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Divergent   Listen
adjective
Divergent  adj.  
1.
Receding farther and farther from each other, as lines radiating from one point; deviating gradually from a given direction; opposed to convergent.
2.
(Optics) Causing divergence of rays; as, a divergent lens.
3.
Fig.: Disagreeing from something given; differing; as, a divergent statement.
Divergent series. (Math.) See Diverging series, under Diverging.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Divergent" Quotes from Famous Books



... afford to give them. When she consequently heard her proposal, Madame Hsing was, of course, only too glad to comply with her wishes, and readily she handed Hsing Chou-yen to the charge of lady Feng. But lady Feng, bethinking herself of the number of young ladies already in the garden, of their divergent dispositions and, above all things, of the inconvenience of starting a separate household, deemed it advisable to send her to live along with Ying Ch'un; for in the event, (she thought), of Hsing Chou-yen meeting afterwards with any contrarieties, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... you ap- proach the castle from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they, leave the river, have pretensions to romantic steepness; one of them, indeed, which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the escalier monumental), achieved this result so successfully as to remind me vaguely - I hardly know why - of the great slope of the Capitol, beside the Ara Coeli, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle which figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced) ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... foregoing letter are those which will govern my administration of the executive office. They are doubtless shared by all intelligent and patriotic citizens, however divergent in their opinions as to the best methods of putting them ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson

... both right in your way," Dominey intervened, very much in the manner of a well-bred host making his usual effort to smooth over two widely divergent points of view. "There is no doubt a war party in Germany and a peace party, statesmen who place economic progress first, and others who are tainted with a purely military lust for conquest. In this country it is very hard for us to strike a balance ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in a nation of slaves and tyrants and nothing else. It is the Prussian governing class which has everywhere and in all departments "set the pace" since the empire was established. No man known to hold opinions divergent from those agreeable to the interests of the Prussian governing class can hope for employment, be it the most humble, in any department of the public service. This is particularly noticeable in its effects in the matter of ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... the country itself, is a strange medley. Some words it has assimilated into itself; others it holds, as it were, by a temporary loan. And in its choice, or invention, it follows two divergent, even opposite, paths. On the one hand, it pursues and gathers to itself barbarous Latinisms; on the other, it is eager in its quest after a coarse ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... a large measure of sovereignty to the General Government, effected by the adoption of the Constitution, was not accomplished until the suggestions of reason were strongly reenforced by the more imperative voice of experience. The divergent interests of peace speedily demanded a "more perfect union." The merchant, the shipmaster, and the manufacturer discovered and disclosed to our statesmen and to the people that commercial emancipation must be added to the political freedom which had been so bravely won. The commercial policy ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... Widely divergent views were expressed by able constitutional lawyers as to what would constitute a valid ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment; some contending that ratification by three fourths of the loyal States would be sufficient, others that three fourths of all ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every language, since there must always be two partners in any communication by means of words, and the verbal currency passing ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... astonished that the most divergent views are held on this new subject, which touches our lives very intimately, and which no experience has as yet illuminated. Because of this divergence of opinion I am also aware that we may be unable to pass an acceptable law at this session. My own ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... silent. These Democratic speakers alleged an unfair composition of the committee, and joined in denouncing the Republican party. But upon the vital and practical question of disunion their utterances were widely divergent. As the name of each of them will assume a degree of historical prominence in the further development of the rebellion, short quotations from their remarks made at that early period will be read with interest. Daniel E. Sickles, of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... invariable. In the first place, it presents a racial evolution which of itself alone already demonstrates a certain degree of plasticity from generation to generation. It presents, further, individual variations which are more distinct as it is less deeply fixed by heredity. Thus the divergent instincts of two varieties, e.g., of insects, present more individual variability and adaptability than do those instincts common to all species of a genus. In short, if we carefully study the behaviour of each individual of a species of insects with a developed ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... had acquired, changed to a certain uneasy deference towards Mainwaring; while the younger Englishman's slightly stiff and deliberate cordiality was, nevertheless, mingled with a mysterious understanding that appeared innate and unconscious. Louise was quick