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Organism   /ˈɔrgənˌɪzəm/   Listen
Organism

noun
1.
A living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function independently.  Synonym: being.
2.
A system considered analogous in structure or function to a living body.



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"Organism" Quotes from Famous Books



... illusion. The concept of consciousness can furnish no link and no mental state which remains when the consciousness is not made real; if this link exists, it is in the permanence of the material objects and of the nervous organism which allows the return of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... rode leisurely down the line, his eye taking note with the quiet glance of the real soldier of every minutia of equipments and appearance generally. Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element, their chief good—yet more, almost as much a necessity of their moral organism as to their animal being is the air they breathe. Such a nature was Nelson's. His face to-day wore that characteristic expression by which every man of his command learned to graduate his expectation of an action; it was the very picture of satisfaction and good humor. He wheeled his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... drive a ploughshare over the very foundation of our position; to break down and destroy the bulwark by which we may secure the results of a great war and a great history, by which we may preserve from defilement this place, where alone in our organism the people never lose their supremacy, except by the recreancy of their Representatives; a bulwark without which we may not save our Government from disintegration and disgrace. If we do this act, it will be a precedent which ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... past wars against the Turkish conqueror have arisen, by the desire of the Christian peoples on whom he lives to shake off this burden. "To live upon their subjects is the Turks' only means of livelihood," says one authority. The Turk is an economic parasite, and the economic organism must end of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... the colossal task of the Comedie Humaine; but pursued his work through discouragement, ill health, and anxieties. Except near the end of his life, when, owing to the unreasonable strain to which it had been subjected, his powerful organism had begun to fail, Balzac refused to neglect his vocation even for his love affairs—a self-control which must have been a severe test to one of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... God to John, God makes known to us what that organism is, and how the agency and the domination of the enraged Dragon will be exerted in acting out his blasphemies, deceits, and bloody spite. The subject is not a pleasant one, but it is an important one. It also has features so ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... scientific—I had almost said an intelligent—view of your function in life. The desire to live by your own labour is actuated by the very proper feeling that you ought to be doing your duty in the social organism. Your present work is equal to, say, three respectable pairs of boots a week. That, you will admit, is a fair measure of your utility. Now, if by becoming a great poet, you could give pleasure and delight ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... observer. The tone of pretended indifference, the 'Let me see' muttered with dry lips, the quivering of the covetous fingers, marked the progress from passion to mania, the growth of the hard and selfish cyst, which was feeding its monstrous size upon the ruin of the whole organism. Astier was becoming the intractable Harpagon of the stage, pitiless to others as to himself, bewailing his poverty and riding in the omnibus, while in two years nearly 6500L. of his savings dropped secretly into the pocket of the humpback. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... issues through imperceptible stages from organic habits and instincts which signify the possession by living creatures of a power to meet the environment on its own terms. Every organism possesses such a working knowledge of nature, and among men the first science consists in those habitual adjustments common to men and infra-human organisms. Man is already practising science before he recognizes it. As skill it distinguishes itself early in his history from lore, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... Boettiger, for example, among that fodder delicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of scholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needful processes of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner and milked him. The product, after standing long enough, mantled over with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... Gordian-knot proposed by the noble British Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction of organism and environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... to go too far in drawing analogies between biology and sociology. Society—as yet, at least—is not an organism in the sense that a tree or a mammal is. It is quite true that with the perfect organization and solidarity to which Socialists look forward the analogy will be more complete than it is to-day, but for the present we must always remember that, as the lawyers would say, "the cases are ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as every other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere. If a man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him anywhere by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and conditions of the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... that has lost all powers of movement. A true parasite that takes food from its host's body and gives nothing in return. Inside this snail's gut there is a protozoan that lives off the snail's ingested food. Yet this little organism is not a parasite, as you might think at first, but a symbiote. It takes food from the snail, but at the same time it secretes a chemical that aids the snail's digestion of the food. Do you get the picture? All these life forms exist in ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... be added, several stains, both on the last page and on the outside cover, which have been pronounced by the Home Office experts to be blood—probably human and certainly mammalian. The fact that something closely resembling the organism of malaria was discovered in this blood, and that Joyce-Armstrong is known to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a remarkable example of the new weapons which modern science has placed in the hands ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins, and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a tormal could not more or less immediately develop antibody resistance. So that in interstellar ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster

... intellect and the march of Science, to be a low type—in fact, a relic of barbarism. There can be no doubt that, in the economy of Nature, bishops are an unnecessary organ, merely transmitted by inheritance in the national organism, and that in the course of time they will become atrophied and degenerate out of existence. When that time comes you must be content to pass into oblivion. Study Palaeontology.' Now he pronounced it Paleyon-tology, not having had a classical ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... rural population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find expression and society is malleable to the general will. I will assert that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real prosperity without such farmers' organizations ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... his own, even of his life—which he had imbibed from Taylor. Taylor was "fond of getting hold of young men and, according to orthodox accounts, doing them a deal of harm." {71a} His views, says Dr. Knapp, sank deep "into the organism of his pupil," and "would only be eradicated, if at all, through much suffering." Dr. Knapp thought that the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a "favourable change in his mode of thinking"—as if prize ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... cold wet night froze the blood in the veins of the aged man, his wolfskin bunda could not keep him warm enough, and, therefore, they placed close beside him two young peasant girls that his dilapidated organism might borrow warmth from their ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... life about the same time, living a short distance apart, professing the same political principles, practicing in the same courts of law, were Alexander H. Stephens of Taliaferro and Robert Toombs of Wilkes. Entirely unlike in physical organism and mental make-up, differing entirely in origin and views of life, these two men were close personal friends, and throughout an eventful period of more than half a century, preserved an affectionate ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... optional fertilization, determining the sex, the mother's organism requires a seminal reservoir which distils its drop of sperm upon the egg contained in the oviduct and thus gives it a feminine character, or else leaves it its original character, the male character, by refusing it that baptism. This reservoir exists in the Hive-bee. Do we find a ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... provisional definitions, which adequately express our knowledge of the things denoted by them, at the time, though a further study of their attributes may induce us subsequently to alter the definition. Thus the old definition of animal as a sentient organism has been rendered inadequate by the discovery that so many of the phenomena of sensation can ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... skin. The first meal is finished. The Sitaris-larva, whose dimensions have almost doubled, now splits open along the back; and through a slit which comprises the head and the three thoracic segments a white corpusculum, the second form of this singular organism, escapes to fall on the surface of the honey, while the abandoned slough remains clinging to the raft which has hitherto safeguarded and fed the larva. Presently both sloughs, those of the Sitaris and the egg, will disappear, submerged under the waves of honey which the new ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... "lived" rather than "known"—or, if any one prefers the term, "realized"—by an organism which is without any psychical accompaniment whatever of the human type, is a fact which I find credible. But when Rolf speaks to me of the origin of the soul, or makes up poetry; when Lola complains to me of honour lost, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... throat increases; the tonsils and fauces swell to a high degree; the eyes become suffused and sensitive to the light; the mucous membranes of the nose and bronchia become also affected, the patient sneezes and coughs, and all the symptoms denote the intense struggle, in which the whole organism is engaged, to rid itself of the enemy which ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde

... besides these particular advantages, the incessant coming and going between the different fields of activity, the circulation of attention which this use of the imagination involves, tends to vitalise and enrich not only the individuals who carry it out, but the whole social organism ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... sacramental system. It seems to me not very important to find a detailed justification of all the things that were done or established in explicit words or acts in the New Testament. If we are dealing, as we believe that we are, with an organism of which the life is God the Holy Ghost Who is the Vicar of Christ in the building and administration of His Kingdom, I do not see why we should not find in the action of the Kingdom as much of inspiration as we find in its writings. I do not see why we should accept certain things ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... quaint organism. Let me say at once, lest I should be cannonaded by physiologists, psychologists, or metaphysicians, that by the 'brain' I mean the faculty which reasons and which gives orders to the muscles. I mean exactly what the plain man means ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett

... biological in the very vital sense that the living organism is the only knowing thing. The knowing process is a life process. Even when knowledge pertains to non-living objects, therefore, it is one-half biological; our most worth-while knowledge—that of ourselves and other organisms—is wholly so. Because all our knowledge ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... fugue or symphony" (p. 301); "In every appeal, the sequence of procedure must be observed. Now the mean tribunal between the individual and humanity is the nation" (p. 165); "If we would know whether there be still any life in an organism which appears dead to us, we are wont to test it by a powerful, even painful stimulus, as for example a stab" (p. 161); "The religious domain in the human soul resembles the domain of the Red Indian in America" (p. 160); "Virtuosos in piety, in convents"(p. 107); ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... free by birth; no taint of slavery or dishonor must rest upon their origin." (P. 143.) Once more this author remarks: "A candidate for Masonry must be physically perfect. As under the Jewish economy no person who was maimed or defective in his physical organism, though of the tribe of Aaron, could enter upon the office of a priest, nor a physically defective animal be offered in sacrifice, so no man who is not 'perfect' in his bodily organization can legally be made a Mason. We have ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher

... been more concerned with the minds and the morals of his clientele than with that physical organism without which neither mind nor morals would be of much use. It would be easy to pick out on the shelves of almost any public library books that are a physiological scandal, printed in type that it is ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... is to a great extent original. Beginning by a disavowal of all dogmas, he began by advancing what was to me the entirely novel doctrine, that the brain was not the sole organ of the mind, but that the whole organism of man had to be taken into account in the diagnosis of character, since the entire body was permeated with the mind. The bones, fluids, and viscera were all related to mental phenomena. The lecturer even questioned whether the science he promulgated was properly termed phrenology. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... backward regions where the city state had been least developed. To koinon ton Aitolon or ton Achaion had become more important than Athens or Corinth, and Sparta was only strong by means of a League.[80:1] By that time the Polis was recognized as a comparatively weak social organism, capable of very high culture but not quite able, as the Covenant of the League of Nations expresses it, 'to hold its own under the strenuous conditions of modern life'. Besides, it was not now ruled by the best citizens. The best had ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... the people's organism for safeguarding and economically handling the funds of their labor to the best advantage of all concerned and without interfering with the rights and privileges of individuals was fully equipped. Each separate institution had grown out of an actual necessity and had its own ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... Power behind phenomena, but a directing Mind, a prevailing Will. The world, according to this conception, was not "made" once upon a time, like a piece of clockwork, and wound up to run without further assistance; it is not a mechanism, but an organism, thrilled and pervaded by an eternal Energy that "worketh even until now." In Sir Oliver Lodge's phrase, we must look for the action of Deity, if at all, then always; and this thought of the indwelling God, revealing ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... khaki-covered bodies about him. Here and there a pair of eyes glinted in the white flickering light from the screen. Waves of laughter or of little exclamations passed over them. They were all so alike, they seemed at moments to be but one organism. This was what he had sought when he had enlisted, he said to himself. It was in this that he would take refuge from the horror of the world that had fallen upon him. He was sick of revolt, of thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner above the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... each other and Robert looked straight into his opponent's eyes, reading there the proof that while outwardly de Mezy might now show no signs of dissipation, yet drink and lost hours had struck a blow at the vital organism of the human machine. He was more confident than ever, and he repeated to himself Willet's advice to be cautious and slow ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... nevertheless was, so hostile to all socialisms and administrative panaceas. Life must be flexible. You ask for a free man, and these Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim at is liberation of the inner interests. Give man possession of a soul, and he will work out his own happiness under any set of conditions. Accordingly, when, in the penultimate ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... requires no greater effort on the part of nature to produce the pine, the oak, the beech, the hickory—all of which we see springing directly from primordial germs to-day—than it did to produce the lowest vegetal organism, from an invisible, indestructible "vital unit," or Darwinian gemmule, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... to commerce. But through years of good fortune and of bad fortune the iron network has continued to spread itself, until all the land lies embraced in its ramifications; and it is spreading still, like some strange organism the one condition of whose life is reproduction, knitting the greatest centres of commerce with the loneliest and remotest villages that were wont to lie far out of the travelled ways of men, and bringing Ultima Thule into touch ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... every organism, an organ which no longer discharges its functions is injurious. The nullity of the sovereign assembly of the people involved no small danger. Any minority in the senate might constitutionally appeal to the comitia ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... work in this field came in isolating a single polyp from the rest in order to study the personal peculiarities of the little organism, for, as is so often the case (even, I fear, with us great big humans sometimes), the individual behaves in an entirely different manner in private from the one he adopts when there is a crowd around. And a polyp, among all creatures, has a minimum of time to himself in which to sit down ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... laboratory (he was both analytical chemist and biologist), it was his custom to return for a few weeks to huge, crude synthetic, nature for relief. After endless discussion of "whorls of force" and of "the office of germs in the human organism," he enjoyed the racy vernacular of the plainsman, to whom bacteria were as indifferent as blackberry-seeds. Each year he resolved to go to the forest, to the lake regions, or to the mountains; but as the day of departure drew near the desert and the strange peoples living ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... ever reaches our minds or our spirits. We assimilate what we can from all this hurry of superfluous food, and the rest goes to waste, and, as a natural consequence, contributes only to the wear and tear of our mental organism. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others

... acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a program (see {quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb}, and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life}, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}. It is even claimed by some that {{Unix}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves of an extremely ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... unfortunate princess: it draws in where it should force out, and forces out where it should draw in. The offices of the auricles and the ventricles are subverted. The blood is sent forth by the veins, and returns by the arteries. Consequently it is running the wrong way through all her corporeal organism,—lungs and all. Is it then at all mysterious, seeing that such is the case, that on the other particular of gravitation as well, she should differ from normal humanity? My proposal for ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... in its degree, the manner and direction of the processes by which man has become what he is, from what he was. Thereby there is breathed into the dead fact the breath of life; it rises from its tomb of centuries, and does its appointed work in the mighty organism of humanity. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the head of the government may be. This inevitability alone can explain how ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who, as a boy, was packing all sorts of lore into a singularly capacious mind, while doing next to nothing that was noticeable. In music it is different. Various learning is not so important as a keenly sensitive organism. The principal thing is emotion, duly ordered by the intellect, not intellect touched by emotion. Haydn's precocity at any rate was of this sort. It proclaimed itself in a quick impressionableness to sound, a delicately-strung ear, and an acute ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... all the organic matter of our time is from preexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build up another? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end? There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organization in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there is certainly ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... himself to the tendencies of natural selection and be modified out of existence by the pressure of his environment, or shall he turn upon himself some of the knowledge of Nature's forces he has gained and by "conscious evolution" begin an adaptation of the environment to the organism? For we no longer hold with Robert Owen and the socialists that man is necessarily controlled and moulded by his surroundings, that he is absolutely subject to the laws of animal evolution. A new era will dawn when man ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... of divine wisdom on which moralists could, if they had only been consulted in time, greatly have improved. It is a thing noble in essence. It is the development of the higher, not the lower, creation. It is the asexual which is the lower, and the sexually differentiated which is the higher organism. ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... the disease was made possible by the successful importation from Japan and Flanders of guinea pigs and rats which had been inoculated with the causative organism in those two countries. Experiments previously made showed that the germ of the disease was carried in the kidneys of a large percentage of apparently healthy wild rats caught near the districts where the disease had been epidemic. Experiments in Europe ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... these positions would be that all terms applied to God have only a secondary import, such, for instance, as we give to the word healthy, as applied to medicine; whereby we signify that it is productive of health in the organism, while the organism itself is said, properly and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... "Hippolytus." He had soon finished reading of "The Cyprian" and her revenge, and looked at the sky instead. And watching the white clouds so bright against the intense blue, Ashurst, on his silver-wedding day, longed for—he knew not what. Maladjusted to life—man's organism! One's mode of life might be high and scrupulous, but there was always an, undercurrent of greediness, a hankering, and sense of waste. Did women have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... realize that Boyle was primarily a chemist and not a biologist. He thought in chemical terms, drawing his examples from physics and chemistry; he did not think in terms of the living creature or the organism, and as a mechanist he passed quite lightly over the concept or organismic behavior. His basic anti-Aristotelianism prevented his appreciating the biologically oriented thought of Aristotle. Instead, Boyle talked about the inorganic world, of ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is really new in a new organism is the new cohering force—the mode of life,—so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the elements, for instance, of its peculiar national [216] architecture. Yet all is also emphatically ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... lawyers of the eighteenth century, he says nothing to show that he was even aware of the existence of a seventeenth, or still less of a sixteenth century. Scott can describe no character without assigning to it its place in the social organism which has been growing up since the earliest dawn of history. This was, of course, no accident. He came at the time when the little provincial centres were just feeling the first invasion of the great movements from without. Edinburgh, whether quite ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... in seeking to reconcile my sense to the existence of regions extending below the surface of the earth, and habitable by beings, if dissimilar from, still, in all material points of organism, akin to those in the upper world, than the contradiction thus presented to the doctrine in which, I believe, most geologists and philosophers concur—viz., that though with us the sun is the great source of heat, yet the deeper we go beneath ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... his misery, "I'm responsible. Men and women ... all the little children—But I'll be in deepsleep. I'd go crazy if I tried to stay awake the whole voyage; the organism can't take it. I'll be asleep, and there'll be nothing I can do, but these ships were given ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson

... without God placing Himself in a relation to man, then we might reject infant baptism. But this is not so. God, in baptism, places Himself in a relation to the subject, receives the subject until it become a part of the organism of grace in its subjective and objective force, and is recognized as a member of the church of Christ. Now the falsity of the position assumed by the enemies of infant baptism lies just here, that only the subjective side of baptism ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... in Hesse regards a reduction of working hours to ten for women in textile mills as "absolutely imperative," as the continuous standing is very injurious to the female organism. ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt

... and assistants are thus safe-guarded against possible unfair and arbitrary action. The Headmistress,[6] however, has almost invariably a preponderating voice in the selection of her staff—as is right if the school is to be a living organism, not merely one of a series of machines with interchangeable parts; but the power of dismissal, if in her hands, is usually safe-guarded by the right of appeal to the appointing body—local authority or board ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... said on correlative changes, to convince us that they are as a rule to be considered as the expression of some general internal or physiologic quality, which is not limited to a single organ, but affects all parts of the organism, provided they are capable of undergoing the change. Such characters are therefore to be considered as units, and should be referred to the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... the churches of England or of Rome,—though he sometimes looked wistfully towards the latter,—Theophilus Londonderry, with his disabilities of worldly condition, would have found no place to be himself in. His was an organism that could not long have breathed in any rigid organisation. It was the non-establishment, the comparative free-field, of Nonconformity that gave him his chance. Conscious, soon after his first few breaths, of a personal force that claimed operation in some human employment, some work ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... already enfeebled by a publicservice system designed for a city one twentieth its size and a complete lack of those facilities mandatory in every other large center of population, increased by the necessary rerouting around the affected area, threatened disruption of the entire organism and the further disintegration of the city's already weakened coordination. The values of realestate dropped, houses were sold for a song, officebuildings for an ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... heart, and an earnest hope grounded on his misanthropic sadness, when I first knew him in his twentieth or twenty-first year, that a something existed in his bodily organism that in the sight of the All-Merciful lessened his responsibility, and the moral imputation of his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... No healthy organism is hurt by exposure to the open air. No dignity is worth having or merited or capable of being long preserved which cannot hold its own ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn

... old literature and began to form a connected doctrine at least as early as the eighth century A.D. Some of its principal ideas are as follows: (i) Letters and syllables (and also their written forms and diagrams) have a potent influence both for the human organism and for the universe. This idea is found in the early Upanishads[437] and is fully developed in the later Sectarian Upanishads. (ii) The human organism is a miniature copy of the universe.[438] It contains many lines or channels (nadi) along ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... there was no servile imitation of any painter; the artist had sought and found in his own soul the divine spark that gave life to his creation. Not an object in the picture, however trifling, but had been the subject of a profound study; the law of its constitution had been analysed, and its internal organism investigated. And the painter had caught that flowing roundness of line which pervades all nature, but which no eye ever sees save that of the creator-artist—that roundness which the mere copyist degrades into points and angles. He had poetised, whilst faithfully representing, the commonest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... one of a species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that, outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms had any special ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... my work was only half done as yet and had to be finished, or else the attack would return. The object was to gain regular circulation of the blood throughout the whole body. This is no witchcraft, but plain mechanical aid to the action of the live organism. ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... commonly used in fireproofing materials and considered to be highly carcinogenic in particulate form. biodiversity - also biological diversity; the relative number of species, diverse in form and function, at the genetic, organism, community, and ecosystem level; loss of biodiversity reduces an ecosystem's ability to recover from natural or man-induced disruption. bio-indicators - a plant or animal species whose presence, abundance, and health reveal the general condition of its ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... and going about our work in the Physical World, the desire body and mind both permeate the dense and the vital bodies, and there is a constant war between the desire nature and the vital body. The vital body is continually engaged in building up the human organism, while the impulses of the desire body tend to tire and to break down tissue. Gradually, in the course of the day, the vital body loses ground before the onslaughts of the desire body, poisons of decay slowly accumulate and the flow of vital fluid becomes more and ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its creators, and its youthful ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... variations which are thus evolved from it. The cause of the production of variations is a matter not at all properly understood at present. Whether variation depends upon some intricate machinery—if I may use the phrase—of the living organism itself, or whether it arises through the influence of conditions upon that form, is not certain, and the question may, for the present, be left open. But the important point is that granting the existence of the tendency to ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... flow of humanity's life, the healthy pulsation of humanity's social organism, the vital condition ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... their Virgin Marys have a motherly air. To my thinking, moreover, if we reverted to some such natural type of beauty, if women were not encouraged by fashion to compress and attenuate their figures so that their very nature, their very organism is changed, there would perhaps be some hope of coping with the evil of depopulation which is talked ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... idea that the organism as a whole cannot be explained from a physico-chemical viewpoint rests most strongly on the existence of animal instincts and will. Many of the instinctive actions are 'purposeful,' i.e. assisting to preserve the individual and the race. This again suggests 'design' and a designing ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... soil,—namely, the giving back to the frame those essentials to its nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds,—a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success. But on these essays, slight ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the viscera are normal and give rise to no disturbing sensations, consciousness is then suspended, and natural sleep ensues. Either local fatigue of the muscles, or of the heart, or ennui, or exhaustion of some brain center usually leads us to seek those conditions in which sleep comes. The whole organism may sleep for the sake of the part. To avoid sleeplessness, we seek monotony of stimulus, either objective or subjective. In the latter case, we dwell on some monotonous memory picture, such as sheep passing one by one through a gap in the hedge. To obtain our ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... words "morality" and "immorality." Yet we are possessed with an inveterate and almost irreclaimable tendency to look at the question of purity of life from a purely individualistic standpoint, and to regard it as a matter concerning the individual rather than the social organism. In electing a member for the Legislature how often have we not been told that we are only concerned with his public career, and have nothing whatever to do with his private life, though the private life is only another expression for the man himself; and how ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... mood and gave the office a market-day "atmosphere." Then things went spinningly. The bank and the staff became a machine and the parts thereof, as if incited to action by the combustion of certain gas-mixtures in the place. Especially the teller's head took on the character of a metallic organism: he could almost hear the wheels buzzing. Occasionally a cog somewhere grated, as, for instance, when a drover brought in a cheque for $500 and had to wait in line behind the wife of a neighbor whom he hated, until she got $1.79 for her produce ticket, and had deposited $1 to the credit of Janet ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... not the end, but after months of pain and privation, which make one wonder at what a frail body, fitted with a delicate organism, can endure, he escaped by the aid of the Dutch at Fort Orange (now the capital of the State of New York), whither the Iroquois had gone to trade, and after six weeks in hiding there, was sent to New Amsterdam—then ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... occupied. But I must not give here this special description of the embryonic processes such as it has hitherto been given, as most of my readers have not studied anatomy, and are not likely to be entrusted with the care of the adult organism. I must content myself with giving some parts of the subject only in general outline, and must not enter upon all the marvellous, but very intricate and not easily described, details that are found in the story of the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... able to follow Canstatt, Day, Rostan, Charcot, Rush, Cheyne, Humphry, or Reveille-Parise into the study of the different conditions which, though normal, are nevertheless factors of a slow or a long life. We must also be able to appreciate fully the value of that interdependence of each part of our organism, which often, owing to a want of equilibrium of strength and resistance in some part when compared to the rest, causes the whole to give way, just as a flaw in a levee will cause the whole of the solidly-constructed mass to give ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... sacrilege to brush a cobweb from your cork by and by. O little fool, that has published a little book full of little poems or other sputtering tokens of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one soft nerve of special sensibility that runs through your exiguous organism, and the one phosphorescent particle in your unilluminated intelligence! But if you don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery business once in a while, and come out among lusty men,—the bristly, pachydermatous fellows that hew out the highways ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... capture of these poor creatures. I know that there are grown people, and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, and value themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only in boys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probable that any lower organism ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... Hoofs, viewing them in the light of idiopathic disease, or as being the immediate cause of the existing lameness in the uninflamed condition of the foot, and when consequential changes of its organism have taken place which bid defiance to therapeutic measures, neurotomy is a ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... did not notice this, and slowly crossed the room, his eyes laughing as if at some secret recollection. His strong, healthy organism, enervated by the heat, was the more sensible to the influence of exciting thought. Suddenly he laughed, a short laugh; it was as if he ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... Crandell and must have done so if he had not dodged behind a tree, and around it he went and the deer after him. Crandell said he called upon his legs to be true to his body then if ever; and I thought, judging from the way those members of his organism were carrying him around that tree, that they were exerting every nerve to save him. He hallooed every minute for me to shoot the deer. But the race was so amusing, I did not care to hurry having never ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin

... its turn (or decent exterior conduct), is nothing without that which constitutes the soul's topmost and central faculty, viz., the religious sentiment, or that which links the soul to God, the centre of all things. As the parts of any organism, as we have seen, fall into confusion and discord when the central bond is wanting; so do the powers of the soul, when it closes itself by evil doing against the entrance of the beams of life and light that unceasingly flow upon it from God, the spiritual sun ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the duty of obedience ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy one; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that the Church was—not a compromise of parties to secure a more or less approximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but—a living organism, instinct with Divine power to bless and to curse. To most of the pious Florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherence to the Frate, that belief in the Divine potency of the Church was not an embraced ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... result, and the same is the case with those who are interred up to the neck, the will alone sufficing. Fakirs probably pass through the same phases that invalids do who are forced to keep perfectly quiet through a fracture or dislocation. During the first days the organism revolts against such inaction, the constraint is great, the muscles contract by starts, and then the patient gets used to it; the constraint becomes less and less, the revolt of the muscles becomes less frequent, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... effectually prevented, at periods more or less remote—on the nature and number of the former immigrants—and on the action of the inhabitants on each other in leading to the preservation of different modifications; the relation of organism to organism in the struggle for life being, as I have already often remarked, the most important of all relations. Thus the high importance of barriers comes into play by checking migration; as does time for the slow ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... Every organism, mechanism or social construct reaches a point in its life cycle at which its existing apparatus must be repaired, renovated and updated or scrapped, redesigned and replaced. Today western civilization in its totality ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... Osgood Mason's patient, Alma Z., in whom the secondary personality assumed the odd name of "Twoey," spoke, as Dr. Mason phrased it, "in a peculiar child-like and Indianlike dialect," and announced that her mission was to cure the broken down physical organism of the original self, which remained completely in abeyance so long as "Twoey" was in evidence. Here, as is apparent, we have a case almost identical with that of Lurancy Vennum, the sole difference being ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... lost it in the hockey field, and did not find it for three days, and I dared not tell Chrissie all that time, for fear she might be offended. She's dreadfully sensitive. She says she has a highly nervous organism, and ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... The human organism may serve as a type of this. Here is a spiritual being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... misunderstood, untranslated science; better than these would be in its place. That truth of nature which it contains for those who are able to receive it, and live by it, you would destroy for them, if you should attempt to make them read it prematurely, in your language. Any kind of organism which by means of those adjustments and compensations, with which nature is always ready to help out anything really hers,—any organism that is capable of serving as the means of an historical social continuance, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... ulcer in the heart of London a deadly poison passes far and wide into the national organism. The ulcer is there still for the knife of some strong man to excise, for there is little doubt that though restrictions will not prevent vice, it is equally true that making vice open, ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... unflattering notion of the animal as it lies coiled among the coral, half hidden with algae. Far too feeble to be offensive, it suffers collapse on alarm—that is to say, if such a violent mental and physical ill can befall an animal of such crude organism. At least, the tentacles are withdrawn, nor will they be protruded until some sense—unlikely to be either sight, hearing, taste, or touch, but probably nervous tension acutely susceptible to vibrations—tells that danger is past. Then the tentacles are shyly exhibited and the agitations ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... on the outer edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime—the so-called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edge of the reef which is always covered by the breaking waves, the living, true, reef—polypes make their ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... anything more delicately caressing to her self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its effect on the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well, let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... art improve? Is art a something, an organism capable of "growing up" into maturity? If it is, by the same token it can grow old, can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with all the honors due its long, useful life. It was Henrik Ibsen who said that the value of a truth ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... actionability. The mere recognition of that psychological fact alters the conventional judgment but little; the failure in these cases consists in not having prevented that automatic transition of images into actions, a transition essentially natural to our organism which ought, however, like so many other things, to be subjected to power of the will.'' Reflex movements require closer study.[1] The most numerous and generally known are: dropping the eyelids, coughing, sneezing, swallowing, all involuntary ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... however, suppose that the first sounds uttered by man were demonstrative of pain or pleasure, marking a great primary distinction, which we make in common with all animals. But our next expression showed superior sensibility and organism: it denoted a very peculiar perception of the intermingling of pain and pleasure, a combination of opposite feelings not possessed by other animals, or not distinct enough in them to have a specific utterance. There might seem to be something ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... easily be produced by inserting the gum under the edge of a wound through the bark of any of the trees above named. The observation that heated or long boiled pieces of gum lose their contagious property made it most probable that a living organism was concerned in the contagions; and he then found that only those pieces of the gum conveyed contagion in which, whether with or without bacteria, there were spores of a relatively highly organized fungus, belonging to the class of Ascomycetes; and that these spores, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... different nature. The same great fact we are learning in regard to thought,—that thoughts are things, that thoughts are forces, the most vital and powerful in the universe, that they have form and substance and power, the quality of the power determined as it is by the quality of the life in whose organism the thoughts are engendered; and so, when a thought is given birth, it does not end there, but takes form, and as a force it goes out and has its effect upon other minds and lives, the effect being determined by its intensity and the quality of the prevailing emotions, and also ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... consciousness to become "in tune" with that of the spirit himself. Then he must learn to project his own mental vibrations with sufficient intensity and force to be "caught" by the sensitive perceptive organism of the medium. These things are beyond the understanding and accomplishment of many decarnate spirits, and unless they are taught by some one on their own plane of existence they are likely to fail in their attempts to communicate through a medium on the earth-plane. But at the present ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... which crowned the edifice of fortunes already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... the ball is the most mobile of inanimate shapes, it may be considered as the "opposite equal" of the living organism. The quickness and ease of its motion as well as its elasticity cause the child to regard it as instinct with life, while its softness renders him able to grasp and handle ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... natural selection is incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation; the apparent inheritance of acquired characters in some cases; and the struggle for existence within the organism, which probably lies at the bottom ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... condition of children. They have to be sustained and given a new education for life. They have to begin many things all over again. Spiritually, they have lost their bearings, and are drifting about in restless anguish. Physically, their whole organism has been shaken by the wound they have received, and must have time after such a violent shock to recover its equilibrium. Their power of judgment has often been temporarily destroyed. They are weak in body and uncertain in mind. This double weakness lays on those who surround them a double ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... ejected from society, and society will return again to its democratic form and structure. There will be no want, in that time, of variety of occupation and talent, or of differentiation in the social organism; quite the contrary; but simply there will be no predatory or parasitical groups within such organism, whose, interests will run counter to the whole, and which will act (as such classes act now) as foci and seedbeds of disease and strife within the whole. With a return to the recognition ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It was no higher than a horse, but the dim outline suggested vast bulk and strength. That hissing pant, as regular and full-volumed as the exhaust of an engine, spoke of a monstrous organism. Once, as it moved, I thought I saw the glint of two terrible, greenish eyes. There was an uneasy rustling, as if it were crawling ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of the sayings of Swedenborg, that the Aryan West had something to learn from the Turanian East. It is so—the reverend thought of the dead as still forming a part of the organism of the family. With the revolt at the Reformation at the trade made out of the feelings of the bereaved, the coining of their tears into cash to line the pockets of the priests, came an unwarranted oblivion of the dead, a dissociation from them. The thought that the departed ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... purposes than those for which they are designed. The most valuable and useful organs of the body are those which are capable of the greatest dishonor, abuse, and corruption. What a snare the wonderful organism of the eye may become, when used to read corrupt books, or to look upon licentious pictures, or vulgar theater scenes, or when used to meet the fascinating gaze of the harlot! What an instrument ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... and puissant Narayana for its refuge. That glorious deity has Emancipation for his refuge. Emancipation is independent of all refuge. Knowing that this body, that is endued with six and ten possessions, is the result of the quality of Sattwa, understanding fully the nature of the physical organism and the character of the Chetana that dwells within it, recognising the one existent Being that lives in the body viz., the Soul, which stands aloof from every concern of the body and in which no sin can attach, realising ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... pinnacles and flying buttresses placed between the windows; the windows themselves grew in size with the introduction and development of tracery and the increasing taste for the decoration of stained glass; until the final organism of Gothic architecture was attained, and the typical Gothic Church, from being a building of three storeys, pierced by windows, became a structure made up of vertical supports, with the intervening ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock

... into wild laughter—shrill, acrid, cheerless, hysterical, her face turned upward, her hands clasped under her chin, her body shaking with what was not laughter, but the terrifying agitation of a broken organism. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... star. It alone did not oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that towel. The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let me read. I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of the enormous organism. I thought: "This magic thing is taking me there! In three days I shall be on that shore." Terrific adventure! The rest of the passengers were merely ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... marched swiftly and silently, while that of Pope slept. The plan of Lee was complicated and delicate to the last degree, but Jackson, the mainspring in this organism, never doubted that he could carry it out. His division soon left the rest of the army far behind, as they marched steadily on over the hills, the fate of the nation almost in the ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler

... absorbed (even without plebiscite) by the S.H.S. State, thus offending also Italy's sentiments, will remain one of the most melancholy pages of the New Holy Alliance that the Entente has become, along with that poor prestigeless organism, the League of Nations. But let us hope this latter will find a means ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... universal faith. The last commandment of the Lord upon earth and the first work of the Holy Spirit upon His descent was to propagate the faith and to carry it to many lands and peoples. Hinduism is conserved by its social organism of caste; Christianity, by its leavening influence upon all that comes in contact with it, and the outreaching power of its ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... according to Hadow, is no "builder of the lofty rhyme," but the poet of the single line, the maker of the phrase exquisite. This is hardly comprehensive. With the more complex, classical types of the musical organism Chopin had little sympathy, but he contrived nevertheless to write two movements of a piano sonata that are excellent—the first half of the B flat minor Sonata. The idealized dance forms he preferred; the Polonaise, Mazurka and Valse were already there for ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... their bitter expression, the feverish glitter, above all, in the eyes, related more eloquently than words the terrible agony of which she was the victim. The past twenty-four hours had acted upon her like certain long illnesses, in which it seems that the very essence of the organism is altered. She was another person. The rapid metamorphosis, so tragical and so striking, caused Boleslas to forget his own anguish. He experienced nothing but one great regret when the woman, so visibly bowed down by grief, was seated, and when he saw in her eyes the look ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Mr. Chance. "Intelligence is a masculine quality which I do not love to see in a woman: it is suitable for us, like a rough skin and—moustachios," with a glance at Captain Horton, and touching his own clean-shaven upper lip. "The more delicate female organism has something finer and higher than intelligence, which however serves the same purpose—and other ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its suffering ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... is at best an instrument of torture. It presses upon a great bundle of nerves; it distorts the figure; it stamps a character of its own upon the whole organism; it is even accused ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... the Providence which had created the marvel of human organism. Everything, he said, was arranged and formed wisely and in the best possible manner, but in one respect nature fared badly in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... which the notion there suggested grew, and the absorbing interest with which it finally held him, would be difficult. The influence of the mind upon the body is known. By persistent direction of thought one can both create and cure a pain in any specific spot of his organism. The mind has a similar power over itself. By intense concentration upon one subject it may suspend and finally destroy its faculty of interest in any and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... which does not slumber, and the organism that wishes to live, does not suffer excess of poison. Finally there came a moment for hiccoughs of disgust. Some voices began to rise asking for other spiritual bread; an instinctive sentiment awakes and cries that it cannot continue any longer in this way, that one must ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,

... hair that was half unplaited. The excessive whiteness of her face betrayed that terrible malady of girlhood which goes by the name of chlorosis, deprives the body of its natural colors, destroys the appetite, and shows a disordered state of the organism. The waxy tones were in all the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... the scope of this summary, were I to give a minute description of the innumerable anomalies discovered in criminals by the Modern School, to attempt to trace such abnormal traits back to their source, or to demonstrate their effect on the organism. This has been done in a very minute fashion in the three volumes of my father's work Criminal Man and his subsequent writings on the same subject, Modern Forms of Crime, Recent Research in Criminal ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... of the internal organism is the sound-post, which serves many purposes. It is the medium by which the vibratory powers of the instrument are set in motion; it gives support to the right side of the belly, it transmits vibrations, and regulates both the power and quality of tone. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... decisions. To be sure, it is not difficult to emphasize certain mental traits as characteristic of women in general in contrast to men in general, and to relate them to certain fundamental tendencies of their psychophysical organism. As soon as this is done, it is easy theoretically to deduce that certain industrial functions are excellently adapted to the minds of women and that certain others stand in striking antagonism to them. If the employment of large numbers ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg

... into the compound in a modified form. And this is equally the case in perception, even if we suppose various media to intervene between the ultimate object and the perceiving mind,—such, e.g., as the rays of light and the sensitive organism in vision,—so long as these media are material, like the ultimate object itself. Whether the object, properly so called, in vision, be the rays of light in contact with the organ, or the body emitting or reflecting those rays, is indifferent to the present question, so long as a material ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... pillow in the dark; and the kennels of the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed, beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house seemed absolutely tragic to her, compact of the stuff of sorrow itself! And yet George Cannon had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... now one group of plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however, just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts, has been attempted by the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... are not deposits of dirt nor are they caused by mysterious conditions in the atmosphere, as once supposed, nor is it in the nature of leaves to be spotted and of fruits to be scabby; nor are the one-sided dwarfed fruits merely accidents. The organism responsible for these blemishes is less evident than the codlin-moth; yet what fruit-grower knows the eggs of the codlin-moth? But the organisms are as definite as are the insects; no longer are the fungi things without form and without ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey

... again. "You mean, Sir Basil, that there is a sort of war waged against what you personify as the Mind by matter; that matter is constantly seeking to enslave mind-electrons, so that it may become an organism which, for awhile, may ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... resists for some time. I have seen a Grasshopper, bitten in the belly, cling firmly for fifteen hours to the smooth, upright wall of the glass bell that constituted his prison. At last, he dropped off and died. Where the Bee, that delicate organism, succumbs in less than half an hour, the Grasshopper, coarse ruminant that he is, resists for a whole day. Put aside these differences, caused by unequal degrees of organic sensitiveness, and we sum up as follows: when bitten by the Tarantula in the neck, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre



Words linked to "Organism" :   relict, organic chemistry, zooid, hybrid, beast, mortal, dwarf, creature, cellular, animate being, carrier, vocalizer, cross, sitter, plant life, recombinant, animal, native, parthenote, body part, actinal, organic, animalculum, polymorph, polyploid, scheme, mutant, bioluminescent, clone, animalcule, individual, heteroploid, congeneric, parasite, zygote, stratum, haploid, somebody, nekton, fauna, fertilized ovum, someone, vocaliser, saprophyte, cell, congener, diploid, eucaryote, heterotroph, plankton, metabolism, mascot, crossbreed, animate thing, stander, variation, utterer, clon, myrmecophile, prokaryote, tissue, benthos, conspecific, host, saprobe, aerobe, amphidiploid, throwback, eukaryote, postdiluvian, morphogenesis, procaryote, atavist, flora, denizen, mutation, commensal, anaerobe, brute, fungus, katharobe, relative, person, sport, congenator, parent, system, metabolic process, living thing, plant, soul



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