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Static   /stˈætɪk/   Listen
Static

noun
1.
A crackling or hissing noise caused by electrical interference.  Synonyms: atmospheric static, atmospherics.
2.
Angry criticism.



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"Static" Quotes from Famous Books



... radiance that made traveling possible even after the twilight had deepened. By and by it grew lighter and the north horizon took on a rosy flush that spread into a tremendous flare. The night was still, clear, crackly; it was surcharged with some static force, and so calm was the air, so deathlike the hush, that the empty valley rang like a bell. That mysterious illumination in the north grew more and more impressive; great ribbons, long pathways of quivering light, unrolled themselves and streamed across ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... religions, between the forces representing order on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... closet-student or field-naturalist, Pliny's trait of mind is essentially that of the compiler. He was no philosophical thinker, no generalizer, no path-maker in science. He lived at the close of a great progressive epoch of thought; in one of those static periods when numberless observers piled up an immense mass of details which might advantageously be sorted into a kind of encyclopaedia. Such an encyclopaedia is the so-called Natural History of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... strange cross-talk. Though busy with the many engineering problems which the telephone heads had assigned to him, Carty found time for some original research. He showed that the roarings in the wires were largely caused by electro-static induction. In 1889 he read a paper before the Electric Club that startled the engineers of that day. He demonstrated that in every telephone circuit there is a particular point at which, if a telephone is inserted, no cross-talk ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers

... static character of village life leaves the boy with little inspiration in his primary interests of play and his serious ideals of the noblest manhood. Idle hours work demoralization and the ever-present example ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... school must be founded upon freedom of form and action, upon flexible bodily movements, the result of vitalized energy instead of muscular effort. There must be no set, rigid, static condition of the muscles. Artistic singing is a form of self-expression; and self-expression, to be natural and beautiful, must be the result of correct ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... be adequately compared or new ones co-operatively undertaken. Hence the importance of discussions of scientific method such as those who have so largely occupied our first volume. Yet, I submit, here lies the means of escaping from these too abstract (and consequently too static) presentments of the general methodology of social science into which sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this would-be practical-minded community ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... were an arm, a dial, and a lens fixed in such a way as to read the dial. I could not see what else the rather complicated little apparatus consisted of, but inside, when Kennedy brought near it the pole of a static electric machine two delicate thin leaves of gold seemed to fly wide ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows through the rhythm, permeates the words and throbs in their rise and fall. On the other hand, the mere idea of the above-quoted poem, stated in unrhythmic prose, would represent only a fact, inertly static, which would not bear repetition. But the emotional idea, incarnated in a rhythmic form, acquires the dynamic quality needed for those things which take part in the world's ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... that seemed like hours he was ready. Using one of the intercom relays he began tapping out a message in Morse code on an exposed wire from the scanner. He looked at the radar scanner and watched it flash white static lines each time he touched the wires. Carefully he ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... that the internal static conditions in reinforced concrete beams change to some extent with the intensity of the direct or normal stresses in the steel and concrete. In order to bring out his point, the speaker will trace, in such a beam, the changes in the internal static ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... to study this subject in looking to see what had become of my first permanent investment, a small venture, made about thirty-five years ago, in the "Sawyer and Gwynne static pressure engine." This was the high-sounding name of the Keely motor of that day, an imposition made possible by the confused ideas prevalent on this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... an hour later, the pipal was surrounded by thousands of Mahratta sepoys, for word had gone forth,—the mysterious rumour of India that is like a weird static whispering to the four corners of the land a message,—had flashed through the tented city that the men from Karowlee were to take the oath ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... Royal Dublin Society, tested the photo-sensibility of aluminium and also of silver bromide down to temperatures approaching that of the liquid air. The mode of observation is essentially that of Schmidt—what he terms his static method. The substance undergoing observation is, however, contained at the bottom of a thin copper tube, 5 cm. in diameter, which is immersed to a depth of about 10 cm in liquid air. The tube is closed above by a ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... by the strength of his own nature, he would find himself looking down upon Lockwood. "I'm alive. He's static. I live above him. There's nothing beyond me. I can't feel the things out of which he makes his ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... there would be no need of further progress for the human race. I do not know whether our age is more restless than that which preceded it, or whether it has merely become more impregnated with the idea of evolution, but, for whatever reason, we have grown incapable of believing in a state of static perfection, and we demand, of any social system, which is to have our approval, that it shall contain within itself a stimulus and opportunity for progress toward something still better. The doubts thus raised ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... must continually be kept in mind is the boy's good and the boy. A lot of our teachers in the public schools are trying to teach the subject-matter of the book when they ought to be teaching the boy. They employ static methods. You can get up a goal for attainment and the boy will reach the goal. Generally, however, he will go no higher than you point. Your teaching should be dynamic ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander

... might be in this way: What is the multiplication table when it is not written down? It is a necessity of thought; it was not created, it cannot but be; every intelligence which goes to it, and thinks, must think in that form or think falsely. So the universe is the static necessity of reason; it is not an object for any intelligence to find, but it is half object and half subject; it never cost anything as a whole; it never was made, but always is made, in the Logos, or expression of reason—the Word; and slowly but surely it will be understood and uttered ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... it seems to me that as Mr. Baxter gets to grip with the realities of his theme, he begins to lose a certain looseness of touch which marks his opening pages. If so, he is showing the power of development, and to the artist this power is everything. The writer who is without it is a mere static consciousness weaving words round the creatures of his own imagination. The man who has it possesses a future, because he is open to the teaching of experience. And among the men with a ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... the brain. Whether or not the consequent functional depression and the morphologic alterations seen in the brain-cells may be due to the low blood-pressure which follows excessive trauma is shown by the following experiments: The circulation of animals was first rendered STATIC by over-transfusion, and was controlled by a continuous blood-pressure record on a drum, the factor of anemia being thereby wholly excluded during the application of the trauma and during the removal of a specimen of brain tissue for histologic study. In each instance, morphologic changes in the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... as it is the outstanding fact is the necessity for struggle. Struggle may conceivably enter into every other world. There is something in us which requires it, which craves for it. A static heaven in which all is won and there is nothing forevermore but to enjoy has never made much appeal to us. If eternal life means eternal growth we shall always have something with which to strive, since growth ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... (passive instruments) will, in general, be classified on the basis of structure, either of special or general application, the essential functions and effects of static structures being resistive or the maintaining of forces ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office

... feeling in one's make-up is, perhaps, the greatest single remedy against a too static condition of ideas. Feeling seems to have a double function in making one open and plastic. A kindly attitude toward new ideas is necessary before they can be viewed long enough to have their value tested. We must be positively friendly, or willing to see worth, before we can see it. Sympathy ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... daily more of a dynamic and less of a static phenomenon. In other days the great body of written records remained more or less stable and with its attendant body of tradition did its work by a sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... etheric vehicle, and be more or less stable or stationary, save at the times when volition or intense, active conscious operations are in progress—when, in short, effort is exerted. At such times, it is surely conceivable that what was static becomes dynamic; something is set into motion which in turn brings into activity some more "physical" energy, and so on, until sufficient material momentum has been gained to affect that most unstable and mobile substance, nervous tissue. It ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... now only continues his habit to preserve the terrible static condition to which it has reduced him, and to prevent that yet more terrible dynamic condition into which he comes with every disturbance of equilibrium; a condition of energetic and agonizing dissolutions ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... and Rick called the airport, then held the phones to his ears to hear the reply through heavy static. When the airport answered he asked for a weather report for the area between St. Thomas and Clipper Cay. He got it, and climbed out, ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... restitution. But it shouldn't involve Kardon. Actually the Lani were never in a position to develop that world. They'd probably have remained on Flora indefinitely. The old court records showed no tendency for their culture to expand. They were an inbred group, a static, balanced society in harmony with their environment. In nearly thirty-five hundred years their numbers increased only to a few thousand. Actually there is a good possibility that the race would ultimately have died out if Old Alexander hadn't enslaved them and instituted a ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae, but, as Professor Osborn points out,[5] "it is a very striking fact, that the basis of our modern methods of studying the Evolution problem was established not by the early naturalists nor by the speculative ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... Fate, rather than any sultan, must be blamed. It was impossible to forgo some further extension of the empire, and very difficult to arrest extension at any satisfactory static point. For one thing, as has been pointed out already, there were important territories in the proper Byzantine sphere still unredeemed at the death of Mohammed. Rhodes, Krete, and Cyprus, whose possession carried with it something like superior control of the Levantine trade, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration opposed to a static regime, whether the passion for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... sun's rays to those spheres. The fields, forests, rocks, and seas, only absorb light, they do not reflect it. In this phenomenon, therefore, there is no element of specular reflection. It consists rather of the lighting up of the static vito-magnetic fluid of our atmosphere, by the great solar current. The atmosphere, thus vivified, discloses our presence to those orbs, and in like manner, their presence to the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... Paul III). A Pope at a later date provided the lady, portrayed in 'a state of nature,' with a silver robe—because, say the gossips, the statue was indecent. Not at all: it was to prevent recurrence of an incident in which the sculptured Julia took a static part with a ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... another. This effect is called an electro-magnetic disturbance in the ether. Again when we charge an insulated body with electricity we find that it attracts any light substance indicating a material disturbance in the ether. This is described as an electro-static disturbance or effect and it is upon this that wireless telegraphy ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... a number of Polygons of high rank moving in different directions, as for example in a ball-room or conversazione—must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual, and amply justify the rich endowments of the Learned Professors of Geometry, both Static and Kinetic, in the illustrious University of Wentbridge, where the Science and Art of Sight Recognition are regularly taught to large classes of the ELITE ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about "imposture" and "static electricity," Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... opposition that such conceptions are dangerously static and have thereby harmed China. But that can be avoided by shifting the balance a little from progenitors to posterity. If people should live more in their children than they now do, they would be not only anxious ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... the Predicate. Participles, into which all other verbs than this Copula, are so resolved, then fall back in like manner into the Class of Adjectives. The Tempic and Motic Word-Kingdom is thus carried back to its dependence upon the Spacic and Static Word-Kingdom, as basis; in the same manner as, in Nature, Time and Motion have Space and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so much insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one possible, given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But is there any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of man's capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest achievements of modern science, does not the conception of evolution take a foremost place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a living organism at any time is the result of the one ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... existence of anything except in immediacy, that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in Auseinandersein. This would be a real death and petrifaction of consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... crackling of the almost static-jammed ultra-wave radio snapped through to his mind. Quickly he began to ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara

... late at Greenlawn—the hands of Mrs. Mimms' watch were nearing eleven—yet this did not deter her from flicking the power on. She dialed to a position a few hours before on that same evening and waited for the equipment to warm up. A roar of angry static and strident voices suddenly filled the room until Mrs. Mimms quickly cut the volume. The outburst was definitely an indication that her work was cut out for her. Eyeing the red pilot indicator across which a ribbon of names was flashing she slowly twirled ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight

... Problems of the Gothic," strove to achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests itself in the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial and inevitable ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... understand the full meaning of the brutal judgment, it brought him disquiet and discontent. For one thing, like the high-road, his profession led nowhither. The thrill of adventure had gone from it. It was static, and Paul's temperament was dynamic. He had also lost his boyish sense of importance, of being the central figure in the little stage. Disillusion began to creep over him. Would he do nothing else but this all his ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... under new and imperfect hygienic insights. Thus most especially if old questions, concerning which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves to give reasons, need to be reopened, there is especial danger that the new equilibrium about which the dynamic is to be re-resolved into static power will be established, if at all, with loss instead of with gain. Indeed, it is a question not of schools but of civilization, whether mental training, from the three R's to science and philosophy, shall really make men better, as the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... rupture of an equilibrium, the liberation of a force which till then was retained in a potential state by some opposing force or obstacle, overcoming which it passes to a new equilibrium and so on Hence alternations of dynamic activity and static repose, of origination of species and types, alternated with periods of stability or fixity. The timepiece does not run down regularly, but "la force procede par saccades; et . . . par pulsations d'autant plus energiques que la nature etait plus ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... indifference; they are perceived by them, but it does not appear that they suppose these things to be endowed with life. It is, however, necessary in the first place to distinguish two modes and stages in this animation of things, one of which we may term static, and the other dynamic. In the first instance, the sentient subject remains tranquil at the very moment when he vivifies the phenomenon or the thing perceived; while the act is accomplished with so much animating force, and with an implicit and fugitive ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... Chief took Joe's place, and under his hand the seemingly static disks—which were actually spinning at forty thousand revolutions per minute—turned obediently and without any appearance of the spectacular. Then Haney worked the controls. And Mike put ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... much to do with the chisel, introducing many a fine after-thought, when the rough-casting of his work was over. He studied human form under such conditions as would bring out its natural features, its static laws, in their entirety, their harmony; and in an academic work, so to speak, no longer to be clearly identified in what may be derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. Yet with Polycleitus ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... arise. A drone plane had been flown to the lake with a television camera transmitting back everything its lens saw. It arrived at the lake and its camera relayed back exactly nothing that had not been photographed and recorded before. But suddenly there was a crash of static and the drone went out of control and crashed. Its camera faithfully transmitted the landscape spinning around until its destruction. Military transmitters were beaming signals on every conceivable frequency to what was now universally called ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... is an abstract vacuity; in the Greek, a static intellect; in the Christian, a dynamic will. As is the conception of God, so is the conception and character of man. The two are so intimately interdependent that it is useless at this time to discuss which is the cause and which the result. They are doubtless the two aspects of the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life—changes of which we all have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... very low pressures than the Smithsonian. All such tables as originally calculated are based upon the hypothesis of a temperature and humidity which decrease regularly with the altitude, and this is not always the case; nor is the "static equilibrium of the atmosphere" which Laplace assumed always maintained; that is to say an equal difference of pressure does not always correspond to an equal difference of altitude. There is, in point of ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... that this current in a strength which would be very painful to the normal skin will in some instances relieve the feeling of pressure and dull discomfort about the rectum and perineum, and it has been successful when galvanism did no good. In patients within reach of a static machine, this form may be used for the numbness if the others do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... Utopias they write about—good stories, too, about a man waking up three thousand years hence and finding everything lovely. But every one of 'em, and I've read all, picture a society that's froze into some certain condition—static. Nothing is! She won't freeze! They can spray the fire of competition with speeches all they like, but they can't put it out. Because why? Well, because this life thing is going on, and competition is the only way ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... range such states beside each other on the ego supposed to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid make up that duration which flows. What we actually obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language, just because we have eliminated from it the element of real time. But, as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive that ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... meditating on something he has just read. Occasionally, he is fingering a portfolio of engravings, or leaning aside to examine severely a globe of the world. That is the nearest he ever gets to physical activity. In him we see the static embodiment of perfect wisdom and perfect righteousness. We take him at his own valuation, humbly. Yet we have a queer instinct that there was a time when he did not diffuse all this cold radiance of good example. Something tells us that he has been a sinner in his day—a rattler of the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed prose tune." Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges, as does Theophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences. A typical paragraph of his shows what might be called the sonata form: an allegro, andante, and presto. For example, the opening pages of Karain (one of his best stories, by the way) ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... division of labour that we need; nor can we in any other fashion provide so well. Thus we shall attain a society which, if less certainly stable than that of the bees, is what that is not—progressive, and not merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the lives and minds ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... summed up by saying that not only in women, but in most female animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic than in males. They tend to more static conditions; they collect, organize, conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... into a pensive torpor. The immediate dangers and stresses of his position he saw with a sort of static clearness. What would they do to-morrow? He could not tell. What would Elizabeth think of his brutalisation? He could not tell. He was exhausted. He was aroused presently by a ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... events, soul is a fact, in certain writers—the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... take pains to see that his whole thought is expressed, instead of leaving vacancies which must be filled by the puzzled and groping reader. His own views and his quotations from the views of others about the static and dynamic theories of distribution are examples of an important principle so imperfectly expressed as to make us doubtful whether it is perfectly apprehended by the writer. He can avoid the use of those pedantic terms which are really nothing but offensive ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... large and clear and handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened, the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large, full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off. Where they are everything is set back, as ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... not likely to improve a full-sized novel. He would too much abound in description; the want of evolution of character—his character is not bad in itself, but it is, to use modern slang, rather static than dynamic—naturally shows itself more; and readers who want an elaborate plot look for it longer and are more angry at not being fed. But for the short, shorter, and shortest kind—the story which may run from ten ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... exist in any one or more of three modes—the harmony or union of cooperating elements; the balance of contrasting or conflicting elements; the development or evolution of a process towards an end or climax. The first two are predominantly static or spatial; the last, dynamic and temporal. I know of no better way of indicating the characteristic quality of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... the opposition between the Greek and Gothic dynasties, in their passionate or vital nature; in the animal and inbred part of them;—Classic and romantic, Static and exstatic. But now, what opposition is there between their divine natures? Between Theseus and Edward III., as warriors, we now know the difference; but between Theseus and Edward III, as theologians; as dreaming and discerning creatures, as didactic kings,—engraving ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... periodicals, in the books published for the discriminating, the bourgeois creeps in and often is dominant. The bourgeois in American literature is a special variety that must not be too quickly identified with the literary product that bears the same name in more static civilizations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and told with facility or they will never see the light. And this literature ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... They were fully as interesting, in their way, as brasswork and leatherwork, those products of peasant natures and peasant hands. But these youths ran past one's eye, ran through one's fingers. They were not static, not even stable. They were restless birds of passage who fidgeted through their years, and even through the days of which the years were made: intent on their own affairs and their own companions; thankless for small favors ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... has been taken into account. Among the new features are a full treatment of electric lighting, and descriptions of storage batteries, methods of transmitting electric energy, simple and easy methods of making electrical measurements with inexpensive apparatus, the compound steam-engine, etc. Static electricity, which is now generally regarded as of comparatively little importance, is treated briefly; while dynamic electricity, the most potent and promising physical element of our modern civilization, is placed in the clearest light of ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... second place, we object to universal foreordination because it leads to Pantheism, a phase of Atheism. Pantheism as Pantheism may be viewed statically or dynamically. The static Pantheist assumes that all properties are properties of one substance. This was the feature of the vedanta system of Hindu philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but Brahma. "He is the clay, we are the forms; the eternal spider which spins from its own bosom ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace

... immediate task. Moreover, because he was impelled by burning convictions to express freely his pronounced views, he was considered radical, and was misunderstood and disliked by many churchmen. The diocese of those earlier years was conservative and static, and politics then played a more weighty part than now. A clerical friend in speaking of Mr. Nelson candidly stated, "I had to grow into friendship with him. In those early days I had a sort of prejudice against him as a militant opponent of things, but I soon saw my ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick

... through space we know not; whether the result is merely action at a distance, as in the case of gravity; or by some intermediate agency, as in the case of light, heat, the electric current, and (as I believe) static electric action. The idea of magnetic fluids, as applied by some, or of Magnetic centres of action, does not include that of the latter kind of transmission, but the idea of lines of force does.' And he continues thus:—'I am more inclined to the notion that in the transmission of the ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall

... The ideal of life, the highest imperative of conscience. Here the nobility of life, as a whole, the supreme life-purpose, gives meaning and incentive to each and every action. The ideal of life is not, however, something static and completed, given once and for all. It grows with the enlightenment of the individual and the development of humanity. The consciousness of every age comprehends it in certain laws and ends of life. The highest form of the ideal finds its embodiment ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... want to remark that the theory of expanding space, together with the empirical data of astronomy, permit no decision to be reached about the finite or infinite character of (three-dimensional) space, while the original " static " hypothesis of space yielded the ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein

... but if the ray be sent, by reflection, back through the same field, it is twisted as much more—a phenomenon which convinces one that rotation is going on in the space through which the ray travels. If the ether through which the ray be sent were simply warped or in some static stress, the ray, after reflection, would be brought back to its original plane, which is not the case. This rotation in the ether is produced by what is going on in the wire. The ether waves called light are interpreted to imply that molecules originate them by ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear

... boy with a desire to put all things to the test of his own free conscience, you are empowering him to criticise everything you teach—even that very liberty of opinion, a belief in which you have been so anxious to create. But with reactionary propaganda it is quite otherwise. By it a static habit of mind is produced—a habit of mind which, except by way of a mercifully not uncommon revolt, is a pawn in the hands of its present teacher, and that public opinion which in time to come will take its ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... the beginning of the young man's longer speech, had sunk almost immediately into his passive calm—the calm of great elemental bodies, the calm of a force so vast as to rest motionless by the very static power of its mass. When he spoke again, it was in the tentative manner of his earlier interrogatory, committing himself not at all, seeking to plumb ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. Yet, although if occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a dash as can the men of towns who are more to the manner born, his special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static, owing little or nothing ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... keyed to the highest pitch of hysterical excitement. They needed little to release the accumulated pressure of static nerve force which the terrorizing mummery of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... place faster than crystallization at the corners of the cube. Eventually, the cube will become a sphere, or something very closely approximating it. But the change is slow, and, once it reaches that state, the situation becomes static. ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett

... be stated at once. Firstly, the industrial situation is rarely so balanced, no matter what the price situation, that a measure of wage increase may not be possible without an equivalent increase in prices. The distributive situation is never one of static equilibrium. The gain of one group or agent of production may simply be another's loss. Each group or agent strives for a large return. If wages go up, profits may go down, or new methods of production may be devised, or strikes ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... constituents of the solution; that is, there is a definite relation between the undissociated acetic acid and its ions, which is characteristic for the prevailing conditions. It is not, however, assumed that this is a condition of static equilibrium, but rather that there is continual dissociation and association, as represented by the opposing reactions, the apparent condition of rest resulting from the fact that the amount of change in one direction during a given time is exactly equal to that ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot

... the gas jet. The generator consists of a small "influence" machine, which is started by pressing the thumb- key C on the side of the box. The rotation of a disc inside the box produces a supply of static electricity, which passes in a stream of sparks between two contact-points in the open end of the stem D. The latter is tubular, and contains a wire insulated from the metal of the tube, and forming with the tube the circuit for the electric discharge. The ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... millions of dollars apart. Failures had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy had now to govern not a puritanical, industrious, sparsely settled Arcady but communities of conflicting dynamic successes, static ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... pole of the social scale to that about which shareholding is most apparent, is a second necessary and quite inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. This new ingredient is most ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... insight into the real fluidity of natural species ought long ago to have toned down the artificial rigidity of logical classifications. To know reality man can no longer rest in a 'timeless' contemplation of a static system; he must expand his thoughts so as to cope with a perpetually changing process. Since the world changes, his 'truths' must change to fit it. He is faced with the necessity of a continuous reconstruction of beliefs. This influence of Darwin has inspired the ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter. And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... to say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was something new in the man—she sensed that. He was more confident, more persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... tons in a space of 50 feet, and followed by loaded cars weighing 20 tons each in a space of 22 feet. An addition of 25 per cent will be made to the strains produced by the rolling-load considered as static in all parts which are liable to be thrown suddenly under strain by the passage of a rapidly moving load. A similar addition of 50 per cent will be made to the strain on suspension links and riveted connections of stringers with floor-beams, ...
— Bridge Disasters in America - The Cause and the Remedy • George L. Vose

... property of the static charge. When a Leyden jar is being charged it dilates a little and the capacity increases, so that it can take a little more charge for a given potential difference existing between its two coatings. This phenomenon occurs with other static condensers, varying in degree with the ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... not be asserted that hydrogen and the elements of the air had been completely liquefied. These gases had not yet been seen collected in the static condition at the bottom of a tube and separated from their vapors by the clearly defined concave surface which is called a meniscus. The experiments had, however, proved that liquefaction is possible at a temperature of below -120 deg. C. (-184 deg. Fahr.). To make the process practicable, it was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... from every possible point of view. Jeffryes and Bickerton worked every night from 8 P.M. until 1 A.M., calling at short intervals and listening attentively at the receiver. In fact, notes were kept of the intensity of the signals, the presence of local atmospheric electrical discharges—"static"—or intermittent sounds due to discharges from snow particles—St. Elmo's fire—and, lastly, of interference in the signals transmitted. The latter phenomenon should lead to interesting deductions, for we had frequent evidence to show ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... cloak making trade of New York presents, for an outside observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static. The cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade. In the general strike of the cloakmakers in 1896 nearly all the manufacturers were German. In the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt

... great difference between such words as we have just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as "white" or "round." The chief difference is that words of this latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal, called "whiteness," or whether white things are to be defined as those ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... on earth where one meets with the present face to face, it is on shipboard. Whether salt water and sea air act as a narcotic on memories of the past and dreams of the future has never been proved, but it is undeniably true that at sea time becomes a static thing and concerns itself solely with ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice

... agree with it," Plekhanov said ponderously. "A society that builds pyramids is a static one. For that matter any society that resorts to make-work projects to busy its citizenry has something ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... beauty mask," he told her, "complete with wig, eyelashes, and wettable velvet lips. It even breathes—pinholed elastiskin with a static adherence-charge. But Micro Systems had nothing to do with it, thank God. Beauty Trix put it on the market ten days ago and it's already started a teen-age craze. Some boys are wearing them too, and the police are yipping at Trix for ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... these days you become conscious, among the people you meet, of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static order are dissolving; and in England that order was so static as to make the present spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration of the old social strata were not lacking, indeed, in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... STATIC.—Also called atmospherics, grinders, strays, X's, and, when bad enough, by other names. It is an electrical disturbance in the atmosphere which makes noises ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins

... Mr. James Wimshurst.—A London Royal Institution lecture, of great value as giving a full account of the recent forms of generators of static electricity.—14 illustrations. 10327 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... of experience, with the immense feeling of assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of resistances—if all this seems to lead to a merely static or contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... neighbors invoked the Rio Treaty and have shown a commitment to combat terrorism through a new Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism adopted in June 2002. But these alliances cannot be taken for granted or remain static. We will strive to help them evolve to meet the ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States

... by way of a glimpse—and even then I put forward my suspicions with extreme reserve—all that I am permitted to surmise is reduced to this: the substance of the sleeping larva as yet has no very definite static existence; it is like the raw materials collected for a building; it is waiting for the elaboration that is to make a bee of it. To mould those shapeless lumps of the future insect, the air, that prime adjuster of living things, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... imp, we know that he is capable of doing both good and evil and that he develops character as he practices virtue and avoids vice. We know, too, that he mentally develops. Born with the capacity to do, he behaves to his own blessing or condemnation. There is no such thing as static life. To the teacher is given the privilege of pointing to the higher life. He is the gardener in the garden of life. His task is to plant and to cultivate the flowers of noble thoughts and deeds rather than to let the human soul grow up to weeds. This ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion

... change that now and call it static instead of noise since we've all become radio experts," smirked ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield

... punishment assumes the form of a liberal revolt; in the former, it appears reactionary. This is why Galds, holding the balance even, with the impartiality which is the root of his character, seems in Brbara to advocate a static philosophy, whereas in most of his work he is the liberal whom ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... cardinal," he said. "And, as if that were not enough, a bigoted Roman Catholic into the bargain.... And yet—and yet," he went on, taking heart a little, "as for her bigotry, to judge by her assiduity in attending the village church, that factor, at least, thank goodness, would appear to be static, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... use. Thus, in history itself there is the presence of a reality higher than the individual, and higher than the ordinary meaning of the [p.75] hour. This becomes the standard by which everything has to be measured. Of course, this norm does not remain static in regard to its own content. But its growth of content depends upon the contributions made to it by individuals in their will-relations. Something over-individual issues out of all these relations, and this enters into the still higher ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... against his desk, after they were seated. The lawyer disposed himself on the far edge of his chair, as if fearing that a more comfortable pose might commit him to something. Mr. Pierce sat solid and square, a static force neatly buttoned into a creaseless suit. His face was immobile, but under the heavy lids the eyes smouldered, dully. The tone of his voice was lifelessly level: yet with ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... eventually find its way back to the universal source from which it came, just as water must find its own level. The present status of everything that we observe to-day is purely temporary: we are looking at one picture of a cosmic cinema film that stretches on to infinity. Just because we see only one static picture of a process which truly never stops moving, so we get a view of life that contains much of delusion. We have heard a Doctor of Music state in public his opinion that the age of the composition of musical masterpieces was for ever passed: so will others ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... he would be relieved of every incumbrance that beset him. Education was looked upon as an end and not as an agency. As his friends were destined to disappointment, the Negro himself was doomed to humiliation and chagrin. Education creates as many problems as it solves. It is both static and dynamical. When Professor Straton says, therefore, that education has not solved the race problem, he utters a truism. But if he means to imply that it has not had a wholesome effect upon the life of the Negro, his conclusion ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... thoughtful person it is the method of the man which constitutes his real greatness, that power of insight by which he solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever and of hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all static and hydrostatic science to this day. And yet on that very question of the lever the great mind of Aristotle babbles—neither sees the thing itself, nor the way towards seeing it. But since Archimedes spoke, the thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. There is something to me very ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... 1887, her great social popularity had not begun. She was, I now know, already near sixty, but it never occurred to me to consider her age. She possessed a curious static quality, a perennial youthfulness. Every one must have observed how like Watts' picture of her at twenty she still was at eighty-six. This was not preserved by any arts or fictile graces. She rather affected, prematurely, the dress and appearance of an elderly ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one. Experience ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... another way of saying that all things proceed from a common source, that Life is One, that Mind and Body derive from the same source, that energy is so much an integral of matter, that in the final analysis matter is only static energy; since the atom is made of molecules, and molecules of electrons, and electrons of electricity, ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower

... stunned by his arrest, and attempted suicide; Connor believes he can induce him to tell the locations of the other relay stations. Lutz had the wireless antennae strung along the ceilings in the upper corridors of his house. He declares they have just perfected a method to overcome static interference." ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... down and Mrs. Northover happy and content once more, Mr. Legg cast her into much doubt and uncertainty. Indeed his attitude so unexpected, awoke a measure of dismay. Life, that Nelly hoped was becoming static and comfortable again, suddenly grew highly dynamic. Changes stared her in the face and that was done ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... during the last fifty years wealth has increased four times as fast as the population. Malthus, of course, did not foresee the inventions and agricultural progress of the nineteenth century. Still, it is evident that his theory is a static one and cannot be made to ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... had considered the electric discharge to be instantaneous; but it was afterwards found that its velocity depended on the nature of the conductor, its resistance, and its electro-static capacity. Faraday showed, for example, that its velocity in a submarine wire, coated with insulator and surrounded with water, is only 144,000 miles a second, or still less. Wheatstone's device of the revolving ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... pantheistic and monistic. In Aristotle matter is not created by or derived from God, who is external to the universe. Plotinus derives everything from God, who through his powers or activities pervades all. The different gradations of being are static in Aristotle, dynamic in Plotinus. Plotinus assumes an absolute cause, which he calls the One and the Good. This is the highest and is at the top of the scale of existence. It is superior to Being as well as to Thought, for the latter imply a duality whereas unity is prior to and above ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... is the principle which tends to order; Individuality to freedom. The desire of order is the animating sentiment of conservatism. The love of freedom is the vital essence of progress. Unity is the static, and Individuality the motic force of human society. Both are inherent in the nature of things, and equally important as elements of a true social organization. Unity is allied to the affections, which are synthetic in their character; Individuality, to the intellect, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... convention, and checks the free representation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various and full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery cannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countless suggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real world presents to ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... wilfulness and the more static obstinacy of these former, there is an instinctive bond; whereas the tolerant and colourless cleverness of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... fired again, and again the robot reacted. It seemed familiar somehow. Then he remembered the robot on the river bank, jiggling and swaying for seconds after each shot. "Of course!" He cursed himself for missing the obvious. "The blaster static blanks out radio transmission from the computer for a few seconds. They even ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik

... after all something of a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M. Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how great may be ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... of red. A flame of fear shot through her, and a first thought of fire, but even before she could rise she saw it was static, this crimson gash across the blackness, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... said of a certain eminent preacher that his logic was on fire. It might be said of Booker Washington that his statistics were on fire. He marshalled them in such a way that they were dynamic and stirring instead of static and paralyzing, as we all know them to our sorrow. It so happened that Mr. Washington had never before been in southwestern Georgia. After his speech one old farmer was heard to say as he shook his head: "I don't understan' it! Booker T. Washington ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... High-frequency or static electricity sometimes works wonders in the hands of a specialist, but the electric batteries, medical coils, finger-rings and body-belts so persistently ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays. Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate; nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... always their practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hedone—the pleasure of the ideal now—is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... either the one or the other. As in mathematics, all motion can be expressed either under formulas of initial motion (mechanics), or of continuous motion (kinematics), or as all force can be expressed as either static or as dynamic force; in either case the other form assuming a merely hypothetical or negative position; so the logic of quality is competent to represent all existence as ideal or as material, all truth as absolute ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... Master Freddy would get on the back of her chair, and Miss Gusta would lie down on the rug, and never stir for all she could say to them, but only laugh at her.—To be sure!' And then auntie would take a sip at her rum and water, and sit considering old times like a static. And I sat as if all my head was one great ear, and I never spoke a word. And auntie began again. 'The way I came to know so much about her was this. Nobody, you see, took any notice or care of her. For the children ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... his discovery of Magneto-electricity may be ranked with that of the pile by Volta, this new discovery, may almost stand beside that of Definite Combining Proportions in Chemistry. He passed on to Static Electricity—its Conduction, Induction, and Mode of Propagation. He discovered and illustrated the principle of Inductive Capacity; and, turning to theory, he asked himself how electrical attractions and repulsions are transmitted. Are they, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... moving, so that his body did not offer a static target. He concentrated his attention on Dave, throwing shot after shot at him. That he would kill his enemy Clanton never had a doubt. It was firmly fixed in his mind that he had been sent as the ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... retardation in the velocity of the transmitted electricity. This retardation is not due to the length of the path which the electric current has to traverse, since it does not take place with a conductor equally long, insulated in the air. It arises, as Faraday has demonstrated, from a static reaction, which is determined by the introduction of a current into a conductor well insulated, but surrounded outside its insulating coating by a conducting body, such as sea-water or moist ground, or even simply by the metallic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... incommunicable knowledge of God received in contemplation" (Dom John Chapman). The revelation sought for was not so much a dogmatic revelation as a revelation of the processes of "transmutation" of Rebirth, of Apotheosis or "Deification." Its aim was dynamic rather than static. But while the followers of the Gnosis, both Christian and Hellenistic, would have agreed that the direct knowledge of God is incommunicable to others, they undoubtedly seem to have held that there were what may be described as intermediate or preparatory ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh

... dynamic, not static; not a condition but a movement. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow" is its end or justification. It is a rush of forces, an evolution towards greater activities and higher adjustment, the growth of a stability which shall be ever more unstable. This onward motion is recognized in the pessimistic ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan

... generation," says Dr. Worcester in his Preface, "men have been groping for a theology which should approach the old mysteries, God, evil, the soul and immortality from the point of view of modern scientific and philosophic thought. The old static aspect of the universe has been supplemented by the dynamic. The old transcendent conception of God has yielded to the immanent. The thought of God as mere ruler and judge is no longer sufficient for men's religious needs. Science has discovered God at ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... establishing a catena of patristic and orthodox authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently infallible, as long as the Church remained undivided. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... inactive. But behind the army were the waiting millions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches might gradually have become a mere condition of thought, an accepted limitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures. The danger was that such a war—static, dogged, uneventful—might gradually cramp instead of enlarging the mood of the lookers-on. Conscription, of course, was there to minimize this danger. Every one was sharing alike in the glory and the woe. But the glory was not of a kind to penetrate or ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton



Words linked to "Static" :   electrostatic, disturbance, unfavorable judgment, nonmoving, criticism, unchangeable, unmoving, radio noise, noise, interference



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