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Fundamental   Listen
noun
Fundamental  n.  A leading or primary principle, rule, law, or article, which serves as the groundwork of a system; essential part, as, the fundamentals of the Christian faith.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fundamental" Quotes from Famous Books



... often identity of expression actually does occur. And (2), the only condition which could warrant the belief that there has been assimilation, is observed to be invariably away from Dr. Tischendorf's instances.—viz. a sufficient number of respectable attesting witnesses: it being a fundamental principle in the law of Evidence, that the very few are rather to be suspected than the many. But further (3), if there be some marked diversity of expression discoverable in the two parallel places; and if that diversity has been carefully maintained all down the ages in either ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... as our fundamental proposition that a hieroglyphic form of writing is better fitted to, and must properly, in the period of its natural development, accompany the imaginative processes of mind. Or, since imagination to our ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... Upon whatever fundamental scheme we perseveringly concentrate our powers, upon whatever main road of occupation we take life's journey,—art, politics, commerce, science,—if only we will take its upper fork as often as ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable

... feasts, and forms of worship, and even to name those who shall receive divine honors. There is no trace here of that scrupulous regard for personal independence and that invincible distrust of governmental action which characterized Jefferson. It is true, he and the Gallic writers agreed upon certain fundamental propositions; but they were peculiar neither to him nor them. Some of the same principles were announced by Locke and Beccaria, by Hobbes, who maintained the omnipotence of the state, and by Grotius, who insisted upon the divine right of kings. To agree with another upon certain matters does not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... alone, the two friends at first kept an embarrassed silence. It however became necessary for one of them to break it first, and as d'Artagnan appeared determined to leave that honor to his companion, Aramis said, "you see that I am returned to my fundamental ideas." ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Brent told him that he should not come any more until he had at least learned enough to realize how little he knew. It was a disappointment to Jane, but she persuaded Miss Liz not to press the issue, deciding that it might be better in the long run for Dale to proceed more systematically in fundamental things and lay ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... model. Utmost vigour of stroke was here combined with utmost delicacy of modulation. Rich colour and the use of gold are an integral part of the Buddhist pictures, though in the masterpieces of the religious painters a grand rhythm of linear design gives the fundamental character. Exquisite subdued colour is also found in the "flower and bird pieces" and still-life subjects of the Sung artists, and becomes more emphatic and variegated in the decorative artists of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... of phylacteries is a fundamental principle of the Jewish religion. They are to be preserved with the greatest care. Indeed, the Rabbis assert that the single precept of the phylacteries is equal in value to all the commandments.[27:1] The Talmud says: "Whoever has the phylacteries bound to his head and arm, and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... leave the real issue untouched. The real ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,—the fundamental identity of the good, the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... the depositaries of revelation, there is nothing unreasonable in a miracle which so powerfully contributed to their conquest of Canaan, and we have yet to learn that there is anything unreasonable in the belief that they were the depositaries of revelation. The fundamental postulate of the Old Testament is a supernatural revelation, and that opens the door for any miracle needful for its accomplishment. It is folly to seek to conciliate by minimising the miraculous element. However ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... suffer foreign troops of any nation whatsoever to enter into Germany, or pass through it during the troubles aforesaid, and the consequences that might result from them; but to oppose the same with their utmost might, in order to secure Germany from the calamities of war, maintain her fundamental laws and constitutions, and preserve her peace uninterrupted. Thus, the late treaty with Russia was virtually renounced. Their majesties, moreover, seized this favourable opportunity to adjust the differences that had subsisted between them, in relation to the remainder ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... contemporaries, there is nothing particularly new in our author's interest in those aspects of human nature which render a man different from his fellows. It is true that the main stress of neoclassical thought had rested on the fundamental likeness of all men in all ages, and had sought an ideal and universal norm in morals, conduct, and art. But there had always been counter currents making for a recognition of the inescapable differences among various races and ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill

... barter-economy and money-economy is of great and fundamental importance. It repeats itself with so much regularity in the history of every highly developed nation, that political economists gifted with perception for the historical, could not possibly overlook it. Thus, Aristotle, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... miles apart, were to concentrate at a remote point far within the enemy's lines, situated on a river always difficult and uncertain of navigation, and now obstructed and fortified. Not often in the history of war is the same fundamental principle twice violated in the same campaign; yet here it was so, and even in the same orders, for after once concentrating within the enemy's lines at Alexandria, the united forces of Banks, Sherman, and Porter were actually to meet those of Steele within the enemy's ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... the Church this general view of creation became fundamental; they impressed upon Christendom more and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God. Here and there sundry theologians of larger mind attempted to give a more spiritual view regarding some parts ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... of the Motor and Sensory Mechanisms.—Lesions of the motor mechanism differ in their fundamental characters according as they affect the upper or the lower neurones. The signs also vary according as the affected area is destroyed or merely irritated, say by the pressure of a tumour. Irritative lesions in ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... its fundamental note too loud near a delicate glass, or it will break," whispered my friend to me, as he saw me gazing ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... of Model II lie in its content and its construction. The fundamental principle on which it is built might be called the "killing-two-birds-with-one-stone idea." Two things are wrong; one reform will make both right. Can you think of any other subject which might be discussed on the ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller

... this end he may conquer and hold in subjection people and territory, until such terms are submitted to. And until then, the state of war continues. The right to impose such terms as will secure peace in the future is one of the fundamental ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... that the war-making instinct is not fundamental. This instinct does not exist in the early stages of ant life. Putting together newly hatched ants belonging to three different species, Forel obtained a mixed ant community whose members lived in perfect harmony. The only primitive instinct of newly hatched ants is that for domestic ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... to start with. Your grandfather had a business worth not much, but it was a business, and the fundamental thing is to have machinery to work with when you start life. I had that. My father was narrow, contracted and a blunderer, but he made good in a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... language like prose and poetry. It speaks to our feelings and imaginations, as it were by suggestion; reaching for this very reason depths of our being quite beyond the power of mere words. No one can define rhythm except by saying that rhythm, in the sense of motion, is the fundamental fact in the universe and in all life, both physical and human. Everything in the heavens above and in the earth beneath is in ceaseless motion and change; nothing remains the same for two consecutive seconds. Even the component parts of material—such as stone and wood, which we ordinarily speak ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... over it seems almost as though I had been untrue to my fundamental philosophy. The world has gone, vanished; but perhaps it is for the best, afterall. We shall start again in a few days with a clean slate, picking up from where we left off—for we have books and tools and men of learning and intelligence—to start a new ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... of your letter, dearest one, though I delight in hearing from you, gave me great pain. I had hoped and believed that you were better grounded in the fundamental truths of the Gospel than to express yourself as you have done. You speak of Holy Church as if there were one visible establishment on earth which all are bound to obey, when Christ founded only one spiritual Church, on the great ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston

... view much better in your letter. Instead of saying, as I often have, that very few species vary at the same time, I ought to have said, that very few species of a genus EVER vary so as to become modified; for this is the fundamental explanation of classification, and is shown ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... was a sort of sentimental regard of self in the matter,—an implied special, and thus partially exclusive predilection or preference of the Saviour for the individual supposed to be making use of them; a certain fundamental want of humility therefore, although the forms of speech in which they were cast might be laboriously humble. They also not unfrequently manifested a great leaning to the forms of earthly show as representative of the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... giraffe to propitiate the spectators. Of course you may take up the position that the hypocrisy is practised all day before her mistress, and that the mere momentum of habit carries it on at other times. This is plausible, but I suspect that such a case would rather come under the fundamental law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. Let us be charitable and look for better reasons. The mere milk of human kindness explains something, but not enough, and I am inclined to think that the Ayah is the subject of an indiscriminate maternal emotion, which runs where it can find ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... migrating with this sort of property. Such accidents as having a few sheep bitten by rattlesnakes, and also a certain percentage becoming foot-sore and breaking down from fatigue, are common to every herd that crosses the Rocky Mountains. Economy in living is the great fundamental principle among the lower classes of the Mexicans; therefore, when a sheep is going to die from fatigue, or any simple disease, natural death is anticipated by the herders with the aid of the hunting-knife, and the meat, being dressed and cooked, is unhesitatingly eaten by them. Next to the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... controversial method known as the instance—instantia, [Greek: enstasis]. For example, "all ruminants are horned" is a proposition which may be upset by the single instance of the camel. The instance is a case in which a universal truth is sought to be applied, and something is inserted in the fundamental definition of it which is not universally true, and by which it is upset. But there is room for mistake; and when this trick is employed by your opponent, you must observe (1) whether the example which he gives is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer

... who propagates them for orchard purposes. My interest in the various points connected with pecan growing was at that time a very direct interest, and the only motive I had for determining various facts was the fundamental motive which largely dominates the world today, and that is the question of securing the thing we ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association

