Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Formative   /fˈɔrmətɪv/   Listen
Formative

adjective
1.
Capable of forming new cells and tissues.
2.
Forming or capable of forming or molding or fashioning.  Synonyms: plastic, shaping.  "A formative experience"



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books



... the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he required large ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo

... be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none of ...
— Progress and History • Various

... remembers wondering in his boyish way how so rough and plain a man should happen to live in so respectable a house. The habit of mental absorption, or 'absent-mindedness' as it is called, was common with him always, but particularly during the formative periods of his life. The New Salem people, it will be remembered, thought him crazy because he passed his best friends in the street without seeing them. At the table, in his own family, he often sat down without knowing or realizing where ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... Giuseppe Antonini and is entitled "The German Madness." Its subject, full of quotations from Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi, is not new to Americans. For Italians it may come as a revelation. It demonstrates the formative influences which have found expression in what is called "Prussian Militarism," as an attitude of mind which believes in the supremacy of force over all things—over goodness, virtue, kindness, and all else ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... Moliere's great sentence, "Il s'ensuit de la, que tout ce qu'ily a de beau est dans les dictionnaires; il n'y a que les mots qui sont transposes." But when you used to be in your cave, Sibyl, and to be inspired, there was (and there remains still in some small measure), beyond the merely formative and sustaining power, another, which we painters call "passion"—I don't know what the philosophers call it; we know it makes people red, or white; and therefore it must be something, itself; and perhaps it is the most ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... less frenzied, was no less vengeful and vindictive. Tom had lived four formative years in a climate where the passions are colder—and more comprehensive. Also, he was of his own generation—which slays its enemy peacefully and without messing ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... in the political arena were not only a fighting time, they were a formative time. The young Roosevelt had to discover a philosophy of political action which would satisfy him. He speedily found one that suited his temperament and his keen sense of reality. He found no reason to depart ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... together is now become vain. It may not be so in future; but the architecture we endeavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions of the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety; and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, requires her to ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... indeed a brilliant effort, worthy of the human mind, to comprise in one organic whole, the entire science of nature, from the laws of gravity to the formative impulse in animated bodies;" but the preoccupation of his vast mind, and the hold of pre-existing ideas, offered difficulties to the solution of the problem. But, note the approximation of his ideas to those herein expressed, he said: "The sun, as the main source of light and heat, must ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... all eyes capable of seeing in it something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible—granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions as to the method or methods by which the work can ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... problem is not, as we have said, that a people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... midst by his dismission for some sort of a college frolic, and even while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have been one of the formative factors ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... reverence, and intense and all-absorbing passion for the perfect individual man of realization—a Mahapurusha. Christ, Buddha and Vivekananda were all such-type men. You must constantly and thoughtfully meditate upon the lives and writings of saints and heroes. The formative influence and valuable powers of study and meditation upon lofty ideas and ideals are incalculable. Man grows by the deepening of consciousness and the acquirement of wisdom. All study, subjective and objective, is a Tapashya or Austerity directed to the acquirement of wisdom. ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji

... certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... instruction in college is to give the student access to vital and formative knowledge by studying man and his works, and nature and her works. He is thus led to know himself and to know the world, and the laws which govern nature, and man as a part of nature. He comes to see things as they are and to ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... Andes are yet in a chaotic and formative condition; huge slides of Silurian slates and diorite are of frequent occurrence. A ridge of one of these softer stones had most probably been encased in the surrounding granite for many centuries; then, loosened by water or by time, ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... establishment was delayed for several years. The plan for this fund, as finally approved in 1920, provides for an incorporated board of nine directors, the first members of which were appointed by the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association. This project, while still in its formative stage, has great possibilities for the future of the University, judged by the success of similar funds in other institutions. This is particularly true at Yale, where the alumni fund amounts to nearly $2,000,000 in addition to some ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... In the history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... that the individual senses of the deaf-mute, his own observation and apprehension, are formative factors in the occurrences of sensation and perception, as is of course the case, but that the qualities of the objects observed by him, and associated, according to his individual tendencies, are also raised by him, through ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... reader, and none holds a truer picture of the time. Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne Bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. There are hints that Anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of Puritan life. That she cared ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... and listen to the business of the Sessions, and to show the Chinese as soon as possible that we were one with them, and he succeeded. There was an enthusiasm and warmth distinguishing these early days of the Amoy church that were formative in a very high degree, and that ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg

... almost as early as Hebrew or German, were among the formative forces brought to bear upon the quick-witted but not precocious boy. Heine's parents were orthodox, but by no means bigoted Jews. We read with amazement that one of the plans of the mother, ambitious for her firstborn, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... But our children have their knowing also to attain to, their discoveries to make, their logic of proof, on occasions, to employ. Shall we lavish all the treasures of method on those who have passed the formative stage of mind, and acquired the bent of its activities? Rather, we think, the true intellectual method—combining both Baconian induction and Aristotelian deduction—yet waits to realize some of the best of the application and work for which its joint originators and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... the vague conception of a harmonising or formative structural influence derived from the germ, perishing in each cell from internal causes, but handed from cell to cell till the formative influence itself degrades into molecular discords, does it seem possible to form any ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... The first new formative force was the influence of the classical drama, for which, with other things classical, the Renaissance had aroused enthusiasm. This force operated mainly not through writers for popular audiences, like the authors of most Moralities ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... let drop. All that rich tide of eloquence that you prepared last night with so much enthusiasm is out of place, and yet you must not desert him, you must say something.' So I said something, and I got him off. It made my reputation. But an experience of that kind is formative. A man must not bring his passions to the bar - or to the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and recipiency of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... and startling note of assurance in his voice. Certainly he had developed during the past few months. What I had done, Heaven only knows. Misfortune, which is supposed to be formative of character, seemed to have turned mine into pie. How can I otherwise account for my not checking the lunatic impulse that prompted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... the Samana peninsula produced a kind of lignite which proved of little commercial value and gave rise to the belief that the Republic's coal deposits had not emerged from the formative period. Later investigations show that while there is considerable undeveloped lignite, coal suitable for fuel is not wanting. Small coal deposits have been discovered in the Cibao Valley, between the central and the northern mountain chain, in the province of Pacificador and that of ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... for some time, I found it desirable to limit it to events which had a distinctly formative influence on the development of European States. On questions of motive and policy I have generally refrained from expressing a decided verdict, seeing that these are always the most difficult to probe; and facile dogmatism on them is better fitted to omniscient leaderettes ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... less he liked its atmosphere. And the closer his contact with Jay Gould the more doubtful he became of the wisdom of such an association and perhaps its unconscious influence upon his own life in its formative period. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... being, by extremely abstruse calculations, approximately estimated. The long wished for full explanation of the relations between frictional electricity, voltaism, magnetism, heat, and light, seems likely soon to be obtained; and, consequently, also the exact physical relations of the vital or formative force of ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne

... thinking and feeling and their transcription into their present forms by really great artists give them a permanent place in the world's literature. This I do not question. It is partly because I believe this so intensely that I wish them kept for fuller appreciation. It is as formative factors in a young child's thinking that I am afraid of them. Neither am I afraid of all of them. There are some old conceptions of life and death and human relations which the race has not outgrown, perhaps never ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell

... instance, the magnificent devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a hopeless undertaking—this group of mountaineers against the chivalry of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... all the respectabilities in his serious dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet refers to him as one of the formative minds of the century. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... man is far on the road to evil when he loses faith in woman. During the formative period of character she is, of earthly influences, the most potent in making or marring him. A kind refusal, where no false encouragement has been given, often does a man good, and leaves his faith intact; ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... the Loo-Choo Islands. Philologists have excluded the language from the Aryan and Semitic tongues, and included it in the Turanian group. It is said to possess all the characteristics of the Turanian family being agglutinated, that is to say, maintaining its roots in their integrity without formative prefixes, poor in conjunctions, and copious in the use of participles. It is uncertain when alphabetical characters were introduced into Japan, but it is believed to have happened when intercourse with Korea was first opened about the commencement of the Christian Era. The warrior Empress, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... "I," the mysterious "I," live with a body woven around me. The Bible hints that this stage is of untold importance. In fact, all the future stages depend largely on how it is lived. That is what makes this first stage so awfully important. It is the formative time whose influence spreads out into eternity. In this stage Acts make habits. Habits make character. ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... heartily at the dinner of the ancients in 'Peregrine Pickle,' to wish to lead back the age to a classic model; and yet on all subjects connected with taste, there are some things to be learned from that people whose formative genius is still the wonder of the world. The meal of society among the Greeks consisted of only two courses, or, to speak more strictly, of one course and a dessert; and the first or solid course was in all probability made up of small portions ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various

