, not to speak of being cheerful, without looking at some physical fact and saying humbly "By your leave." We personify our tools and machines, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... interposing their glittering screen between us and the dark timber belt, the black smoking shores of Kau, and the blue shimmer of the Pacific. From that time, for twenty-four hours, the lower world, and "works and ways of busy men" were entirely shut out, and we were alone with this trackless and inanimate region of horror. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping and directing of those conditions out of which may emerge a society in which the spirit of justice ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... corridor or hall-space which proved to be almost as crowded as the deck had been, and being all the while jostled and buffeted about, I descended by staircases deep into the entrails of this mighty craft where in narrow passageways I wandered about interminably, now stumbling over some inanimate object, now forcibly encountering some living obstacle such as another bewildered shipmate or stewardess. To be upon the safe side, I made a point of murmuring, "I beg your pardon," at the moment of each collision and then proceeding ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... of the home habits of the male biped she gleaned from the telltale hints of the inanimate garments that passed through her nimble hands. She could even tell character and personality from deductions gathered at heel and toe. She knew, for example, that F.C. (in black ink) was an indefatigable fox trotter and she dubbed him Ferdy Cahn, though his name, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... silence felt almost like a weight, so greatly it oppressed me. Even the accustomed voices of nature were hushed, as if war, with its unspeakable cruelty, had cast a spell over all things animate and inanimate. It was weird, uncanny. With every nerve strained I leaned forward across the pommel of my saddle, listening for the slightest sound out in that black void. My head burned and throbbed as with fever, and I felt that strange, unnatural stillness as though it had been ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... Plantarum', 1793, p. ix.-x. Respecting the "spontaneous motion." which is referred to in a subsequent part of the text, see the remarkable passage in Aristotle, 'De Coelo,' ii., 2, p. 284, Bekker, where the distinction between animate and inanimate bodies is made to depend on the internal or external position of the seat of the determining motion. "No movement," says the Stagirite, "proceeds from the vegetable spirit, because plants are buried ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... this, I became attached, or rather, I had become much attached to inanimate objects, which have for me the importance of beings, and my house has become, had become, a world in which I lived an active and solitary life, surrounded by all manner of things, furniture, familiar knick-knacks, as ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... I am simply observing and reporting facts, and that I need not enter into the whys and wherefores. Nevertheless it seems clear that if, in an ordinary dining-room, any heavy inanimate body is to be lifted from the floor, it cannot very well be anything except a table or a chair. I have numerous proofs that this property does not appertain alone to articles of furniture; but in this, as in other experimental demonstrations, the intelligence ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... was not addicted to half measures. His whole record as an agent of the Bible Society was of a series of determined onslaughts upon the obstacles animate and inanimate, that beset his path. Sometimes he took away the breath of his adversaries by the very vigour of his attack, and, like the old Northern leaders, whose deeds he wished to give to an uneager world in translated verse, he faced great dangers and achieved great ends. Recognising that the darkest ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... mentioning some juggling tricks which my brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore. 'A convenient thing enough,' said Dr. Abell to me, 'if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.' 'As if the axe should move itself against him that lifts it; something of that kind?' 'Well, I don't know that that was in my mind so much; but if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at the ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... derived from a knowledge of its temperature. Thus also the evening cloud, exhibiting a fleeting representation of successive objects, is, perhaps, justly appropriated to Autumn, as in that Season the general decay of inanimate nature leads the mind to turn upon itself, and without effort to apply almost every image of sense or vision of the imagination,* to its ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... expect with assurance either of these passions, according as the impression is pleasant or uneasy. But beauty of all kinds gives us a peculiar delight and satisfaction; as deformity produces pain, upon whatever subject it may be placed, and whether surveyed in an animate or inanimate object. If the beauty or deformity, therefore, be placed upon our own bodies, this pleasure or uneasiness must be converted into pride or humility, as having in this case all the circumstances requisite to produce a perfect transition ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... them to send in her name a pilgrim to Mecca, who should deposit an offering on the tomb of the Prophet for the repose of her soul. Having perused these last injunctions, Ali and Chainitza joined hands, and over the inanimate remains of their departed mother swore to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... people are the cringing lickspittles of the nobles in turn. Every private in the army is ambitious to please the king by valor. The king is literally monarch of all he surveys. He is proprietor of the land, and has at his disposal every thing animate or inanimate in his kingdom. He has about three thousand wives.[59] Every man who would marry must buy his spouse from the king; and, while the system of polygamy obtains everywhere throughout the kingdom, the subject must have care not to secure so many ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... avarice, hoping to better their business, humored the stories and enlarged upon them. They half understood that the mystery of life and death are inextricably mixed in savage minds—that they come and go, passing in every form from bears to inanimate things or living in ghosts which grow out of a lodge fire. So for heavy considerations in beaver skins they sent representatives to the Sho-shones and there for an armful of baubles they prevailed upon those people to allow their supernatural ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... the most efficient to the happiness of a household. One daughter only had they, and we could charm our heart even now, by evoking the vanished from oblivion, and imaging her over and over again in the light of words; but although all objects, animate and inanimate, seem always tinged with an air of sadness when they are past—and as at present we are resolved to be cheerful—obstinately to resist all access of melancholy—an enemy to the pathetic—and a scorner of shedders of tears—therefore let Mary Morrison rest in her grave, and let us paint ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
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