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Coherency   Listen
noun
Coherency, Coherence  n.  
1.
A sticking or cleaving together; union of parts of the same body; cohesion.
2.
Connection or dependence, proceeding from the subordination of the parts of a thing to one principle or purpose, as in the parts of a discourse, or of a system of philosophy; a logical and orderly and consistent relation of parts; consecutiveness. "Coherence of discourse, and a direct tendency of all the parts of it to the argument in hand, are most eminently to be found in him."
3.
The state of cohering.
Synonyms: cohesion, cohesiveness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Coherency" Quotes from Famous Books



... bench, overcome with wonder and agitation, quite as much at Miss Armbient's terrible lucidity as at the charge she made against her sister-in-law. There was an amazing coherency in her story, and it was dreadful to me to see myself figuring in it as so ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... handle, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel came in, apologizing with as much coherence as Dr. Middleton ever expected from their sex. They wished to speak to Clara, but they declined to take her away. In vain the Rev. Doctor assured them she was at their service; they protested that they had very ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... that strikes one in that hymn—if hymn we must call it—is the fact that all these rivers, large and small, have their own proper names. That shows a considerable advance in civilized life, and it proves no small degree of coherence, or what the French call solidarity, between the tribes who had taken possession of Northern India. Most settlers call the river on whose banks they settle "the river." Of course there are many names for river. It may be called the runner,[210] the fertilizer, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to her aid and gave her courage. She murmured the usual formula ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... Coherence of these Things is never examin'd into. It is possible likewise for a crafty Divine, in order to rouse a listless and dejected Audience, first to awaken them with lively Images of the Torments of Hell and the State of Damnation, ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... years of Northampton. His studio was a huge, empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland's more luxurious rooms ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... to Mr. Hirst to say that his poem belongs not to the class we have described. It is no transcript of chance conceptions, expressed in loose language, and recklessly huddled together, without coherence and without artistic form, but a true and consistent creation, with a central principle of vitality and a definite shape. He has, in short, produced an original poem on a classic subject, written in a style ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red, devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never closes over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye never closes, so the hands ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Ile follow you, good Master Robert Shallow. Bardolfe, looke to our Horsses. If I were saw'de into Quantities, I should make foure dozen of such bearded Hermites staues, as Master Shallow. It is a wonderfull thing to see the semblable Coherence of his mens spirits, and his: They, by obseruing of him, do beare themselues like foolish Iustices: Hee, by conuersing with them, is turn'd into a Iustice-like Seruingman. Their spirits are so married in Coniunction, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... limited by the rights and welfare of others that subordination, in its best sense, takes place. To direct a body of men toward the acceptance of this principle, so that thereby they may attain social coherence as a group and greater strength of personal character, is the most solid contribution that an officer can make to the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... and their only political unit was the pleme, or tribe. They were considerably influenced by contact with Roman civilization. It was reserved for a foreign race, altogether distinct in origin, religion and customs, to give unity and coherence to the scattered Slavonic groups, and to weld them into a compact and powerful state which for some centuries played an important part in the history of eastern Europe and threatened the existence of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... in the persecution by Galerius; and Constantine was discerning enough to see the vast political importance of winning over such a body; which, though but a small fraction of the whole empire, was the only party which could give coherence to that empire, the only one which had enthusiastic adherents in every province, the only one on whose resolute devotion it was possible for a partizan to rely securely. The bravery and faithful attachment of Christian regiments was a ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... world has only that degree of reality that the objects of dreams have; but although such a view does not seem inconsistent with known facts, there is no reason to prefer it to the common-sense view, according to which other people and things do really exist. Thus coherence as the definition of truth fails because there is no proof that there can ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... was married, told a scattered tale, and soon stated that she was single, explaining later that she had two husbands, and one was dead, while the other had disappeared from her ten years ago. Gradually her alarm subsided and she achieved coherence. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... Coleridge supped with the writer, when his well known conversational talents were eminently displayed; so that what Pope affirmed of Bolingbroke, that "his usual conversation, taken down verbatim, from its coherence and accuracy, would have borne printing, without correction," was fully, and perhaps, more justly applicable ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... incapable of adapting his general political theories to his actual political programme; and, consequently, the utmost personal enthusiasm on his part and great power of effective political agitation cannot give essential coherence, substantial integrity, or ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... influenced the fate of the Hebrew nation; i. e. the Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman, the last represented by "the iron legs," which did indeed bestride the world; these "iron legs" are represented as terminating in feet and toes part of iron and part of clay, which have no natural coherence; i. e. the Roman empire shall be divided into several kingdoms, partly strong and partly weak: a prophecy remarkably fulfilled in the history and condition of the kingdoms of Europe. The prophet goes ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness of Mother Juliana's soul—a quality which is also abundantly witnessed by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to get detached from the main body, and ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... individual speaking and the individual spoken to. Moreover the several parts of this work are not moulded together in any thing like vital unity; the materials seem bundled up arbitrarily, and for stage effect, instead of being assorted on any principle of organic coherence; every thing thus going by the author's will, not by any law of reason or art. But this is a high region, from which there was in that age but one man big enough to be seen; so it's no use speaking of the rest. Therewithal the work ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... effect of promiscuity, however, being to hinder social evolution, wherever it was accompanied by unions having some duration, the product of such unions were likely to be superior to others, and from this primitive stage domestic evolution takes place in several directions by increase of coherence and definiteness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... staring vacantly in front of her, almost unconscious of her surroundings from the intensity of pain. Each item in the horror of the situation told on her separately, but in no sequence—with no coherence. Shame, "hopes early blighted, love scorned," kindness proved treason, the prospect of complete and dishonourable poverty, a poverty which would enrich her foes. And all this was mixed in her mind with the dreadful words from the old letters ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... genius mind is the power of genius to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy, the trivial and the relevant, the true and the false. The thoughts of the gossip, so the psychologists tell us, have connection but not coherence; the thoughts of the genius have coherence and likewise connection and unity. Thus we discover that scandal-mongers are at fault in the mind more than in the heart; and that it behooves people who do not wish to have themselves voted mentally defective ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... and truly thought, that electricity might be used as a motive power for the heaviest bodies, and supply the place of wood used as fuel in manufactures. He also thought that electricity, then impalpable to the senses, was the material ingredient affecting the weight and coherence of bodies. People laughed at what they supposed to be illusions, and there the matter might have stopped; but the poor man persisted in his assertions that the sun contained electricity, which could be attracted, concentrated, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... first Fifteen Psalms of David, translated into Lyric Verse: Proposed as an Essay, supplying the Perspicuity and Coherence according to the Modern Art of Poetry; not known to have been attempted before in any Language. With a Preface containing some Observations of the great and general Defectiveness of former Versions in Greek, Latin, and English. By Dr. [James] Gibbs. London: printed by J. Mathews, for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... shrink from his task, commenced awkwardly, but he gained coherence and force of expression as he proceeded. At least, he made them understand something of the grim resolution which had animated Wyllard. He pictured, in terse seaman's words, the little schooner plunging ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... conversation lost its coherence in Pop's ears. It was mingled with a curious buzzing and a dizziness that made him grip his chair lest it pitch him to the floor. Chills, in which his bones were a mere rattlebox, alternated with little rushes of prairie fire across his ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... its thought or feeling, now trying a Louis Quatorze pattern, then something supposed to be Shakespearian, and at last going back to ancient Greece, or even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly perfect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving artistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities wholly out of the question, Wilhelm Meister seems a mere aggregation of episodes if compared with such a masterpiece as Paul and Virginia, or even with a happy improvisation like the Vicar of Wakefield. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... appalling, and horror followed horror with such paralysing rapidity, that the most practised correspondents and the most experienced officers, both afloat and ashore, were totally unable to follow them and describe what was happening with anything like coherence. It was simply an inferno of death and destruction, which no human words could have properly described, and perhaps the most ghastly feature of it was the fact that there was no human agency visible in it at all. There was no Homeric struggle of man ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith

... struggling against the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live, glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... fighting is not quite so good as in the chansons de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... the visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the drama remains coherent and complete without them. Retain them, and the play becomes connected by conversational references with the three music dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence, no real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung episode (presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... had been fattened on molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the "Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:—"The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes to be used in freedom of the burden of value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... lizard-like tail actually exceeding in length the remainder of the spinal column. The next group of Ratites, although it contained only the Ostrich, Rhea, Emu, Cassowary, and Apteryx, he shewed to be equivalent in anatomical coherence to the third great group of Carinates, which includes the vast majority of living birds. In his arrangement of the latter group, he laid most stress on the characters of the bony structures which form the palate, and by ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the grotesque carvings ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... door, shutting in the wounded man, Chief Campbell and the others. Then he caught the maid sharply by the arm and shook some coherence into her ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... a small suburban borough Once an eagle used to fly, Making observations thorough From his station in the sky, And presenting the appearance Of an animated V, Like the gulls that lend coherence Unto paintings ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl

... his speech and in getting it into finished form, the toaster will do well to remember those three essentials to all good composition with which he struggled in school and college days, Unity, Mass and Coherence. The first means that his talk must have a central thought, on which all his stories, anecdotes and jokes will have a bearing; the second that there will be a proper balance between the parts, that it will not be all introduction and conclusion; the third, that it will hang together, without ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... can strike or please, and thus comprises every species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of examples and illustrations; and it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design. His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a "Veil of Light;" they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... des Revues, by M. Ludvipol, of Paris. In spite of the diversity of schools and the conditions giving rise to them, which are here to be treated for the first time from the point of view of a modern history of literature, the reader will readily convince himself that the subject lacks neither coherence nor unity. It is superfluous to say that in this first attempt at a history of modern Hebrew literature, the grouping of movements and schools borrowed from the Occidental literatures is bound ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... money, enough to meet the king's necessities was extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to the custody of Richard of Cornwall. After his return from France at the end of 1254, Henry's renewed requests for money gave coherence to the opposition. Between 1254 and 1258 the king's exactions, and an effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel lines. To the old sources of discontent were added grievances proceeding ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... poetry, and a few haphazard and detached observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things—"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth—this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind—a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place? When the boy left school his "education" had ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon—this is a fact of infinite significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... separate words are generally correct—such words as 'Christ,' 'God,' 'tears,' 'blood,' 'tempest,' 'sea,' 'thunder,' 'calm,' 'morning,' 'sun,' 'joy.' No grammatical construction hitherto, but a significant sort of grouping of the separate words, as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence. My idea is that she is being exercised in the language, in the character, in order to fuller expression hereafter. Well, you would have us snowed upon with poppies till we sleep and forget these things. I, on the contrary, would have our eyes wide open, our senses 'all attentive,' our ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his analysis of dictions, metres and plots, he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are, however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic. They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day. If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partisanship. They are especially ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... strangest of true stories—the history of Maria Walpole, niece of the famous Horace Walpole and illegitimate daughter of his brother, Sir Edward Walpole. The letters are a potpourri of town and family gossip, and in gathering the references to Maria Walpole into coherence, I am compelled to omit much that is ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington

... one. But the structures thus formed are not physical, at least not entirely so. Structure, in the sense that Sumner uses the term, belongs, as he says, to a category of its own. "It is a category in which custom produces continuity, coherence, and consistency, so that the word 'structure' may properly be applied to the fabric of relations and prescribed positions with which functions are permanently connected." Just as every individual member of a community participates in the process by ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... went abroad again, and then came the climax to the Barker episode, as we called it. I can best tell the story of that climax by printing here a letter written by myself to Parton. It was penned within an hour of the supreme moment, and while it evidences my own mental perturbation in its lack of coherence, it is none the less an absolutely truthful account of what happened. The letter ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... thoughts zigzagged among the jumbling memories; but, as if she made for herself a picture of all these fragments, throwing them upon the canvas haphazard, she saw them all just touched with the one tainting quality that gave them coherence, the faint, false haze she had put over this friendship by her own pretendings. And, if this terrible dinner, or anything, or everything, had shown that saffron tint in its true colour to the man at her side, last night almost a lover, then she had indeed ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... found it advisable to take yet a further step and to lead the legions over the Rhine. He was not without connections beyond the river. the Germans at the stage of culture which they had then reached, lacked as yet any national coherence; in political distraction they—though from other causes—fell nothing short of the Celts. The Ubii (on the Sieg and Lahn), the most civilized among the German tribes, had recently been made subject and tributary by a powerful Suebian canton of the interior, and had as early ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... of 1623 has greater literary merits— the merits of mere smoothness, clearness, grammatical coherence, and intelligibility—than the autograph; and I can understand the preference of some students for the former, though I do not share it Michelangelo the younger added fluency and grace to his great-uncle's composition by the sacrifice ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... it fails to save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way, is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender reference ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... them. Moabites and Midianites, Ammonites and Bedawin, even the king of distant Mesopotamia, had sacked their villages, had overrun their fields, and exacted tribute from the Israelitish tribes. The tribes themselves had lost coherence; they had ranged themselves under different "judges" or "deliverers," had forgotten their common origin and common faith, and had even plunged into interfraternal war. Joshua was scarcely dead before ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... as she moved. Reckage was conscious, for the first time in his life, of a real embarrassment. He could not talk to her; he felt tongue-tied when she addressed him. Ill at ease, yet not unhappy, he struggled to maintain some coherence in his conversation; but, at each moment, his own ideas grew less certain and Sara's voice more enchanting. It seemed to convey the lulling powers of an anodyne. When he tried to rouse himself, the effort was as painful ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... preservation of democratic institutions; the means to that end was the preservation of the Federal government. Now, as in 1852, his paramount object was not to "disappoint the Liberal party throughout the world," to prove that Democracy, when applied on a great scale, had yet sufficient coherence to remain intact, no matter how powerful, nor how plausible, were the forces ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... as I said, conveys to us a strong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance over human action. The most powerful expressions of this side of experience might be found here. The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... simple enough message, but as it translated itself into intelligible coherence it sent a creeping thrill of conflicting fear and triumph through her. For the words which sped across space ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... Western Christianity is divided are seriously examined, they are seen to fall into three main types or groups. Standing by herself is the Church of Rome, venerable, august, impressive in virtue of her unanimity, her coherence, her ordered discipline, and her international position, representing exclusively the ancient Catholic tradition, and making for herself exclusive claims. At the opposite end of the scale there are the multitudinous sects of Protestantism, differing mutually among themselves but ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... appetite, thanks to certain daily exertions on the part of the communal doctor, was still fairly satisfactory. When he spoke at all it was in scattered monosyllables which even the most devoted of his disciples were unable to arrange into such coherence as to justify their inclusion in the GOLDEN BOOK. All this, though hidden from the world at large, had been observed with dismay by the initiated. It was an open secret among them that the last twenty-one sayings ascribed to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... and is liberated [Footnote ref 2]. The Nyaya-Vais'e@sika is a pluralistic system which neither tries to reduce the diversity of experience to any universal principle, nor dismisses patent facts of experience on the strength of the demands of the logical coherence of mere abstract thought. The entities it admits are taken directly from experience. The underlying principle is that at the root of each kind of perception there must be something to which the perception is due. It classified the percepts ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... such agitation as I now feel — In the course of a few days, we have met with a number of incidents so wonderful and interesting, that all my ideas are thrown into confusion and perplexity — You must not expect either method or coherence in what I am going to relate — my dearest Willis. Since my last, the aspect of affairs is totally changed! — and so changed! but I would fain give you a regular detail — In passing a river about eight days ago, our coach was ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... man of large designs, but he lacked perhaps the practical gift of embodiment. I looked upon him as a man of high poetical powers, with a great range of hopes and visions, but without the technical accomplishment which lends these their final coherence. He was fully aware of this himself, but he neither regretted it nor disguised it. The truth was that his interest in existence was so intense, that he lacked the power of self-limitation needed for an artistic success. What, however, he gave to all who ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and plunged into their story. With interruptions and additions from his chum, he managed to finish it with some degree of coherence, Captain Hollinger listening without comment. When they had done, ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney

... Conceit the Extravagancy of their Inclination, or their Fancy, shall suggest; they can think as wildly as they talk and act, and will not endure that their Wit should be controuled by such formal Things as Decency and common Sense: Deduction, Coherence, Consistency, and all the Rules of Reason they accordingly disdain, as too precise and mechanical for ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... all the members, producing the idea and feeling of the oneness of home. It makes a unity of affection, so that the temper, hopes and interests of each member have a living echo and response in all the others. It gives to home its unitive heart, preserves its vital coherence, fuses all the hearts together, makes each a thread in the web of home-being, where each finds its true measure, is inspired with the home-feeling when all is right, and oppressed with home-sickness when separated ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... certain laws. The cultivation of the science of geometry went hand in hand with the study of astronomy: and as we emerge from the dim prehistoric ages into the historical period, we find that the theory of the phenomena of the heavens possessed already some degree of coherence. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... in her artless way, and with none of the coherence with which I have here written it; her face kindled, and she felt sure that she had convinced me that I was wrong, and that justice was a living person. Indeed I did wince a little; but I recovered myself immediately, and pointed out to her that we had books whose genuineness was beyond ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... of another person instead of one of my own to analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is, however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... of us what we are able to receive of it in "wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of our individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As the landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements we construct a meaning, each for himself. To ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... Still in my ear the gaoler's answer repeated itself—'I suppose, if they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in and play': and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a while had no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the town below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon—Regnum Scientiae ut regnum Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.—Into the Kingdom of Knowledge, as into ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal. To give my story coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I know nothing of the three months during which they lived together. I do not know how they got on or what they talked about. After all, there are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion can only be reached ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... the Church, on which such stress was at the very outset laid, but a civil government, and regulations for trade and shipping, must have been active forces, always tending to grow in strength and coherence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... Cedars. With shaking fingers he dragged out his watch. He couldn't read the dial. He braced his hands against the table, thrust back his chair, and arose. The room tumbled about him. Before his eyes the dancers made long nebulous bands of colour in which nothing had form or coherence. Instinctively he felt he hadn't dined recklessly enough to account for these amazing symptoms. He ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp

... them, he seems to jest with us, and to think it sufficient if he allows that there are beings of any kind happy and eternal. But with regard to Balbus, I suppose you observed how many things were said by him, which, however false they may be, yet have a perfect coherence and connection; therefore, my design, as I said, in opposing him, is not so much to confute his principles as to induce him to explain what I do not clearly understand: for which reason, Balbus, I will give you the choice, either to answer me every particular as I go on, or permit ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... each; but far more frequently the transition from one to the other is effected gradually; or, if not, there exist, at any rate, in other places intervening, a series of rocks which possess an imperfectly crystalline character, passing down into that of simple coherence. This transition is usually effected through the different kinds of slate; the slaty crystallines becoming more and more fine in texture, until at last they appear composed of nothing but very fine mica or chlorite; and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... disconnectedly. The original speech had a logical order and set forth a logical train of thought. These should be followed as far as possible in the report. Bring in the quotations in their true order and fill the gaps between them with indirect discourse to knit them together and to give the report the coherence of the original speech. But do not carry this indirect explanation to the extent of making your copy a report of the speech in indirect discourse with occasional bits of direct quotation to illustrate. Remember that, after all, the direct quotation ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... knew that I could rely on your sympathy and friendship, under all circumstances. Please pardon any lack of coherence or orderly arrangement of details, in what I am about ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... rode down it at dawn that morning, Andy and Jeff ahead on their mules whistling, singing, skylarking like two playful bear cubs. It was herself that was changed. She pushed the cheap hat off her hot forehead and tried to win to some coherence of thought and—so far had she already come on a new, strange path—looked back with wondering uncomprehension, as upon the beliefs and preferences of a crude primitive ancestress, to the girl who had cared that this hat cost a dollar and a half instead of a dollar ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... like what hath any coherence with reason or mercy, for a man to abuse his friend? Because Christ died for men, shall I therefore spit in his face? The bread and water that was given by Elisha to his enemies, that came into the land of Israel to take ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan

... Tell me of what has happened—all, do you hear?" cried Sergius, raising himself impatiently on one elbow. "If your story seems to lack coherence and truth, I swear to you that I will go down into the Forum at once and learn what ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could have been included in the category of literature; and yet it was ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... the main a yet lighter thing, and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in plot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shakespeare's comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency, blameless in composition and coherence; while in Love's Labour's Lost the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and the structure of the story is as that of a house of clouds which the wind builds and unbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and wanton in their ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... body where two or more bones meet is called an articulation, or joint. At the place of meeting the bones are firmly attached to each other, thereby securing the necessary coherence of the skeleton. The large number of bones, and consequently of articulations, are necessary for the different movements of the body and also on account of the manner in which the skeleton develops, or grows. Articulations are classed with reference to ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... naturally for the broken order and lax coherence of this letter, by the suggestion that, as St. Paul dictated it, there was present with him a sense of almost nervous hesitation. He has exactly a gentleman's reluctance to do an ungracious action: while he knows that it is his duty to warn the Colossians of a serious danger, ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... distinctly undesirable. While cadences are indispensable, in music of clearly recognizable form, it is equally true that they must not be so emphatic as to check the current of melody and harmony too frequently or completely, or destroy the continuity and coherence of the members. And it is therefore an almost invariable practice, especially in music of a higher order, to modify and disguise the cadences by some means or other; that is, to diminish the weight of the characteristic "longer tone,"—to counteract, partially or entirely, the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... of the head of the department, and their success or failure depends largely on his good-will. Wages and privileges are in his hand, and if he is morally unscrupulous he can ruin a weak-willed subordinate. There is little coherence among employees; there are always men and women who stand ready to take a vacant position, and often no particular skill or experience is required. There has been no such solidifying of interests by trade-unions as in the factory; the individual makes his own contract and stands on his own ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... coherence among the systems of modern theology, we may observe, that the doctrine of absolute decrees has ever been intimately connected with the enthusiastic spirit, as that doctrine affords the highest subject of joy, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... a character, etc. Cf. Maurice Morgann, "On the Character of Falstaff": "But it was not enough for Shakespeare to have formed his characters with the most perfect truth and coherence; it was further necessary that he should possess a wonderful facility of compressing, as it were, his own spirit into these images, and of giving alternate animation to the forms. This was not to be done from without; he must have felt every varied situation, and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... acknowledge his demands on her attention. But not the less willingly did he return with her to the solitude of the ruinous factory. On every safe occasion, becoming more and more frequent as the days grew longer, he repaired thither, and every time returned more capable of drawing the coherence of melody from that ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... Wulf had just finished a very excellent dinner, which Fandor paid for out of his own pocket. He was careful not to take any of the royal funds for his personal use. Wulf hovered on the borderland of drunkenness, but his ideas still showed some coherence. For the twentieth time he ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre

... descriptions, far better historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually to be found in the world could give him for his Skylark, his Epipsychidion, or his Prometheus. But to exaggerate good is to vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil, on the contrary, is to darken counsel—already dark enough—and the want ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... success in giving unity and coherence to his argument depends chiefly on his method of introducing new ideas in supporting his issues. These changes from one idea to another, or transitions, as they are called, should always be made so that the hearer's attention will be recalled to the assertion ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon

... resurrection bursting asunder the bonds of Hades and showing that it was no longer the hopeless prison of the dead. The justice of this explanation appears from the logical necessity of the series of ideas, the internal coherence and harmony of thought. It has been ably shown that substantially this view is the accurate interpretation of the New Testament ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... basis of good expression. This truth is a tautology, for to reason well is in fact to express oneself well, because the expression is the intuitive possession of one's own logical thought. The principle of contradiction, itself, is at bottom nothing but the aesthetic principle of coherence. It will be said that starting from erroneous concepts it is possible to write and to speak exceedingly well, as it is also possible to reason well; that some who are dull at research may yet be most limpid writers. That is precisely ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... into the mouth of the insane Lear any such sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the insanity ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Moliere and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In philosophy the conditions are not different. Il faut prendre son ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the popular fancy which created him. For though the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... colourlessness of strict normality. It is a magic, a glamour, of the nature of personal affection, which only great poetry can fully express, and volumes of bad poetry cannot quite destroy. It has besides a real political value, binding the State together, and giving it a stronger moral coherence than can be attained by any legal or constitutional authority; a fact that is illustrated by those distressful countries in which its limits are not conterminous with the political boundaries of the ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... the Indians had brought it to him from thirteen miles beyond Cornwall's Creek, where there was an immense deposit of the same kind. It was, in fact, soft asphalte, or petroleum, or bitumen, or whatever the learned may please to designate it, in a state of coherence. ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... Pythagoras, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and other physicists and philosophers have set forth that the primordial elements are four in number: air, fire, earth, and water; and that it is from their coherence to one another under the moulding power of nature that the qualities of things are ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... though far oftener his obscurity seems to result from impatience, or the flattery of those hollow and alluring words which beset the dreams of poets, and must be harshly snubbed before they can be finally banished. There are many noble lines in his poems, but not much unity of effect or coherence of sentiment; and it happens now and then that the idea which the reader painfully and laboriously evolves from them is, after all, not a great truth or beauty, but some curious intellectual toy, some plaything of the singer's fancy, some idle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... kind that Jesus regularly exerted in healing the sufferers from nervous disorders who were reputed victims of demoniac possession.[23] In this view these resuscitations from apparent death appear in natural coherence with the many other works of mercy that Jesus wrought as the Great Physician of his people, and may be regarded as the crown and consummation of all his restorative ministries. Jesus' thanksgiving after the tomb had been opened—"Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... we had advertised for a cook—in vain! And ranch life, in consequence, began to lose colour and coherence. Even the animals suffered: the dogs, the chickens, and in particular the tame piglet, who hung disconsolate about the kitchen door watching, and perchance praying, for the hired girl that ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete effects of the division ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... plainly. The sublime intoxication of opium gleamed in his eyes; the dew of a stealthy perspiration began to glisten on his face. In five minutes more, the talk which he still kept up with me, failed in coherence. He held steadily to the subject of the Diamond; but he ceased to complete his sentences. A little later, the sentences dropped to single words. Then, there was an interval of silence. Then, he sat up in bed. Then, still busy with the subject of the Diamond, he began to talk again—not ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... in the modulation of the voice. Every one will be benefited by reading his volumes.... Too much stress can hardly be laid on the author's ground principle, that where a method aims to regulate the modulation of the voice by rules, then inconsistencies and lack of organic coherence begin to take the place of that sense of life which lies at the heart of every true product of art. On the contrary, where vocal expression is studied as a manifestation of the processes of thinking, there results the truer energy ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry

... come wandering idly by, and unfasten, undo, relax, disintegrate all that has been effected by the force and vigilance of their betters. This distinction is carried into even the most trivial things of life. Yet without that organization and coherence, the existence of the destroyers themselves would become a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... arms, and spread his great chin upon his deer-skin apron, and nodded briskly with his deep gray eyes, surveying me in triumph. To his mind, that mill was the wonder of the world, and any argument based upon it, with or without coherence, was, like its circular saws, irresistible. And yet he thought that women can not reason! However, I did not say another word just then, but gave way to him, as behooved a child. And not only that, but I always found him ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... LAPLACE. The rotation of each nucleus or sun round its axis produces centrifugal force; that force, by refrigeration, increases beyond the centripetal force of gravity; in consequence rings are formed and detached from the surface, whose unequal coherence of parts mostly causes them to break into separate masses or planets, partaking of the motion of the bodies from which they have been separated, and these primaries in their turn becoming centres of gravitation and centrifugal ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... The rendering given above is only intended to link the various speeches into coherence; it has no resemblance with the French. In the original, "Font chatoyer ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... myself for a moment, my delirium never left me. After many useless efforts to banish all fictions from my mind, they at length seduced me, and my future endeavors were confined to giving them order and coherence, for the purpose of converting them into ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... had made him so certain from the first moment, if she were not meant for him? If he lived to be a hundred, he would never meet another. Why, because of his love, must he bury the will and force of a man? If there were no more coherence in God's scheme than this, let him too be incoherent! Let him hold authority, and live outside authority! Why stifle his powers for the sake of a coherence which did not exist! That would indeed be madness greater than that of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... entreats Dora, seeing the girl has some important news to impart, but is so nervous and unstrung as to be almost incapable of speaking with any coherence. But presently Florence grows calmer, and then, her voice becoming clear and full, she is able ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"