to see that these two men, more widely divergent in quality than any two of her own countrymen, were yet more subtly connected by some unknown sympathy than the most equal of Americans. Minty's prophetic belief of the effect of the two women upon Richardson was certainly true as regarded Mrs. Bradley. The banker—a large material ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... comparatively recent time, led divergent paths; but, thanks to such men as Haeckel, Romanes, Huxley, Wolff, and many others, this erroneous method of investigation, to a great extent, ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... structurally modified in accordance with their altered way of life, retain the primitive habit of clinging vertically to the trunks of trees, although the habit has lost its use. With the tyrant birds—a family showing an extraordinary amount of variation—it is the same; for the most divergent kinds are frequently seen reverting to the family habit of perching on an elevation, from which to make forays after passing insects, returning after each capture to the same stand. The thrushes, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... in all directions around a center—the mean is always returned to; but mutations, or the progressive steps in evolution, are divergent lines away from the center. Fluctuations are superficial and of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to the environment, but not called into being by it. Of ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... business connected with the Church Congress. Church Congresses keep an incredible number of people busy about them beforehand; besides all the management of committees and programmes and side-shows, there is the management of all the people of divergent views who won't meet each other, such as Mr. George Lansbury and Mr. Athelstan Riley. (Not that this delicate task fell to me; I was only concerned ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay

... implications. Now that the Constitution was ratified, what tie was there to hold these two to any united action for the future? Nothing but a shadow—the name of a party not yet two years old. As soon, therefore, as the federal party fairly entered upon a secure tenure of power, the divergent instincts of the two classes represented by Hamilton and Jefferson began to show themselves more distinctly until there was no longer any pretence of party unity, and the democratic (or republican) party assumed its place, in 1792-3, as the recognized opponent of the party in power. It ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... the Series presents his contribution subject to no change by the Editor. In cases where it may be deemed of sufficient importance to notice a divergent view this will be done in a foot-note. The authors, however, will aim to make their several contributions consistent with the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... divergent lines could not but have its effect upon them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman might, with a refinement ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... A Battalion offers widely divergent contrasts in the psychology of men composing its ranks, and it is with the intention of bringing the reader into intimate and personal touch with all these types of men that this chapter is penned. Nick names are as common as daisies in the Army ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... hurt or wounded the blood flowed and life gradually declined in vigour and ebbed away. For this reason the blood was subsequently often identified with the life. During the progress of culture many divergent views have been held about the source and location of life and mental and physical qualities, and the correct one that life is centred in the heart and brain, and that the brain is the seat of intelligence and mental qualities has only recently been arrived at. We still talk ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... that the perplexities to which the Entente Governments were a prey in connection with the Russian problem subsequent to March 1917 were aggravated from the outset—and yet more so after Lenin's gaining the mastery—by the very divergent views which prevailed amongst them in connection with most of the awkward ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... which are Australian. The Oriental Borneo and Bali are respectively divided from the Australian Celebes and Lombok by a narrow belt of sea known as "Wallace's line," on the opposite side of which the indigenous mammalia are as widely divergent as in any two parts ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... evidently divergent and the issues doubtful; when suddenly a Russian Envoy (Vicovitch), also on a so-called commercial mission, arrived at Cabul, offering the Ameer money and assistance against the Sikhs. This altered the aspect of affairs. Burnes wrote to the Governor-General ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde

... I retraverse the path by which I reached Fat-shan before encountering a divergent pathway, acceptable as, leading distinctly toward the northwest. The inevitable Celestial is right on hand, extracting no end of satisfaction from following, shadow-like, close behind and watching my ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... from base to apex like the meridians on a globe; they are simple, or here and there they separate into two divergent branches, which sometimes again converge into one; at the apex of the sporangium there is usually a small irregular net in which all the ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan

... France the epoch of the Renaissance of letters. What is called the Renaissance of letters is the result, to each race, of the closest contact of the educated people with ancient literature, contact which sometimes strengthened the national vein, sometimes weakened it, according to the divergent temperaments ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... daily business, we spasmodically bethink ourselves, and for a little while seek for the light of God's felt presence to shine upon us, we shall not get it. But if we lay a masterful hand, as we ought to do, on these divergent desires that draw us asunder, and bind ourselves, as it were, together, by the strong cord of a resolved purpose carried out throughout our lives, then we shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the present legal test for criminal responsibility is admittedly vague and inadequate, affording great opportunity for divergent expert testimony and a readily availed of excuse for the arbitrary and sentimental actions of juries, to which is largely due the distrust prevailing of the claim of insanity when interposed as ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... too. Not that he had asked it in so many words and stood hesitating, fearing to take the divergent path until he could take her willing blessing with him. He had made his decision firmly and against her wishes. She had kept silent at first, and had watched his progress as she had watched his baby steps, tearfully—prayerfully at times—standing ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... days—confreres in professional life and in the walks of literature—comrades of past political struggles—friends, ever indulgent and generous—political leaders of whom I have always been proud, and gentlemen of various origins, divergent opinions and different religious beliefs, all tendering me their warmest congratulations upon the success I have achieved in the literary world. No words of mine are adequate to express my feelings, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... institutions to free himself from the burden of government and weight of responsibility which he had voluntarily taken upon his shoulders. At Berlin, Bismarck's severity and love of power had brought it about that the divergent policy and uncertainty of early years had ceased; there was one mind and one will directing this State; the unauthorised interference and amateur criticism of courtiers were no longer permitted. In France, all the evils from which Prussia ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... operation both in the individual and the national life. And in recognition of this natural, though oft hidden process, the fact that to three men in that audience—men whose life-lines, to all appearance, were divergent, whose aims and purposes were antipodal—the simple song made powerful appeal, and by means of that appeal they came in after life to comprehend something of the workings of this great natural law, need cause no wonderment, no cavilling at the so-called ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... this time forward the cleavage in character, sentiment, and above all in religion, between north and south was to become, as time went on, more and more accentuated. The Dutch republic and the Spanish Netherlands were henceforth destined to pursue their separate course along widely divergent paths. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... Huns. It was a glorious illustration of the axiom "right is greater than might," which the German had in his pride reversed to read "might is right." It was prophetic of what the final issue of a contest based on such divergent principles was to be. So in those days Canadian men and women held their heads higher and carried on their war work with increased determination, stimulated by the knowledge that they were contending with an enemy more remorseless and implacable than ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... abyss of madness. Nature imposes limits to sympathy in most minds, barriers of forgetfulness without which healthy thought is impossible. The danger to the mind of indulging in unlimited sympathy has been emphasized by the most divergent students of psychological law. Herbert Spencer analysed it with characteristic thoroughness. Nietzsche went farther. He reacted violently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and in philosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. The war has ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... an unconquerable realist and truth-teller, and she could not at the moment utter any other than a divergent word. "We got you here to-night to talk over that Haney business. We don't entirely like it; at least, I don't. Frank has no responsibility, never had. Haney is not a bad man, and she isn't a bit low or common; but folks think she is. And it's going to hurt you both, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... always, of some rash infatuation, Alfieri was already shaking off the intellectual torpor of his youth; and the first stirrings of his curiosity roused an answering passion in Odo. Their tastes were indeed divergent, for to that external beauty which was to Odo the very bloom of life, Alfieri remained insensible; while of its imaginative counterpart, its prolongation in the realm of thought and emotion, he had but the most ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... has been aimed at than to tell an interesting story in the simplest possible way, to enter into any discussion of a question to which what has just been said might naturally seem to lead—the question, namely, of the results, immediate and remote, of the mission system in California. The widely divergent conclusions on this subject registered by the historians will, on investigation, be found, as in most such cases, to depend quite as much upon bias of mind and preconceived ideals, as upon the bare facts presented, concerning which, one would ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson

... Between the divergent requirements of size and numbers, there is always a middle term; a mean, not capable of exact definition, but still existent within certain not very widely separated extremes. For commerce destroying by individual cruisers, acting separately, which was the measure that commended itself to the men ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... moment any good result of the President's suggestion, in America or in the allied countries, was out of the question; and if any hope had remained, the Germans presently destroyed it. They wanted a peace conference with no terms stated beforehand, where they could play on the divergent interests of the allied countries; nor did they want the President to have anything to do with the making of peace, lest, as Bethmann Hollweg expressed it to Bernstorff, the Germans should be "robbed of their gains by neutral pressure." So the German reply on Dec. ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... pliers, in the third each arm is in two portions, screwing the one into the other. The second type is represented by the original Phos burner, in which the curved arms of B are replaced by a pair of straight divergent arms of thin, soft tubing, joined to a pair of convergent wider tubes carrying the two tips. The third type is met with in the Drake burner, where the divergent arms are wide and have an internal thread into which screws an external thread cut upon lateral prolongations of ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... the symbol of this day appears are various and sometimes widely divergent. The principal ones are shown in plates LXV, 9 to 20. The form given by Landa is seen at 9; that most common in the Codex Tro. at 10. Other forms which frequently occur are shown at 11-13; those shown at 14-16 are from the Troano Codex. Some ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas

... howling against horseflesh and the devilish ingenuity of him who discovered a precedent for roasting it; it heard the chorus, "where is the Column?" and the mocking echo answering "where!" It heard many divergent opinions as to what the Column was going to do; some contending that it was waiting to be re-inforced by the "Sixth Division"; more dictating with fiery rancour that it was for the "Seventh Division" the Column waited; another ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... of genius and which the variation of madness? In the light of contemporary events, most people would be inclined to give the palm to Moltke. But when an organism is about to undergo mutation, the change is often preluded by frequent and extensive variations. Of these divergent variations, those only persist which are best suited to the conditions of existence. Thus, in Nicolai's view, the ideas of Moltke and his disciples are a favourable presage ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... these facts for the benefit of those persons who have not yet understood that it is absolutely useless at the present day to dispute the evolution of living beings. Deceived by the divergent opinions of scientists concerning hypotheses which endeavor to explain the details of evolution, these persons confound the details with the fundamental ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... the man who had control of the valley; but while Alton had striven with arduous toil to bring about this consummation, Hallam of the Tyee was waiting while those he meant to plunder worked for him. It was also plain that there was no room for two leaders with divergent aspirations, and the rancher had seen sufficient of his opponent's dealings to recognize that he would not scruple about any measures which promised to rid him of a rival. Therefore it became him to be careful, and once more his fingers fell ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... man involved closely in the practical management of a saw log may conceivably possess scant leisure to correlate the scattered efforts of such divergent activities. The cross cutters and swampers may get ahead of the fellers and have to wait in idleness until the latter have knocked down a tree. Or the donkey may fall silent from lack of logs to haul; or the chute crews may smoke their pipes awaiting the donkey. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... if you have concluded your unaccountable peregrinations remove the two files marked E1925 and E1926 to Pomona. If you mislay one scrap of paper they contain—the bartering of a thousand Weeners being an inadequate equivalent—your miserable substance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergent directions. Don't come back here, but attempt for once to palliate the offense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interview her, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... Elsewhere, a brilliant radiated formation was conspicuous, spreading at four opposite points into four vast luminous expansions, compared to feather-plumes or aigrettes.[157] Arago at Perpignan noticed considerable irregularities in the divergent rays. Some appeared curved and twisted, a few lay across the others, in a direction almost tangential to the moon's limb, the general effect being described as that of a "hank of thread in disorder."[158] At Lipeszk, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... have none of me. In the flood tide of my passion she married a scorbutic archdeacon of the name of Jugg. Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can't remember. It was something ending in "-ine." We quarrelled because we held divergent views on Mr. Wilson Barrett. Then there was Clothilde, whose tragical story I have already unfolded; Lucy Crooks, who threw me over for this dear, amiable, wooden-headed stockjobbing Latimer; X, Y and Z—but here, let me remark, I was the hunted—mammas ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... modern France, J.J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths. Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm. ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222] Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about the other.[223] Hobbes's ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... optic[42] and olfactory,[43] on the other with nerves of general sensation and motion.[44] To this intricate part of the brain, these centres, converge the nerve-fibres collected in the spinal cord and medulla oblongata, and from them radiate other fibres that pursue a divergent course, and finally terminate in the gray matter of the cerebral hemispheres. Thus, the brute impressions brought from the periphery of the body, are conveyed to special foci of concentration, thence to be transmitted to the gray matter at the surface of the ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... with the Uitlander population is that, owing to their numbers and activity, they have brought in their train an influx of new wealth into the Transvaal of truly colossal dimensions. Thus, to sum up the distinctive and divergent characteristics of the two classes into which the population of the South African Republic is divided—the Boers, or old population, are conservative, ignorant, stagnant, and a minority; the Uitlanders, or new population, are progressive, full of enterprise, energy and ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler

... 'nihilistic,' because Buddhism, having been adopted by savage tribes as well as civilized nations, by quiet, enervated people as well as by warlike, sturdy hordes, during some twenty-five hundred years, has developed itself into beliefs widely divergent and even diametrically opposed. Even in Japan alone it has differentiated itself into thirteen main sects and forty-four sub-sects[FN6] and is still in full vigour, though in other countries it has already passed its prime. Thus Japan seems to be the best representative ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... a revolving or divergent glance. If both eyes project in parallel lines, they see double. A drunken man sees double because ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... gathered from Arch Hawn, that during the truce in the mountains little Aaron Honeycutt had developed a wild passion for Mavis, but at that absurdity Jason had only laughed. Still the customs of the Blue-grass and the hills were widely divergent, and if Gray, only out of loneliness, were much with Mavis, only one interpretation was possible to the Hawns and Honeycutts, just as only one interpretation had been possible for Steve with reference to Marjorie and himself, and Steve's interpretation he contemptuously ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... works there are many divergent opinions, ranging from Macaulay's unbounded praise to the condemnation of some of our modern critics. From a literary view point Milton's prose would be stronger if less violent, and a modern writer would hardly ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... when they sat down to supper, and the fun grew fast and furious. Talk was less restrained in Lucien's house than at Matifat's, for no one suspected that the representatives of the brotherhood and the newspaper writers held divergent opinions. Young intellects, depraved by arguing for either side, now came into conflict with each other, and fearful axioms of the journalistic jurisprudence, then in its infancy, hurtled to and fro. Claude Vignon, upholding the dignity of criticism, inveighed against the tendency of the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but that ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 4.4% in 2005, led by China (9.3%), India (7.6%), and Russia (5.9%). The other 14 successor nations of the USSR and the other old Warsaw Pact nations again experienced widely divergent growth rates; the three Baltic nations continued as strong performers, in the 7% range of growth. Growth results posted by the major industrial countries varied from no gain for Italy to a strong gain by the United ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... unimportant or merely curious study. Yet psychologists, medical and non-medical, almost without exception, treat its manifestations—when they refer to them at all—in a dogmatic and off-hand manner which is far from scientific. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most widely divergent opinions are expressed. Nor is it surprising that ignorant and chaotic notions among the general population should lead to results that would be ludicrous if they were not pathetic. To mention one instance known to me: a married lady who ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... bottom of the tub a number of bottles were laid in convergent rows, so that the neck of each bottle turned towards the centre. Other bottles filled with magnetized water tightly corked up were laid in divergent rows with their necks turned outwards. Several rows were thus piled up, and the apparatus was then pronounced to be at 'high pressure'. The tub was filled with water, to which were sometimes added powdered glass and iron filings. There were also some dry tubs, that is, prepared in ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... mineral of the locality, and is conspicuous by its rich green color on all the rocks and in the outcrops. Fine specimens of it form excellent cabinet specimens. It should be in masses of good size, with a silky, divergent, fibrous structure, quite hard, and of a pure oil green color, for this purpose. Drused crystals of it are also very beautiful and abundant, but very minute. As the greater part of it is but a sixteenth or eighth of an inch in thickness, it may require ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... woman sat, with a great cushion of moss in a bag of matting on the ground before her, over which was spread a deer-skin on which was laid raw cotton, which she briskly beat with beaters made of five or six divergent sticks fastened together at one end. Such beating sticks are called mapaho; one is held in each hand, and the beating is briskly done, alternately with one and the other; the beating is intended to spread the raw cotton into a thin and even sheet before it is spun into thread. Returning ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... circumstances, and be forced to accept charity, but your true pauper, be he rich or poor, has the parasitic habit of mind. When we ask ourselves then, Who are the poor? we must answer that they include widely divergent types of character,—the selfish and the {12} unselfish, the noble and the mean, workers and parasites—and that, in going among them, we must be prepared to meet human beings differing often from ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond

... other, the difference between the deities would be hardly more than one of name; in other words, it would be almost purely dialectical. But the gradual dispersion of the tribes, and their consequent isolation from each other, would favour the growth of divergent modes of conceiving and worshipping the gods whom they had carried with them from their old home, so that in time discrepancies of myth and ritual would tend to spring up and thereby to convert a nominal into a real distinction ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... last-produced forms and their original parent-species. Now, if we suppose a species to produce two or more varieties, and these in the course of time to produce other varieties, the principal of good being derived from diversification of structure will generally lead to the preservation of the most divergent varieties; thus the lesser differences characteristic of varieties come to be augmented into the greater differences characteristic of species, and, by the extermination of the older intermediate forms, new species end by being distinctly defined objects. Thus, also, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... the Ganges many advanced occultists wandered to the land of Egypt, and sat at the feet of the Master. From him they obtained the Master-Key which explained and reconciled their divergent views, and thus the Secret Doctrine was firmly established. From other lands also came the learned ones, all of whom regarded Hermes as the Master of Masters, and his influence was so great that in spite of the many wanderings from the path on the part ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... surprised to learn, from what has gone before, that an immense mass of records have accumulated respecting the appearance of the Corona. Correspondingly numerous and divergent are the theories which have been launched to explain the observations made. One thing is in the highest degree probable, namely, that electricity ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived from Further Records (London, 1890), were written rather late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126] and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of grape-shot" (as Carlyle might ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... Divergent ideals and other considerations led Portuguese Conservatives to throw their influence into the scale in favor of neutrality, but now that their country is at war they have accepted the fact and can ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... and has very diverging affinities. I find, strongly put and illustrated, the very same remark in the genera of hymenoptera. Now, it is not to me at first apparent why a very distinct and isolated group should be apt to have more divergent affinities than a less isolated group. I am aware that most genera have more affinities than in two ways, which latter, perhaps, is the commonest case. I see how infinitely vague all this is; but I should very much like to know what ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Wilkinson; the dress of the lower classes, by the same author; the prodigies of Egyptian architecture at Edfou; Caillaud's discovery of Meroe in the depths of AEthiopia; these, and a host of brilliant evidences, center their once divergent rays in one flood of light upon the temple of genius reared by Herodotus, and display the goddess of Truth ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... not to be seen by anybody just then; and the reddleman waited in the window-bench of the kitchen, his hands hanging across his divergent knees, and his cap ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... Despite the divergent lines of their lives a great tie of affection united them. They met only at long intervals—when he came into town for a night—and all correspondence between them was on his side as she never knew where he was. Even had he not lavished a rough tenderness upon her, the memory of pangs ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... the sun in sinking might hope to fall in fairer spheres than the skies he had left, for they were of a dun-color and an opaque consistency. Only one horizontal rift gave glimpses of a dazzling ochreous tint of indescribable brilliancy, from the focus of which the divergent light was shed upon the western limits of the land. Chilhowee, near at hand, was dark enough—a purplish garnet hue; but the scarlet of the sour-wood gleamed in the cove; the hickory still flared gallantly yellow; the receding ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... Kipling and Bok were engaged in a discussion of the Boer problem, which was then pressing. Father Kipling sat by listening, but made no comment on the divergent views, since, Kipling holding the English side of the question and Bok the Dutch side, it followed that they could not agree. Finally Father Kipling arose and said: "Well, I will take a stroll and see if I can't listen to the water and get all this ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... its natural and specific danger, and the specific English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other, both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... perpendicularly into the air, and attain a length of, on an average, half a millimetre, or one-fiftieth of an inch, but they seldom become longer, and then their growth is at an end. Their free upper end swells in a rounded manner, and from this is produced, on the whole of its upper part, rayed divergent protuberances, which attain an oval form, and a length almost equal to their radius, or, in weaker specimens, the diameter of the rounded head. The rayed divergent protuberances are the direct producers and bearers of the propagating cells, spores, or conidia, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... artificial to help it, will produce better animals and better men than the present, and fit them better to the conditions of existence, why, let it work, say we, to the top of its bent There is still room enough for improvement. Only let us hope that it always works for good: if not, the divergent lines on Darwin's lithographic diagram of "Transmutation made Easy," ominously show what small deviations from the straight path may come to in ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... most closely united, there appeared the beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time went on. Isaac Williams, dear as he was to Newman, and returning to the full Newman's affection, yet represented from the first the views of what Williams spoke of as the "Bisley and Fairford School," which, though ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged, of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels, with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... religions proves the creation of man who received a divine revelation. According to evolution, all religions were evolved or invented by humanoids. In that case, we would expect them to be widely divergent; and we would be surprised, if they agreed on great and important points, and especially on points which could not be clearly arrived at by reason. For instance, what in reason teaches us that an animal sacrifice is a proper way to worship God? How ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... Light, in other words, occupies thirty-six days in traversing it, but sixty-five years in journeying thence hither. Its components may be regarded, on an average, as of the twelfth magnitude; for, although the divergent stars rank much higher in the scale of brightness, the central ones, there is reason to believe, are notably fainter. The sum total of their light, if concentrated into one stellar point, would at any rate very little ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... of a single nation from among the four that constitute the United Kingdom; the other devotes itself to the affairs of a single social class. The existence of these powerful sectional organizations is a disastrous portent. They stand, not as the old parties do for divergent views concerning the interests of the State as a whole, but for mortal schism in the body politic. Never can there be a full return to healthy national life until means have been found for reabsorbing these and other incipient schismatic organizations ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... the torrent of 1859 within six feet of us, a huge, straggling, coal-black river, broken up into streams in our vicinity, but on the whole, presenting an iridescent uphill expanse a mile wide. We had reached one of the divergent streams to which it had been said after its downward course of 9000 feet, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further," while the main body had pursued its course to the ocean. Whatever force impelled it had ceased to act, and the last towering wave of fire had halted just there, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... squadron sprang out of Port Stanley and began a chase which could only have one ending. Von Spee turned to fight, with his two armoured cruisers against the two over-powering battle cruisers of the British, so that his three light cruisers might "star away" at their utmost speed, on three divergent courses, in an effort to escape. Vain hope! Sturdee's battle cruisers sank the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, while his other cruisers sank two of the three German cruisers. All the Germans went down ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... during the winter in still more distant spheres, although the conquest of German colonies was regarded by the pure strategist as belonging to the illegitimate and divergent rather than to the legitimate and subsidiary type of military operation. Policy may, however, outweigh strategy, and the circumstance that the victor only retains as the price of peace his conquests, or part of them, made in war, extenuates if it ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... very interesting to know whether the gossamer threads thrown out by these insects are in an excited state of electricity: their divergent state would seem to imply they were; for there seems to be no other natural cause which could prevent them from coming together, especially before the insect had left its resting-place. If electric, then neighbouring bodies, as the hand or branches of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various

... population of the city and vicinity were present to witness the novel scenes, men and women vying with each other in applauding and enthusing the martial ardor of the soldiers on parade. Such an army, hastily improvised in a few brief days from city, country, and towns, made up of a composite of divergent race elements, as was that of the Louisiana contingent with the command of Jackson at New Orleans, was perhaps never paralleled in the history of warfare before. Major Plauche's battalion of uniformed companies was made up mainly of French and Spanish Creoles, with some ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith

... cranium deficient that lived five days. Putnam speaks of a female nosencephalous monster that lived twenty-nine hours. Angell and Elsner in March, 1895, reported a case of anencephaly, or rather pseudencephaly, associated with double divergent strabismus and limbs in a state of constant spastic contraction. The infant lived eight days. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire cites an example of anencephaly which lived a quarter of an hour. Fauvel mentioned one that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... St. George, nor is it a profound interpretation of character like the Habbakuk or Jeremiah. Its effect is impaired by this sense of compromise and uncertainty. It is one of the very rare cases in which Donatello hesitated between divergent aims and finally ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... it did not affect his love for her, nor her love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the mountain-tops ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the thought had been Felsenburgh's, though ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... species, sometimes feeding on the same, sometimes on different plants. In every such case the valleys that are nearest to each other furnish the most nearly allied forms; and a full set of the varieties of each species presents a minute gradation