... "Manfred." In the "Zwei Fantasiestuecke", op. 17—"Erzaehlung" and "Hexentanz"—but more particularly in the "Wald-Idyllen" of op. 19—"Waldesstille," "Spiel der Nymphen," "Traeumerei," and "Driadentanz,"—a definite poetic concept is implied. Here the formative influence of Raff is evident. The works which follow—"Drei Poesien" ("Nachts am Meere," "Erzaehlung aus der Ritterzeit," "Ballade"), and the "Mondbilder," after Hans Christian Andersen—are of a similar kind. The romanticism which pervades them is not of a very ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... accepted by Schwann, the connection between the three co-existent cell-constituents was long thought to be of this nature: that the nucleolus was the first to show itself in the development of tissues, by separating out of a formative fluid (blastema, cyto-blastema), that it quickly attained a certain size, that then fine granules were precipitated out of the blastema and settled around it, and that about these there condensed a membrane. In this ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, &c. The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit is a formative or animating function: the Spirit constitutes the life of 'trees and beasts and men.' This view is strictly ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain.—"It is wonderful," says Pliny, "how the mind is stirred ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... the history of the telegraph, in its relation to its inventor, through all the intricacies involved in the conflicting interests of various companies and men in this its formative period. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... problem presents itself solely in connection with the error, it does not accompany the normal process of development. An interest stimulated merely by curiosity, by a "problem," would not be that formative interest which wells up from the needs of life itself, and therefore directs the building up of the spiritual personality. If it were only the problem which should lead the soul to find itself, order might be dissipated by it, as by any other external cause which tends to seduce ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... conception, in miniature, of the westward movement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession, revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhaps escape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family, even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization, expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social and economic tendencies the individual merges into the group; the group into the community; the community into a new society. In this clear perspective of historic development the spectacular hero at first ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... years which elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. This half-century was the formative era of the American nation. Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years of construction. But the men who led the movement for independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... India for their Master. To bring them over here for training is not altogether good. There are dangers in this our age of jazz. It is not good to send out very young girls to a far country during the formative years lest a strange language and customs and a new civilization should unfit them to go back to their "Main Street" and adjust themselves. The Indian Colleges are best for the undergraduate Indian girl and are ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... many so-called schools are really homes, often very excellent homes, with which schools, often very inefficient schools, are united. All this we must lump together— it is, indeed, woven together almost inextricably—when we speak of home as a formative factor. The home, so far as its hygienic conditions go, we have already dealt with, and we have dealt, too, with the great neglected necessity, the absolute necessity if our peoples are to keep together, of making and keeping the language ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... but they met in vacations and wrote frequent and ardent love-letters. Both had genuine attacks of love-sickness and of jealousy. As M.O. looks back on this first love passion he can by no means regret it. It doubtless had great formative influence. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... seed cannot be generated naturally in any other way. It ought, then, rather to be said that in the natural generation of all animals that are generated from seed, the active principle lies in the formative power of the seed, but that in the case of animals generated from putrefaction, the formative power of is the influence of the heavenly bodies. The material principle, however, in the generation of either kind of animals, is either some element, or something compounded of the elements. But at the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... two lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature; and that the second in like manner comprises various {25} aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorganised element or principle; the first, to adopt a later method of expression, is Form, the second Matter. How this antithesis was worked out by Plato and Aristotle ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... of this West that I have known from childhood, it seems to me that the day of that first enlistment oath was a pivotal point around which much of the destiny of Western Canada would turn for the rest of recorded time. Hence it is at this stage of the story that the formative day at Lower Fort ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... of this important period of Church history—the formative period—has here a clear narrative, packed with information drawn from authentic sources and elucidated with the most recent results of investigation. We do not know of any other work on Church history in which so much learned and accurate ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... it in him which gave him that strength, and which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame? I will not reply to this question by pointing to the popularity of his History of England; the essays that follow will afford sufficient material ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... ability to eat and sleep are all that may reasonably be expected of him, and that he must depend upon his family for everything, he will grow up helpless, selfish and awkward, and no amount of later training will entirely counteract the pernicious effect produced in these early, formative years. When placed in school with other children, he will be very sensitive to correction, and may become morbid and unhappy, thus giving a wrong impression of the blind in general. If, on the other hand, the child is taught to be self-helpful, permitted to join in the work and play of other ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... "The first thing to do is to form the habits that lead to character; the next thing is to stamp the young mind with right views of life; then comes book-learning—words, figures, and maps—but stories that educate morally are the primer of life. Christ taught spiritual truths by parables. I teach formative ideas by parables. The teacher should be a story-teller. In my own country all children go through fairy-land. Here they teach the young figures first, as though all of life was a money-market. It is all unnatural and wrong. I must teach and preach ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth

... politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead formula on men's lips and the dry topic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... evolution has not ceased, but has gone on in him rapidly and immensely. The strain has simply been transferred from the body to the mind, and to the extent that the mental characteristics are more flexible and yield more readily to formative influences, the mind has surpassed the body in rapidity of evolutionary variation. Within a period during which the lower animals have remained almost unchanged, man has varied enormously in mental conditions, and to-day may be looked upon, not merely as a distinct ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... political virtues. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the second of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. And the best skill that ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... During their formative period the Hebrews acquired many characteristics that they have retained throughout their history. From their early nomadic life they inherited physical strength, hardihood, adaptability even to the most unfavorable environment, courage, perseverance and that individual initiative ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... the venerable Dr. Ryerson is the most important literary work of his life. It fitly crowns a career of unusual intellectual activity with a standard history of the formative period of Anglo-American civilization. The range and scope of the work are much wider than most persons would suppose from the announcement. Most people looked for a work that would be mainly made up of biographical sketches of the U. E. Loyalist pioneer in the settlement ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... the formative period, when the cosmic cement sets, if ever. During those years George Peabody had emerged from a clerkship ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... to normal instruction,—make it two years; give in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four years. In this as in all other progressive formative periods the ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell

... boys was so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense of the matter—which would have been that it all depended on what was meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very definite by their measure and intention; there were "advantages," generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... translation permanently established. The English Bible, on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the contributions of able hands through many generations, during which the English language itself passed through a wonderful formative development, the incomparable beauty of King James' version owes its existence, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... the one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley

... his own choice to take up religious teaching among young men. He began with our office-boys, and then the work spread and was blessed. I was almost alarmed, at one time, at the way it took hold of him: when the papers began to talk about him as a formative influence I was afraid he'd lose his head and go into the church. Luckily he tried University Settlement first; but just as I thought he was settling down to that, he took to worrying about the Higher Criticism, and saying he couldn't go on teaching ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... and the Dragon. In Christian literature Michael has been replaced by St. George. The old Babylonian conception has been fruitful of poetry, representing, as it does, in grand form the struggle between the chaotic and the formative forces ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the music of its familiar phrases haunts all the field and grove of our fine literature. At least one cause of his popularity is that there is so much Bible in Tennyson. We cannot help seeing that the poet owes a large debt to the Christian Scriptures, not only for their formative influence on his mind and for the purely literary material in the way of illustrations and allusions which they have given him, but also for the creation of a moral atmosphere, a medium of thought and feeling in which he can speak freely and with ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... centuries, he was continually finding how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most formative ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... too, that the dream had come to him of a future of creative purpose. He had always wanted to write. Looking back over his University days, he was aware of a formative process which had led towards this end. It was there he had communed with the spirit of a tragic muse. There had been all the traditions of Poe and his tempestuous youth—and Randy, passing the door which had once opened and closed on that dark figure, had felt the thrill ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... second, unsectarian control; third, a living union between the university and the whole school system of the State; fourth, concentration of revenues for advanced education. The second division was that of "Formative Ideas''; and under these—First, equality between different courses of study. In this I especially developed ideas which had occurred to me as far back as my observations after graduation at Yale, where the classical students belonging to the "college proper'' were given ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... not count, and for anything novel we are forced to turn our eyes and ears toward the direction of France. After Berlioz, a small fry, indeed, yet not without interest. The visit made by Claude Debussy to Russia in 1879 and during his formative period had consequences. He absorbed Moussorgsky, and built upon him, and he had Wagner at his finger-ends; like Charpentier he cannot keep Wagner out of his scores; the Bayreuth composer is the King Charles's head in his manuscript. Tristan und Isolde in particular ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... Whether it be that Calvinism is eclectic as regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon individual character, certain it is that the Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other—the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the Puritans of Old and New England, seeming, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... are formed from the blood, and are subjected to several changes before they are perfected. At their early formative stage, they are cartilaginous. The vessels of the cartilage, at this period, convey only the lymph, or white portion of the blood; subsequently, they convey red blood. At this time, true ossification (the deposition of phosphate and carbonate ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... of waiting for experience of life to give the answer for them. Brenton, meantime, was becoming ten times the force he had been at Saint Peter's; the only trouble lay in the fact that now his force was, not formative, but deformative. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... of the lads who had spent within its comfortable walls such an eventful year. They had grown much, not only physically, but there had been development mentally and morally that would tell for good in the oncoming years. To have been under the guidance of such a couple as Mr and Mr Ross in such a formative period of their young lives was of incalculable value. Happy are the boys who have such guardians; happier still if their own parents ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II or somewhat later, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... In this formative period, the soul is unsoiled by warfare with the world. It lies, like a block of pure, uncut Parian marble, ready ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... Charles Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school—so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street—where "blue-coat boys" passed the most importantly formative period of their lives. Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... the tool, i. e., the machine, to kindle ambition in the workers. It is only through the intelligent use of the tool and consequent love of work which follows that we can look forward to supplying the skilled machine workers of the future. This training must be given while the girls are in the formative period, to develop habits of thought and action which will counteract the bad effects upon the worker that follow division and subdivision of work, with consequent subdivision of ability, which takes place in all factories today. When a pupil has been thoroughly ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman

... 'Thoughts on History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum—the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the North American ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... All through this formative period Bell had adhered to and introduced the magneto form of telephone, now used only as a receiver, and very poorly adapted for the vital function of a speech-transmitter. From August, 1877, the Western Union Telegraph Company worked along the other line, and in 1878, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... lends itself with full force. The rehearsal of war and strife, the superficial view of history which sees only the smoke of battles and the monuments of military heroes, give place to an insight which traces the advancing welfare of the common people. The minister will inspire his formative citizens with good portrayals of statesmen, educators, inventors, reformers, discoverers, pioneers, and philanthropists. He will charm them into greatness at the very time when a boy's ideals ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... from that which nature presents to us, the DESIRED word, the congenial. Men find what the artist brings intelligible and to their taste, stimulating and alluring, genial and friendly, spiritually nourishing, formative and elevating. Thus the artist, grateful to the nature that made him, weaves a second nature—but a conscious, a fuller, a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... such as she had never in her life bestowed on any other subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married—was still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of perfection of that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern she had married was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may, what she saw depicted on his face to-night ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... organism is, could be produced only by an agency analogous to, although far more perfect than the agency of man." "This," he says, "supposes the Creator to be an organism analogous to man, although infinitely more perfect; who contemplates his formative powers, lays the plan of the machine, and then, by the use of appropriate means, produces an effect answering to the preconceived plan.... However highly the Creator may be exalted, this view involves the ascription to Him of human ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators, that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they spiritualize ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... generative Soul, and the virtue or power of Heaven, and the virtue or power of the aliments united or bound together, that is the involution or complex nature of the seed. It matures and prepares the material for the formative power or virtue which the generating Soul bestows; and the formative power or virtue prepares the organs for the celestial virtue or power, which produces, from the power of the seed, the Soul in life; which, as soon as produced, receives from the power of the ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... who and what was responsible for each one's individual conception of what he wanted? Not one of them had demanded existence. Each had had existence thrust upon him. Nature, and a thousand generations of life and love and pain, such environment in which, willy-nilly, they passed their formative years, had bestowed upon each his individual quota of character, compounded of desires, of intellect, of tendencies. And the sum total of their actions and reactions—what was it? How could they have modified life, bent it ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the human ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only the habit of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a Power beyond sense—a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been stripped ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... mere expression of formative forces, then this song would be pathetic in its presumption. But why is there beauty at all in creation—the beauty whose only meaning is in a call that claims disinterestedness as a response? The poet proudly says: "Your flute could not have its music ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... that sped away and was gone ere the slowly falling temperature of the Earth admitted the formation of a crust over her surface. When that came, the first great scene was closed. The star had expired, the planet rolled in her annual course around the still glowing central sun. Now came the formative age of the world, when the great ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... his right mind. Quite sane now," said Pennington. "But don't you think, Dick, we ought to take that exciting book away from him? The mind of youth in its tender formative state can be inflamed easily ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler

... utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by living men, a vital formative energy is still at work. It is one which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... he says, 'seemeth to be more accurate and elaborate than the rest,' which we find, upon examination, to be a strictly religious culture, and lastly the method to which he gives the preference, as the most compendious and summary in its formative or reforming influence, 'the electing and propounding unto a man's self good and virtuous ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable sort within his compass to attain.' He says enough under these heads to show the difficulty of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... load up with portfolio and portable inkstand, your favorite stationery, the books that delighted your childhood or exerted a formative influence upon your character in youth. Deny yourself and leave at home the gold or silver toilet set, photograph album, family Bibles, heavy fancy work, gilded horseshoe for luck, etc. I know of bright people who actually ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... young man can be demure, then demure was the Princess Sophie Zobraska. Paul, who prided himself on his knowledge of feminine subtlety, was at fault; but who was he to appreciate the repressive influence of a practical-minded convent friend, quickly formative and loudly assertive of opinions, on an impressionable lady awakening to curiosities? He was just a dunderhead, like any one of us—just as much as the most eminent feminine psychologist alive—which ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident—but not reckless—of the future. Many Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of political thinking ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... of a country the university stands out as the apex, the culminating and crowning point of its intellectual life. For, as the college course develops the studious and acquisitive powers of the mind, the university course has in view its creative and formative powers. "Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school," says Morley, "but it is at college that aspiring talents enter into their own inheritance." "It is the function of education in the highest sense, to ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... an intellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moral surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly interprets St. Paul. Faith—a ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... world the foundations were laid for the great movement that exists to-day. Yet the present world-wide movement, so harmonious in its principles and methods and so united in doctrines, could not have been all that it is had there not come to its aid in its most critical and formative period several of the ablest and best-schooled minds of Europe. At the period when the workers were finding their feet and beginning their task of organization on a large scale, there was also in Europe much revolutionary activity in "intellectual" ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... of Kipling were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where, though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established a reputation as a clever writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones, and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit to him in his future literary work. At seventeen young Kipling returned to India, where he secured ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of a great work and ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... another matter which entered the picture in these formative years. This began as a device, a good one it proved to be, used by the Company to stimulate immigration and settlement in Virginia. It allowed any person who paid his own way to the Colony to receive ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch

... the French. He went in a schoolboy; he came out the first soldier in the colonies, and one of the leading men of Virginia. Let us pause a moment and look at him as he stands on the threshold of this momentous period, rightly called momentous because it was the formative period in the ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge

... speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... also specially important because it gave to England a new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections, genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader experiences of an emancipated, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... exemplified in the formative period of Amerigo Vespucci's life, for, in order to become qualified to adorn the high position of a prince of commerce, he was as carefully trained as if to fill a prelate's chair or grasp the helm of state. So reluctant was his uncle, the good ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... of these stories is to give a personal portrait of the man, using the background of his early life—to trace his career up from boyhood through the formative years. Such data serves to explain the great soldier of later years. Every schoolboy knows, for example, what Washington did after he was placed in command of the Colonial Army—but what he did in the earlier years ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden

... formative process has been of the general nature just exhibited, irregularities of various kinds are of frequent occurrence. Hand numerals may appear, and then suddenly disappear, just where we should look for them with the greatest degree ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... say, the only explanation of a godless life, unless the man is an idiot, is that there lie beneath it, as formative principles and unspoken assumptions, guiding and shaping it, one or both of these two thoughts: either 'There is no God,' or 'He does not care what I do, and I am safe to go on for evermore in the present ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... significant penalties for convicted traffickers and failed to vigorously investigate and prosecute ongoing and widespread allegations of public officials' complicity in trafficking; victim protection efforts remain in early, formative stages and a lack of sensitivity for victims remains a problem, particularly ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts—till recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars—has compelled most of us to accept the Appendix Vergiliana at face value. These poems, written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved manner of the classical style, are full of personal reminiscences. They reveal many important facts about his daily life, his occupations, his ambitions and his ideals, and best of all they disclose the processes by which the poet during ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,—the quality that the Institute prided itself on ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... regulations instituted by medical counsel. Also the fact that consumptives so frequently spring from neurotic parentage and the victims of dissipation, especially alcoholic, still farther goes to show that the hereditary element is essentially a reduced power of resistance to formative evils, and that as a negative condition it may hold the balance of power in focusing the forces. Thus, heredity, in disease, can be understood as in no sense implying a specific force, but rather an atonic or susceptible ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... in Hartford began a new era in Harriet's life. It was the formative period, and it is therefore important to say a few words concerning her sister Catherine, under whose immediate supervision she was to continue her education. In fact, no one can comprehend either Mrs. Stowe or her writings without some knowledge of the life and character of ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... and so anxious to insure its perpetuation, that it began to teach the principles of honest dealing to its babies in the cradle, and made the like teachings the staple of their culture thenceforward through all the years devoted to their education. Also, throughout the formative years temptations were kept out of the way of the young people, so that their honesty could have every chance to harden and solidify, and become a part of their very bone. The neighbouring towns were jealous of this honourable supremacy, and affected to sneer at Hadleyburg's pride in it and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... state. As we shall see, the suggestions of the Book of Discipline were to be but imperfectly realized; yet, by defining the ideals and moulding the temper and culture of the prevailing majority of the Scottish people, it has been one of the great formative ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... limited to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved "the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar views in widely ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... actually was. Herder's general views were already incipient in him; and what Herder did was to deepen and intensify them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch in his mental history. Yet in his association with Herder one fact has to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him. He frankly recognised Herder's superiority to himself in knowledge and experience, but he retained his mental independence. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... observation he made to me one spring morning in 1919 when the Republican attitude toward the League of Nations was still in the formative process. Borah was "convinced" that Elihu Root and Will H. Hays were conspiring to induce the Republicans to accept the League and he said, quite seriously, that he had about come to the conclusion that ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... presuppositions of Christian Ethics. The second part will be devoted to man as moral subject, and will analyse the capacities of the soul which respond to the calls and claims of the new Life. The third Section will involve a consideration of the formative Principles of Character, the moulding of the soul, the Ideals, Motives and Forces by means of which the 'New Man' is 'recreated' and fashioned. Finally, under Conduct, the Virtues, Duties and Rights of man will be discussed; and the various spheres of service and ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... youth on the Jersey who lived to be a minister, and for many years was in charge of a church at Berkeley. This youth was sensitive, delicate, and far from strong. His faith in human nature received a shock, and his disposition was warped at the most receptive and formative period of his life, by the terrible scenes of suffering on the one hand, and relentless cruelty on the other, that he witnessed in that fatal place. He wrote, in his memoir many years after: "I have since found that the whole world is but one great prison-house of guilty, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... of the higher mental faculties may be found in the wide prevalence and use of the most highly generalized philosophical terms. Consider for instance, "Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo." No complete translation can be found for them in English; "Ri" and "Ki" may be best translated as the rational and the formative principles in the universe, while "In" and "Yo" signify the active and the passive, the male and the female, the light and the darkness; in a word, the poles of a positive and negative. It is true that these ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... cultivated man who knows his Tropics—and more particularly one who has known his Tropics during the formative period of mental development, say from eighteen to thirty—I feel instinctively that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain clues to the problems of the world we live in, not possessed in anything like the same degree by the mere average ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I survived, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... general periods. The first is the formative period, and extends to the Persian wars, 500 B.C. The second period covers the flourishing era of Greece, from 500 B.C. to 359 B.C. The third is the Macedonian period, when the freedom of Greece was lost,—the era of Philip and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... strongly formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation: History ancient ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... structure and metamorphosis, which are still passing before our eyes. Rocks of eruption, sedimentary rocks, changed (metamorphosed) rocks, conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative condition; rocks of eruption, p 20 endogenous (granite, sienite, porphyry, greenstone, hyperathene, rock, euphotide, melaphyre, basalt, and phonolithe); sedimentary rocks (silurian schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, infusorial deposit); metamorphosed ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... of ideas through reading had become in his case a curious phenomenon," so Honore de Balzac has recorded in Louis Lambert, in which he has painted in the person of his hero his own formative years in the college school of Vendome. "His eye would take in seven or eight lines at once, and his mind would grasp the meaning with a velocity equal to that of his glance; sometimes even a single word in a phrase was enough to give him the essence of it. His ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... embryo from commixture of blood being wholly false, their opinion in this case must of necessity be likewise. I shall therefore conclude this chapter by observing that although a strong imagination of the mother may often determine the sex, yet the main agent in this case is the plastic or formative principle, according to those rules and laws given us by the great Creator, who makes and fashions it, and therein determines the sex, according to the council of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... power was established in Media, the country had been—as in all nations in their formative state—ruled by chieftains, who acknowledged as their supreme lord the King of Assyria, who reigned in Nineveh. Among these chieftains was a remarkable man called Deioces, so upright and able that he was elected king. Deioces reigned fifty-three years wisely and well, bequeathing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... purpose to secure adequate sustenance and their meed of enjoyment. Various habits of life had to be adopted in various parts of the world, and these produced various habits of thought. Consequently, we find that behind all systems of primitive religion lies the formative background of natural phenomena. A mythology reflects the geography, the fauna and flora, and the climatic conditions of the area in which it took ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to "amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work upon them ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of sexual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling voluptuously, as she knew ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... were the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... very good New York family,—he had known her father who had been something of a figure in finance until the crash of ninety-three,—and the head of Herndon Hall was reputed to have an excellent "formative" influence upon her girls. And certainly that raw little specimen who had presented herself in his office needed all the "formative influence" she ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... honorable conduct and devoted patriotism was the rule, and self-seeking vanity and ambition the exception; yet a few exceptions would be enough to disturb the comfort of a large command. To sum up, the only fair way to estimate the volunteer army is by its work and its fitness for work after the formative period was passed, and when the inevitable mistakes and the necessary faults of its first organization had been measurably cured. My settled judgment is that it took the field in the spring of 1862 as well fitted for its work as any army in the world, its superior excellences in the most ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... to any book, contained for him a large share of Great Britain's greatness. His brave heart beat for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,—perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily absorbs young men of genuine feeling ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... of an eternal Presence, we are to set ourselves, with the inexhaustible diligence of hope, to the business of the spiritual life. We are to bring all the treasures of a manifested and possessed Redeemer to bear upon the passing hour, and to let Him be seen in us, "Christ our Life," always formative and empowering. ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule

... family was still further swelled by the addition of a little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without reluctance that he accepted this new ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... pupils of these courses. You can by looking back a few weeks see your own improvement. You are able today to do many things of value in a stage career that when you entered here you found impossible of accomplishment. But you are still in the formative period as to the finished product, as represented by the solo ballet, the stage work par excellence, to which you all aspire, and in which you will realize your fondest hopes when you possess its full ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... what it was to begin; they had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the creative, formative and ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... education has been adopted in each, ranging from the rural school to the state university. The system in every state is quite complete and more or less efficient to accomplish its objects. The entire system is due to the presence of the Bible in our land, and especially during the formative period of our government. The states have deemed it necessary to train the young and rising generation in the interest of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... the experiment was in its early stages, it was my good fortune to be allowed to make suggestions for its development, and as the devices in question were those I had been accustomed to use as a pastime for children, I was able to take some slight hand in the formative work of its adoption as an educational method. Carried out most ably by the teachers to whom it was entrusted, the plan has evolved into a more inclusive and systematic one than was at first hoped for; it is one from which I ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant

... comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... influences of the home surroundings and, after school, of occupation and the whole social environment. But during the school years—and they are the most impressionable of all—it is the school life that is for most the chief formative influence; and now more necessarily so than ever. When, a few generations back, life was still, in the main, life in the country, and most things were still made at home or in the village, the most important part of education lay, except for a few, outside ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... Emily Charlotte, wife of Hugo Meynell-Ingram, of Hoar Cross and Temple Newsam. I mention these two names together because Mrs. Meynell-Ingram (whose qualities of intellect and character made a deep impression on all those who were brought in contact with her) was one of the formative influences of her brother's life. The present Lord Halifax (who succeeded to his father's peerage in 1885) writes thus about ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire of his nature. Yet it often happens that he forgets much that he needs to remember, and thus the question of methodical ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others

... number of people to refuse to take them. It is in this case as in every other; secession is the beginning of a new integration. The living elements leave the dead or dying form and gradually create in virtue of their own combinations a new form more suited to present things. There is a formative, a creative power in sincerity and also in segregation itself. And the new form, the new species produced by variation and segregation will measure itself and its qualities with the old one. The old one will either go to the wall, accept ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine, but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... principal was right; many schools are so built or so conducted, many school courses are so devised or so executed, that children are inevitably injured by the environment in which the compulsory education law forces them to spend their formative years. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... if one fit to own things could not at pleasure enter upon all, and incorporate them into himself or herself; Of vista—suppose some sight in arriere through the formative chaos, presuming the growth, fulness, life, now attain'd on the journey, (But I see the road continued, and the journey ever continued;) Of what was once lacking on earth, and in due time has become supplied—and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... may be given either orally or in writing. Only difficult definitions are appended: in the case of words not defined, pupils may be required to form the definition by reference to the signification of the radicals and the formative elements, thus, acr id acrid, being bitter, acr id ity state of ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton

... of mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members of our race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our original progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. The fatal sophistry in the traducian account ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... therefore, explains how it is that the many can arise from the one, and in this particular he reconciled the apparent contradictions of the Ionians and Eleatics. The theory of chemistry, as it now exists, essentially includes his views. The general formative principle of Nature he regarded as being Destiny or Fate; but there are indications that by this he meant ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... me. "Do you mean to imply," said he, with raised eyebrows, "that any woman would admit the possibility of acquaintanceship with any particular man's having had a formative influence on her character? After ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond

... he now presents, in a veto message, to the Senate of the United States as the equals of the States it represents; informs that body that he is constitutionally the President of the States he has made, as well as the President of the States which have not enjoyed the advantage of his formative hand; and unmistakably hints that Congress, unless it admits the representatives of the States he has reconstructed, is not a complete and competent legislative body for the whole Union,—is, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various



Words linked to "Formative" :   linguistic unit, biology, constructive, formative cell, form, biological science, language unit, shaping, plastic



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com