... two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong's qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... doubtless never exactly measured; and it was perhaps well he was vague, for he found his friend, who was on the point of leaving Paris, so distracted by procrastinating milliners and perjured lingeres that coherence had quite deserted her. "You must find Saint-Germain dreadfully dull," she nevertheless had the presence of mind to say as he was going. "Why won't you come ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... believe that she had ever left Limasito; the climacteric weeks in New York, the trip to Topaz Gulch and the later scene in Jim Baggott's hotel had alike faded into a vague, nebulous shadow without substance or coherence, and she herself seemed ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... educational structure are many, and in some cases obvious to all. In the first place, it is said, and with much truth, that there is no systematic coherence between the different parts of our educational machinery, and no thorough-going correlation between the various aims which the separate parts of the system are intended to realise. As Mr. De Montmorency has recently pointed out, we have always had ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... Powis. Lady Malpas arrived yesterday. I shall visit Miss Rich to-morrow. In the next apartment to [nine lodges *****. I have not seen him some years; and he is grown either mad or superannuated, and talks without cessation or coherence: you would think all the articles in a dictionary were prating together at once. The Bedfords are expected this week. There are forty thousand others that I neither know nor intend to know. In short, it is living in a fair, and I am heartily sick of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... of telling the story through the person of the hero is that his presence as the central figure in every event narrated makes for coherence and gives the story unity. But attendant disadvantages are that it is often difficult to account for the hero's presence in every scene, that he cannot be an eye-witness to events happening at the same time in different places, and that it is ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... silence. No one had seen her. And then Miss Snaith stood up and SHRIEKED. Betsy took her by the shoulders, and shook her into coherence. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... lowering it into a somewhat prosaic and unideal Prudentialism, nor is it saved from this by the tacking on to it, by a sort of after-thought, of the second and higher Ideal—an addition which ruins the coherence of the account without really transmuting its substance The source of our dissatisfaction with the whole theory lies deeper than in its tendency to identify the end with the maximum of enjoyment or satisfaction, or to regard the goodness or badness of acts and feelings as lying solely in their ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... haughtiness, which they bitterly resented and which they would have called in question had the situation been other than it was. Truth to tell, influenced by Hornigold, they had embarked upon a mad enterprise, and they needed Morgan to bring it to a successful conclusion. Without him the slender coherence which already existed would fail, and anarchy would be the state upon the ship. There would be nothing left to them but to scatter if they could make an unheeded landing at some convenient place, or be captured, if they could not, with a certainty of being hung forthwith. So long as they remained ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... gone before he could recover his speech or enough coherence to say what was in his mind. She informed the orderly that the ailing man was John Sprague, a lieutenant in the First Virginia Volunteers, for that was the regiment the hospital guards had named, when, on the night of the arrival, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... of panic and the impulse to dash after, stayed, she forced herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty for coherence of procedure. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... parties du reseau ferrugineux en font beaucoup moins que le fond meme du gres. De meme si l'on compare entr'eux les gres qui renferment des cailloux avec ceux qui n'en contiennent pas, on trouve dans ceux-ci plus de gluten calcaire, l'eau-forte diminue beaucoup plus leur coherence. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... three of the same nature. This is what a consideration of the superstitions of savages would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes fragmentary, and the attributes of these ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... harmonies between cause and effect, and the proportionate agencies which characters introduced in the Drama bring to bear upon event and catastrophe, are carefully shunned,—as real life does for the most part shun them,—yet there is a latent coherence in all that, by influencing the mind, do, though indirectly, shape out the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... endeavoured to collect her thoughts, and took up a pen in order to address those dear parents, whom, spite of her errors, she still loved with the utmost tenderness, but vain was every effort to write with the least coherence; her tears fell so fast they almost blinded her; and as she proceeded to describe her unhappy situation, she became so agitated that she was obliged to give over the attempt and retire to bed, where, overcome with the fatigue her mind had undergone, she fell into a slumber ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... and even the violence of party feeling continued to send its echoes to the far regions of South Africa, confusing the minds of the various populations there, and preventing any real coherence and continuity in our Government of that great Colony. A good and successful Administrator has sometimes been withdrawn to be superseded by another, equally well-intentioned, perhaps, but whose policy was on wholly different lines, thus undoing ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler

... formless; no doubt it was the first which came to hand for expressing what he had to say. He begins sentences and omits to finish them; he goes off into digressions and forgets to pick up the line of thought he has dropped; he throws out his ideas in lumps instead of fusing them into mutual coherence. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... group, constituting the constructive period, comprises the men who were foremost in framing the Constitution, and in organizing and giving coherence and life to the new government and to the nationality thereby created. This is introduced by John Adams. He, like Washington, might properly find a place in both the first and the second groups, but the distinction of the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... window, glad of the cool morning breeze blowing against his face, trying to pull himself together, trying to brace himself to meet the consequences of his folly, trying to drag his disordered thoughts into something approaching coherence. He stared down over the bay and the sunlit waters mocked him with their dancing ripples sliding lightheartedly one after the other toward the shore. The view that he looked upon had been until this morning a never-failing source of pleasure, now it moved him to nothing but the recollection ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... orthodox dress. It represents, as well as I can put it, the rhapsodical reverie of a great poet to whom nothing seems strange, and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to give them coherence, until, perhaps, when awakened from his dream, he naively wonders what they may have meant. It will be remembered that Schumann added titles to his ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... assembly to receive the report, the chairman of the committee reads it in his place, and then delivers it to the clerk, when it lies on the table till the assembly sees fit to consider it. If the report consists of a paper with amendments, the chairman of the committee reads the amendments with the coherence in the paper, explaining the alterations and reasons of the committee for the amendments, till he has gone through the whole. If the report is very long, it is not usually read until the assembly is ready to consider it [see ...
— Robert's Rules of Order - Pocket Manual of Rules Of Order For Deliberative Assemblies • Henry M. Robert