of forms between the more divergent types found in the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broad Babylonish girdle of crimson cloth, minutely gold-embroidered, and hung with silver, copper and gold coins of the Orient; my beard, still black, sweeps in two divergent sheaves to my hips, flustered by every wind; as I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet, a-glow with luminous stones. I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... minds capable of grasping spontaneously this ensemble of causes and effects, of principles and consequences, by which I try to demonstrate the approaching disappearance of property; on the other hand, the ideas that are generally formed of this right are too divergent and too loosely determined to allow an admission, so soon, of the contrary theory. Thus, in the middle and lower ranks of literature and philosophy, no less than among the common people, it is thought that, when property is abolished, no one will be able to ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... melody originally conceived for the last movement of the Symphony in D minor was developed into the finale of one of the last string quartets. In fact the instances in which composers have put their pieces to widely divergent purposes are innumerable and sometimes amusing, in view of the fantastic belief that they are guided by plenary inspiration. The overture which Rossini wrote for his "Barber of Seville" was lost soon after the first production of the opera. The composer ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... to speak according to his brief, but that in such condemnations the Holy See is engaged, for the most part, in repudiating one or two great lines of error, such as Lutheranism or Jansenism, principally ethical not doctrinal, which are divergent from the Catholic mind, and that it is but expressing what any good Catholic, of fair abilities, though unlearned, would say himself, from common and sound sense, if the matter could be ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... were on the whole laborious, uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many ways nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations is associated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Science and Art department Honours marks an epoch. Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these minor manoeuvres and conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly, and just incoherently, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... of art the constructional characters of architecture give rise to many notions of decoration which afterwards descend to other arts, taking greatly divergent forms. Aboriginal architecture in some parts of America had reached a development capable of wielding a strong influence. This is not true, however, of any ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes

... conception of the beautiful, not merely in poetry, music, art and nature, but in human beings. I have insight into human nature, derived not only from a courageous experience, but also from imagination; and I have a clear though distant vision, down dark, long and often divergent avenues, of the ordered meaning of God. I take this opportunity of saying my religion is a vibrating reality never away from me; and this is all I shall write upon ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... mind the essential differences between these two groups, which, in catering for quite different tastes, necessarily follow widely divergent policies. Both groups pay reasonably well, and it may be said that all women's papers of any reputation whatever give a considerate ear to the outside contributor. The sixpennies, having what ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... profitable at the present time to descend into the particulars of the rivalry which interests in many respects so divergent necessarily entailed. A gentleman who had singular opportunities for arriving at an unprejudiced judgment recently informed the writer of this article that one company alone employed the element of "influence" to the extent of three millions of dollars, or its supposed equivalent. Facts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... principles of education are sufficiently flexible to fit any community in the United States; they will apply to places of the most divergent school needs. ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... Messiah's birth is a subject upon which specialists in theology and history, and those who are designated in literature "the learned," fail to agree. Numerous lines of investigation have been followed, only to reach divergent conclusions, both as to the year and as to the month and day within the year at which the "Christian era" in reality began. The establishment of the birth of Christ as an event marking a time from which chronological data should be calculated, was first effected about 532 ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... it will seem that we ought not to pass from the question of origin without a word on the subject of the age of the earth. All that one can do, however, is to give a number of very divergent estimates. Physicists have tried to calculate the age of the sun from the rate of its dissipation of heat, and have assigned, at the most, a hundred million years to our solar system; but the recent discovery of a source of heat in the disintegration of such metals as radium has ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... public such as we now find it hard even to imagine. In those days the intellectual classes of India felt the ordinary activities of life to be unsatisfying: they thought it natural to renounce the world and mortify the flesh: divergent systems of ritual, theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to meditation and study. Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot



Words linked to "Divergent" :   different, divergent thinking, diverging, radiating, divergence, convergent, divergent thinker, branching, diverge, divergent strabismus



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