... utilized in the service of human progress. Now as this ethereal energy which is only just beginning to be recognized can be drawn upon for light, for heat, for motor power, for communication, just as this hitherto undreamed-of power can be drawn upon for the fundamental needs of the physical world, so, correspondingly, does there exist the infinite reservoir of spiritual energy which God freely opens to man in precisely the proportion in which he recognizes and avails himself ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... before the discovery of radium enabled physicists of the ordinary type to improve their acquaintance with the "electron." Whatever name is given to that minute body it is recognised now by ordinary science as well as by occult observation, as the fundamental unit of physical matter. To that extent ordinary science has overtaken the occult research I am dealing with, but that research rapidly carried the occult student into regions of knowledge whither, it is perfectly certain, the ordinary ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... The fundamental laws, considered as a whole, were the wisest devisable to suit the peculiar circumstances of the Colony; but whilst many of them were disregarded or treated as a dead letter, so many loopholes were ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... completely triumphant; not because it is more true, but because it is a more advanced truth, and one step nearer, therefore, to the final solution, which will then lap back, and subsume and assimilate and reconcile the whole family of fundamental principles upon which the existence of human society is inexpugnably based. It is upon this lower ground of adaptation to the exigency of the age and the occasion, and as a means to the development of still higher truths, that we urge ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... compromise this middle party is able to offer does not make provision for the ideals of either of the extremists, and indeed meets little favor anywhere in a country excited by recent events in world history, where revolutionary changes are expected and a settlement far more in accord with fundamental principles. ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... or tendency of all creatures is, to preserve their existing condition with its inherent capacities, and to keep clear of destruction or disablement. This appetite (they said) manifests itself in little children before any pleasure or pain is felt, and is moreover a fundamental postulate, pre-supposed in all desires of particular pleasures, as well as in all aversions to particular pains. We begin by loving our own vitality; and we come, by association, to love what promotes ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... plan for uniting all sects and parties, on the one broad fundamental ground of the unity of God as ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... forty books and pamphlets published between 1698 and 1725 are definitely part of the Collier controversy, but the fact that none of them really discusses adequately fundamental premises concerning the nature, method, and function of comedy had serious consequences for the English stage. The situation was further complicated by the rise of sentimental comedy and the fact that the theories supposed ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet

... of scientific discovery, so far from tending to verify and confirm, has served rather to disprove and invalidate the fundamental assumption on ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... the government than when they were still hamlets. The object of this bill is to correct those monstrous disproportions, and to bring the legal order of society into something like harmony with the natural order. What, then, can be more inconsistent with the fundamental principle of the bill than to exclude any district from a share in the representation, for no reason but because that district is, and must always be, one of great importance? This bill was meant to reconcile and unite. Will you frame it in such a manner ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... when in his "History" he denies that communications were frequent between his party and England, or that any of the Regent's charges are true. As for opposing authority and being rebellious, the manifest fundamental idea of the plot is to marry Elizabeth to Arran and deny "entrance and title" to the rightful Queen. It was an admirable scheme, and had Arran not become a lunatic, had Elizabeth not been "that imperial ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... convinced that the fundamental type of all the three Tolstoy brothers was identical, just as the type of all maple-leaves is identical, despite the variety of their configurations. And if I set myself to develop the idea, I could show to what a degree all three brothers shared ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy

... States, if they colonized that country, and would drive them, if circumstances rendered it necessary, to a Titanic struggle for their independence, even if they should succumb in shaking off the yoke of a new oppressor. If Washington proposed to carry out the fundamental principles of its constitution, there was no doubt that it would not attempt to colonize the Philippines, or even to annex them. It was probable then that it would give them independence and guarantee it; in such case the presence of the President was necessary, as he would ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... has a strong innate tendency to preserve itself, to assert itself, to push itself forward, and to act on its environment, consciously or unconsciously. The innate, strong tendency of the living is an undeveloped, but fundamental, nature of Spirit or Mind. It shows itself first in inert matter as impenetrability, or affinity, or mechanical force. Rock has a powerful tendency to preserve itself. And it is hard to crush it. Diamond has ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... shiver of passing shells in the air and the blue of the lower sky continually breaking out into eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such panoplies of the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon a greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of thing now. We are very ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... of English government had taken possession of these young heads. Constitution, Upper House, Lower House, national guarantee, balance of power, Magna Charta, Law of Habeas Corpus,—all these words were incessantly repeated, and seldom understood; but they were of fundamental importance to a ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... efforts shall be employed in making the Rising Star one of the vessels of our squadron, and then we shall be invincible, and by keeping good relations with Sir Thomas Hardy, and by his means with England, we shall establish fundamental principles to our glories. I am satisfied of the conferences and deliberations you had with this gentleman, and I approve the whole, although the Valparaiso ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... all "animals," but this meant nothing more than her unwillingness to have her work increased by their introduction into the Atwater household. No; the appearance of the dog had stirred something queer and fundamental within her. All coloured people look startled the first time they see a French Poodle, but there is a difference. Most coloured men do not really worry much about being coloured, but many coloured women do. In the expression of a coloured man, when he looks at a black and woolly French ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... Abstruse mathematical theories, unless in some of their more striking results, are excluded from consideration. These, during the eighteenth century, constituted the sum and substance of astronomy, and their fundamental importance can never be diminished, and should never be ignored. But as the outcome of the enormous development given to the powers of the telescope in recent times, together with the swift advance of physical science, and the inclusion, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... between them. Now had come this mammoth difference, a divergence of standard too vital to be smoothed over by a gloss of cajolery. Willie was angry through every fiber of his being. Slowly it seeped into his consciousness that Janoah's fundamental philosophy and his own were at odds; their attitude of mind as antagonistic as the poles. Against trust loomed suspicion, against generosity narrowness, against optimism pessimism. Janoah believed the worst of ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... universal reason is in itself. For, as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws; universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... no dream of students, it is a conclusion which results from an analysis of the tendencies of modern society: Anarchist Communism is the union of the two fundamental tendencies of our society—a tendency towards economic equality, and a tendency towards political liberty. So long as Communism presented itself under an authoritarian form, which necessarily implies government, armed with much greater power than ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin

... machines, it derives the whole of its energy from its fuel, the subject of foods—their properties, uses, and methods of preparation—has been gone into with unusual care. An adequate supply of clean-burning food-fuel for the human engine is so absolutely fundamental both for health and for efficiency—we are so literally what we have eaten—that to be well fed is in very fact two-thirds of the battle of life from a physiological point of view. The whole discussion ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... Physics inquires into the efficient and material causes of things; metaphysics, into the formal and final causes. The principal objects of physics are concrete substances, or abstract though physical qualities. The research into abstract qualities, the fundamental problem of physics, comes near to the metaphysical study of forms, which indeed differs from the first only in being more general, and in having as its results a form strictly so called, i.e. a nature or quality which is a limitation or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... illegitimate and legitimate unions of heterostyled plants, it is quite unjustifiable to assume that the sterility of species when first crossed and of their hybrid offspring, indicates that they differ in some fundamental manner from the varieties or individuals ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... the speeches of John Bright. They are noteworthy for their simplicity of diction and uniform quality of directness. His method was to make a plain statement of facts, enunciate certain fundamental principles, then follow with ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... constitutions, and compromises because they are compromises. But what are compromises?' asked the young speaker, 'and what was laid down in these constitutions? Eminent lawgivers have said that certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and that all laws of man's making which trample on those ideas are null and void—wrong to obey, but right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States sat upon the neck of those rights, recognizes human ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... to be able to formulate fundamental recipes. In preparing quick bread recipes, she should know the required consistency of flour mixtures, i.e. the approximate proportion of moisture and flour for each bread; and the proportion of leavening, seasoning, ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer

... of various sensibilities. Monochromatic light is utilized in photo-micrography for the best rendition of detail. Light-waves have been utilized as standards of length because they are invariable and fundamental. Numerous other interesting adaptations of artificial light are ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... foster the implementation of human rights, fundamental freedoms, democracy, and the rule of law; to act as an instrument of early warning, conflict prevention, and crisis management; and to serve as a framework for conventional arms control and confidence ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... by party is the fundamental basis of it. There must be parties or there can be no government; this is equally true of democracies and limited monarchies. The primary is the basis of party government. His selfish interests, of whatever sort, make it necessary for every ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... attainment as that reached by Jesus would have allowed His disciples to use such mighty power without also instructing them fully in the nature of the forces they were using, and of the best methods of employing the same. And such knowledge could not be imparted without the fundamental truths of nature being understood by them, which understanding was possible only to those who had grasped the great Basic Truths ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... an unusual strength hardened to the temper of steel by constant exposure to the elements and by a life of activity. The colour of his hair was probably white; that is, per se, and with reference to its absolute or fundamental base; but by smoke and neglect it had been tarnished into grim upper strata of rusty grey and sullen yellow—which, contrasted with a broad fiery disk of face—harsh bushy eyebrows—and a Bardolph nose, effectually ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey

... to believe that the primal, fundamental sense,—the sense of touch,—from which all the other senses have been evolved or developed, has been in existence almost as ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... promulgated the doctrine upon which society was governed, that every man had a natural right to life, liberty, and his own method of pursuing happiness. Now, both sides in the conflict claimed to be following closely the spirit of this fundamental doctrine. The workingmen declared that they had a perfect right to organize and to induce all their number to join the unions. They said the individual relation between them and the employers had had its day and that experience was proving to them that every concession ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... are nowhere more indispensable than in public employment. These should be fundamental requisites to original appointment and the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... pretend, that the first Minister being big with Child, could not attend the Publick Affairs, as so great an Exigency of State required; but this I can give no manner of Credit to, since it seems to contradict a Fundamental Maxim in their Government which I have before mentioned. My Author gives the most probable Reason of this great Disaster; for he affirms, that the General was brought to Bed, or (as others say) Miscarried the very Night before the Battel: However it was, this signal Overthrow ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... United States has probably made more steel than all the rest of the world put together. "The nation that makes the cheapest steel," says Mr. Carnegie, "has the other nations at its feet." When some future Buckle analyzes the fundamental facts in the World War, he may possibly find that steel precipitated it and ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... figures that adorn particularly the inferior parts of the building, would be here so much the more superfluous, as an intelligent spectator may easily understand them. All these fine ornaments are meant to symbolize the mysteries of Redemption, taken from the principal facts in Scripture and from the fundamental doctrines of the christian faith. In this respect the lower tier is the most remarkable; the middle one has neither the same beauty nor the same religious signification; the third is the least satisfactory both as regards execution ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous

... people, have come into the possession of nearly four million square miles of the richest portion of the earth. It is ours to use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy. The fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot

... intentional shaping of courses. She had always owned that, had always given his intentions full credit; only, what he had meant had bored her—she could not find it in herself now to fix on any more self-exonerating term. After the first perplexed and painful years of adjustment to fundamental disappointment she had at last seen the facts clearly and not at all unkindly, and it seemed to her that, as far as her husband went, she had made the best of them. It was rather odious of her, no doubt, to think it now, but it seemed the truth, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... is the fact that when Mexico adopted a republican constitution, in imitation of that of the United States, it was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble. It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the authority of the Roman Catholic ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... but to a merely English Reader 1800 years A.D. Some dropt stitches in the Story, not considered by the old Genius of those days, I have, I think, 'taken up,' as any little Dramatist of these Days can do: though the fundamental absurdity of the Plot (equal to Tom Jones according to Coleridge!) remains; namely, that OEdipus, after so many years reigning in Thebes as to have a Family about him, should apparently never have heard of Laius' murder till the Play ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... from the particular nature of a House of Commons as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty can subsist. The Colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke

... instructions, they were working for unity regardless of the form of government which might follow. Victor Emmanuel could sound the depths of Mazzini's patriotism; Cavour never could. The two men were made to misunderstand each other. There are differences too fundamental for even imagination to bridge over. Had they lived till now, when both are raised on pedestals in the Italian House of Fame, from which time shall not remove them, Mazzini would still have been for Cavour, and Cavour for Mazzini, the evil genius of ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion between the two races, before the victory of the English language showed this fusion to have been in substance accomplished. One of these difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it existed is not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character and temperament of French and English differed largely from ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... of the tailor shop, is not unworthy the attention of the grand council of China's statesmen. Has not Carlyle shown in his "Sartor Resartus" how the Philosophy of Clothes is fundamental to the history of civilisation? The Japanese with wonderful foresight settled that question at the very time when they adopted their ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... the world to impose a human will upon it is surely an occasion for solemnity and thanksgiving," he soliloquized. "How can anyone be so gross as to see only materialism in such work as this? Surely it has something of fundamental religion in it! Just as from the soil springs all physical life, may it not be that deep down in the soil are, some way, the roots of the spiritual? The soil feeds the city in two ways; it fills its belly with material food, and it is continually re-vitalizing ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... in the Carnhuanawc MS. detached from the former, and separately entitled "Fragments of the Gododin and other pieces of the sixth century." That they were "incantations," cannot be admitted; and if the word "gorchan," or "gwarchan" mean here anything except simply "a canon, or fundamental part of song," we should be inclined to consider it as synonymous with "gwarthan," and to suppose that the poems in question referred to the camps of Adebon, ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... emphasis which our civilization has given to human rights and individual freedom and the equality of men. India has thus far denied to the individual those rights and liberties which are deemed elementary and fundamental in the West. Its emphasis has always been upon the rights and privileges of Society as a corporate body. It has ignored entirely the claims of the individual and has prevented him from enjoying his inalienable ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... church of Christ. Most of the histories which have been written, are filled either with accounts of individuals, or of bodies of wicked men, who could lay no claim to the character of the church of Christ. A church consists of a society of people, professing the fundamental doctrines of the gospel, and practising them in their lives. Or, in other words, having both the form and power of godliness. Without these, no body of men have any right to be called the church of Christ. If you observe this, you ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... hoping you will most vigorously, and with all your might, maintain the Rights and Privileges of the Honourable City; and not suffer the Force or Persuasion of any Arbitrary Lover whatsoever, to subvert their antient and Fundamental Laws, by seducing and forcibly bearing away so rich and so illustrious a Lady: and, Madam, we will unanimously stand by you with our Lives and Fortunes.—This I learnt from a Speech at the Election of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn

... Parlor was indeed all its name implied, a temple of the cult of adornment, the last cry in the effort to satisfy what is more than health, wealth, and happiness to some women—the fundamental feminine instinct for beauty. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve

... the fundamental virtue in a man. It includes moral strength. If she cannot be sure of his strength, she will always doubt him and her love ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... them; though the mode of effecting such an intercourse must be left to the thousand contingencies which govern all, and act so capriciously on the tempers of the savage races. The utmost forbearance, and a liberality guided by prudence, so as not to excite too great a degree of cupidity, appear the fundamental rules for managing men in a low state of civilization. The results of an amicable understanding are as uncertain as its commencement; for they depend on the enterprise of the individual, and the power of the native tribe into whose hands he may have fallen. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel

... fundamental propositions we now append a third, which needs no proof, but follows as a natural and logical conclusion ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton

... * open at both ends be blown across at one end, the fundamental tone of the tube will be sounded; but if the hand be placed at one end of the tube, so as to effectually close it, and the open end be blown across as before, a sound will be heard exactly one octave below that which was heard when both ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller

... anthropology, paleontology, or geology. The story-form by means of which these facts are conveyed is merely a literary device for bringing home to the child the truth that has thus far been ascertained regarding the fundamental steps in the development of ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... unmanageable: met, too, by building up men in THE TRUTH: above all, by giving Theological instruction to those who are destined to become Professors of Theological Science, and are about to undertake the cure of souls.... In this spirit, I asserted the opposite fundamental verities; and so, would have been content to dismiss the "Essays and Reviews" from my thoughts ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... as to the ultimate nature of matter, as witness the theories of Leibnitz and Boscovich and Davy, to which we may recur. But he had not as yet conceived the notion of a distinction between matter and energy, which is so fundamental to the physics of a later epoch. He did not speak of heat, light, electricity, as forms of energy or "force"; he conceived them as subtile forms of matter—as highly attenuated yet tangible fluids, subject to gravitation and chemical attraction; ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... as its fundamental elements, several hundred single matrices, which consist of flat plates of brass having on one edge a female letter or matrix proper, and in the upper end a series of teeth, used for selecting and distributing ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... often ashamed of it? Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says Paissu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the monk Obradovi['c], who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamental thought of working for the whole people, including the women, he clung to the idea of a literature in the popular, rather than in the old Church language. He was to set out, in pursuit of Western science, to France ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... certain points which may be considered as fundamental, without which the most rigid attention to matters of dress will go for nothing. For instance, cleanliness, which according to the old proverb, is rated so high as to be placed next to godliness, is one of these, and of primary importance. The most ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for 'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible. The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger writers is that comedy is, 'par excellence,' a fragile thing. It is conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'Happy Hypocrite' are conceptions which ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... Tenor? Is there any that ever durst usurp the Glory of it? We, we are those, who by our Ingenuity have raised her to this Degree of Sublimity, in taking also from her that noisy murmuring of the fundamental Basses, in such Manner,——(mark me well, and learn) that if in an Orchestre there were an hundred Violins, we are capable of composing in such a Manner, that all and every one shall play the very Air which the Voice ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi

... helpfully the essence of an incident, and Geikie furnishes a mass of illustrative material from rabbinic sources, though with less criticism than even Edersheim has used. Neither of these works, however, deals with the fundamental problems of the composition of the gospels, nor are they satisfactory on other perplexing questions, for example, the ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... I am dealing besets confessedly legal conceptions. Take the fundamental question, What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling you that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... regarded as a beneficial end. Such proposals would have been remarkable even had there been entire agreement of opinion, but they were the more remarkable as being made by him under the consciousness that there existed between us certain fundamental differences, openly avowed. I had, both directly and by implication, combated that form of the experiential theory of human knowledge which characterizes Mr. Mill's philosophy: in upholding Realism, I had opposed in decided ways those metaphysical systems to which his own ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other