... misquotation that got upon Ledgar's nerves. "Alas, poor Garrick!" was one of her typical lapses. Nor was Ledgar himself more of a success with Mary, who found him (and here my sympathies went over to her) lacking in force and coherence. But as Mary eloped with somebody else at the end of part one she hadn't my prolonged experience of Ledgar's incomprehensibility. Nor did the question of his semi-lunatic friend worry her, or the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various

... are thus seen to represent two polarically opposite tendencies with regard to the levity-gravity coherence which breaks up when combustion occurs. In the case of sulphur, the ponderable and imponderable entities appear to cling together; in the case of phosphorus, they seem to be anxious to part. These two different tendencies - which are characteristic of many other substances ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... the recognition of a tangible line up to which to hold, and to abandon which means defeat, dishonour, and disaster. It is much for untried men to recognise in their surroundings something which gives the unity of a common purpose, and thus the coherence which discipline imparts. Although there was in Parker's dispositions nothing open to serious criticism,—nothing that can be ascribed to undervaluing his opponent,—and although, also, he had good reason to expect ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... of the next generation, quitted—as they seldom did quit—the ground of external form and regularity and logical coherence, it was only to ask: Is this work, this poem or this novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability, is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? To them this was the one ground on which the matter of literature, ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... power, that of the Hittites, grew up towards the north, chiefly perhaps in Asia Minor, but with a tendency to project itself southward into the Mesopotamian region. Upper Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, were at this time inhabited by weak tribes, each under its own chief, with no coherence, and no great military spirit. The chief of these tribes, at the time when Thothmes I. ascended the Egyptian throne, were the Rutennu in Syria, and the Nahari or Nairi in Upper Mesopotamia. The two monarchies of the south, Elam and Babylon were not in ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... later, when they sat side by side on the piazza settee, and when coherence and logic had become attributes to their conversation, Keith sighed, with a ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter

... belief. The definition of truth as the correspondence between beliefs and facts seems peculiarly evident in the case of memory, as against not only the pragmatist definition but also the idealist definition by means of coherence. These considerations, however, are taking us away from psychology, to which ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... a piece of writing, either true or made up by the author, and consisting of Introduction, Body and Conclusion. It should contain Unity, Coherence, Emphasis, Perspecuity, Vivacity, and Presision. It may be ornamented with dialogue, discription ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... curiosity, after a quarrel, or at least a sharp coolness with John Murray, he published in two volumes, in May 1857, The Romany Rye, which carries on the story of Lavengro for just about a month further, namely, down towards the end of August 1825, and there again stops dead. Whether we regard coherence or the rate of progress, no more attempt at amendment is perceptible than can be discerned in the later as compared with the earlier volumes of Tristram Shandy. The peculiarities of the earlier volume are, indeed, here accentuated, while the Author had evidently only been ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... very worst form. It is one of the group-ideas of the great herd, that without oneself doing any work, one may enrich oneself unrestrictedly, by means of craft, at the expense of the very poorest. Only the unprecedented magnitude of the herd and its unparalleled firm coherence made so great a deviation from Primal ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... some motet appropriate to the holy day for which it was written, that in a Roman Catholic cathedral service the polyphonic music of the best period co-operates with the Gregorian intonations to produce a consistent musical whole with a thematic coherence almost suggestive of Wagnerian Leitmotif. In later times the Protestant music of Germany attained a similar consistency, under more complicated musical conditions, by the use of chorale-tunes; and in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... Bakunin, Brousse, and Krapotkin, have written about the "propaganda of action" with sufficient coherence to make themselves understood, it appears that it is not their hope to destroy government by removing all executive heads,—even their tortured brains recognize the impossibility of that task; nor ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... attached to the view of their function which they learned from the battle with capitalism. It is not at all unlikely that certain favorably placed trade unions would under a socialist state become the center of coherence and government. But a guild society would inevitably find them a tough problem to deal with, for direct action would have revealed their strategic power, and some of their leaders at least would not offer up this power readily on the altar of freedom. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... war, military units on the basis of "Groups of Hundred", "Groups of Thousand", etc., were created and the original tribes were dissolved into military regiments. In the course of time, and especially at the time of the dissolution of a federation, these military units had gained social coherence and appeared to be tribes again; we are probably correct in assuming that all "tribes" which we find from this time on were already "secondary" tribes of this type. A secondary tribe often took its name from its leader, but it could also revive ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... means: From the obligations of clientage, my friend Beowulf, and for assistance thou hast sought us.—This gives coherence to Hrothgar's opening remarks in VIII., and also introduces a new motive for Beowulf's coming ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin

... it; the existence of such capital in a pillow being the last intelligible confidential communication made to her by the departed, before succumbing to dropsical conditions of snuff and gin, incompatible equally with coherence and existence. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... girl have got into a cab? Why must a girl walking along Piccadilly be my daughter Maud just because she got into a cab. London," he proceeded, warming to the argument and thrilled by the clearness and coherence of his reasoning, "is full ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse



Words linked to "Coherency" :   coherence, cohesiveness, coherent, incoherence, understandability, comprehensibility, cohesion, continuity



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