... of view the fundamental mood of the four personages has thus the same expression, and this Beethoven justifies by making the original utterance profoundly contemplative, not only by the beautiful subject of the canon, but by ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... codification of the Shulhan 'Aruk as not binding at all; those which have been adopted since the Talmudic period to be subject to change by common consent; while those of the Bible and in the Talmud were to him fundamental and unalterable."[18] ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... imperio. This renders a full display of the principal defects of the confederation necessary in order to show that the evils we experience do not proceed from minute or partial imperfections, but from fundamental errors in the structure of the building, which can not be amended otherwise than by an alteration in the very elements and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... Reputation that of a man of the Court-Party among the Protectoratists: His Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Account of the Treatise, with Extracts: The Treatise more than a Plea for Religious Toleration: Church-Disestablishment the Fundamental Idea: The Treatise addressed to Richard's Parliament, and chiefly to Vane and the Republicans there: No Effect from it: Milton's Four last State-Letters for Richard (Nos. CXLIV.-CXLVII.): His Private Epistle to Jean Labadie, with Account of that Person: Milton ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... sort of realism. The characters, life, and backgrounds of many of them are taken from her own Warwickshire acquaintances and country, and for the others she made the most painstaking study. More fundamental than her sympathy, indeed, perhaps even from the outset, is her instinct for scientific analysis. Like a biologist or a botanist, and with much more deliberate effort than most of her fellow-craftsmen, she traces and scrutinizes all the acts and motives of her characters ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... custom duties and taxes on income and sales. Road construction is a top domestic priority. In the long term, Eritrea may benefit from the development of offshore oil, offshore fishing, and tourism. Eritrea's economic future depends on its ability to master fundamental social and economic problems, e.g., by reducing illiteracy, promoting job creation, expanding technical training, attracting foreign investment, and streamlining the bureaucracy. The most immediate threat to the economy, however, is the possible expansion of the border conflict with Ethiopia, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... this feeling was in the public mind appeared signally on one great occasion. In the autumn of 1788 the King became insane. The opposition, eager for office, committed the great indiscretion of asserting that the heir apparent had, by the fundamental laws of England, a right to be Regent with the full powers of royalty. Pitt, on the other hand, maintained it to be the constitutional doctrine that, when a Sovereign is, by reason of infancy, disease, or absence, incapable of exercising the regal functions, it belongs to the Estates of the realm ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... us, "divers new articles have been added by the free choice and good consent and best advice of the Perfect and True Masons, Masters, and Brethren." If, as an ethic of life, these laws seem simple and rudimentary, they are none the less fundamental, and they remain to this day the only gate and way by which those must enter who would go up to the House of the Lord. As such they are great and saving things to lay to heart and act upon, and if Masonry taught nothing else its title to the respect of mankind would be ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... energies to the performance of an honest piece of work, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who can no longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of man unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful to himself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of money the cause of Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has delivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers, and for the sake of gain turned ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... work for the Boylean lectures as should hold them tug as long as the ministry of the letter should last'; for he too, you see, masked his infidelity by a distinction between the 'letter' and the 'spirit,' though he applied the convenient terms in a totally different sense. Poor soul! The fundamental principles of his infidelity are surrendered by Strauss himself. Similarly, a score of assailants of the Bible have appeared and vanished since his day; each proclaiming, just as he himself went to the bottom, that he had given the Bible its death-blow! Somehow, however, that singular book ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... me completely. "We can't afford to have you gambling and cheating Normals," he went on. "One of the Lodge's fundamental rules is that no psi may use his powers to the detriment of Normals. Lefty's big scene at Nick's fixed it so you won't be welcome in a big-time poker game anywhere in town. We did that deliberately. And we're telling you to quit gambling, as of ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination force of character is the only whip, force of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... not only in the choice of the cacao beans but also in the selection of spices and essences, for, whilst the fundamental flavour of a chocolate is determined by the blend of beans and the method of manufacture, the piquancy and special character are often obtained by the addition of minute quantities of flavourings. The ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp

... a Titian or a Sesson. Each preparation of the leaves has its individuality, its special affinity with water and heat, its own method of telling a story. The truly beautiful must always be in it. How much do we not suffer through the constant failure of society to recognise this simple and fundamental law of art and life; Lichilai, a Sung poet, has sadly remarked that there were three most deplorable things in the world: the spoiling of fine youths through false education, the degradation of fine art through vulgar admiration, and the utter waste ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... now to consider figures of speech, we may equally discern the same general law of effect. Underlying all the rules given for the choice and right use of them, we shall find the same fundamental requirement—economy of attention. It is indeed chiefly because they so well subserve this requirement, that figures of speech are employed. To bring the mind more easily to the desired conception, is in many cases solely, and in all ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

... powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity. They form the connecting links between the selfish and the social passions. By the fundamental principle of Christianity, the happiness of the individual is interwoven, by innumerable and imperceptible ties, with that of his contemporaries. By the power of filial reverence and parental affection, individual existence ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams

... a book of this nature, to be used in the grade schools, we realize that the one fundamental thing to keep in mind is the economic importance of the insect, be it good or bad. The child wants to know what is good and what is bad and how he can make use of the good and how he can get rid of the bad. And yet there is something more associated with ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman

... of you still feel for old Germany. It would be specially ungracious toward you, President Eliot, for in quite recent times you honored me by your ready help in my scientific labors. All I want to do is to remove a few fundamental errors—in fact, only one. I feel in duty bound to do so, since many well-disposed Americans share ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... causes with which he had least sympathy. His own convictions, which he had reached through stern and self-sacrificing struggles, were absolutely solid. By the incessant writing of some forty years, he enforced the fundamental truth of human redemption through God made Man on the attention of people to whom professional preachers speak in vain, and he steadily impressed on his fellow-Christians those ethical duties of justice and mercy which ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... make it an unchristian church. To go into the South to establish white churches from which, whether by a formal law or by an unwritten but self-enforcing edict, men are excluded because God made them black, is to deny one of the fundamental tenets of Christ: All ye are brethren. It is to introduce into a church already divided by sectarian strifes a new division. It is to rend afresh the seamless robe. To say to any man asking for Christian fellowship on the simple ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various

... were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, On the Acting of Munden, which ends the book of Elia, with its great close, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... has told us truly that compromise in a matter of fundamental morals, that is, slavery, cost us the Civil War. In matters of eternal truth, and in matters of fundamental morals, we must not, we will not, compromise. WE ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... gold standard, and we never exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions, for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm for the future of the ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... in the State, private schools were conducted for Negroes immediately after their emancipation. There had come into the county of Kanawha Rev. F. C. James, an Ohio Negro, the father of C. H. James, the wealthy wholesale produce merchant of Charleston. This pioneer was a man of fundamental education and unusual native ability. He opened at Chapel Hollow, or Salines, two and one-half miles from Malden, in 1865, probably the first Negro school in the Kanawha Valley. He thereafter taught elsewhere and later became the founder of the First Baptist Church of Charleston. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... learned the trick of speech and got by rote the language of religion. They had no personal knowledge of God or message obtained directly from Him; but it was not difficult to put on the prophet's mantle and talk in the traditional prophetic tones. The fundamental charge against the false prophets is always this: "I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran; I have not spoken unto them, yet ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker

... the laws in France than in America, but in fact it exists. In America, it acts by elections and decrees; in France it proceeds by revolutions; but notwithstanding the different constitutions of these two countries, public opinion is the predominant authority in both of them. The fundamental principle of legislation—a principle essentially republican—is the same in both countries, although its consequences may be different, and its results more or less extensive. Whence I am led to conclude that France with its King is nearer akin to a republic than the Union with its ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... perils that confront our nation is the mania for enormous and costly military and naval armament—and also the policy of extending our territory by foreign conquests. The high mission of our Republic is to maintain the fundamental principles initiated in our Declaration of Independence—that all true government rests on the consent of the governed. It is an impious profanation of our flag of freedom to make it the symbol of absolutism on any soil. In the conflict now waging for true ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... rights as part of the organic act to the extent that changes have not been made, by the constitution. Examine them—the constitution and the declaration of rights—we find other most astounding doctrines in the soviet fundamental law. I shall not discuss but merely mention a few of them. They do not pertain so much to the structure of government as they do to the economic and social conditions surrounding the people ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... grown familiar. But the episode of the Cafe de Paris marks the beginning and the end of Elodie's acquaintance with the smart world. She hates it with a fierce jealousy, knowing that it is a sphere beyond her ken. Herein lay a fundamental principle of her character. The courtesan, with her easy adaptability to the glittering environment which she craves, and Elodie, essentially child of the people, proud, and virtuous according to her lights, were worlds apart. A bit of a socialist, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... their different customs, they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal labours; they pledge to each other the same opinions; and that knowledge which, like a small river, takes its ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... the operation of natural law don't dread it. Don't treat symptoms; treat the fundamental cause. Pain is Nature's danger signal. Prevention is better than cure. The elements of prevention. Importance of a knowledge of physiology. The body, the vehicle of expression for the mind. The strenuous life. Tear worse than wear. The importance of reserve energy. The effect of ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell



Words linked to "Fundamental" :   basic, profound, cardinal, fundamental particle, factor, first harmonic, fundamental measure, primal, fundamental analysis, fundamental principle, fundamental law, significant, of import, underlying, rudimentary, fundamental interaction, key, fundamental frequency, fundamental quantity



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