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Fluidity   Listen
noun
Fluidity  n.  The quality of being fluid or capable of flowing; a liquid, aeriform, or gaseous state; opposed to solidity. "It was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fluidity" Quotes from Famous Books



... direction if it is impelled more in that direction than in any other, each particle of it is impelled equally in all directions. It is the perfect equilibrium that keeps the particles from changing their places, and fluidity has caused the equilibrium. In like manner when labor and capital can create and get just as much in one place as in another, they are attracted as strongly in one direction as in another and therefore do not move. A young man ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... though at present restricted to the tropics. In his last essay, Epoques de la Nature (1778), he claims that the earth's history may be divided into epochs, from the earliest to the present time. The first epoch was that of fluidity, of incandescence, when the earth and the planets assumed their form; the second, of cooling; the third, when the waters covered the earth, and volcanoes began to be active; the fourth, that of the retreat of the seas, and the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... sincerity and depth of soul. Again one may note Turgenev's method for rehabilitating Shubin in our eyes; Shubin is simply made to criticise Stahov; the thing is done in a few seemingly careless lines, but these lines lay bare Shubin's strength and weakness, the fluidity of his nature. The reader who does not see the art which underlies almost every line of On the Eve is merely paying the highest tribute to that art; as often the clear waters of a pool conceal its surprising depth. Taking Shubin's character as an ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev

... consummate artist to sing with complete effect,—"Turn ye, turn ye—why will ye die?" The marvel truly is that we are already so dead, so immured and petrified in our hard self-satisfaction, when we might so easily develop the freedom, fluidity, and delicacy of fine response to these tenuous intimations of our own spirituality and high destiny. Here we live, as some writer has aptly said, on top of a gold mine, and the tragedy is that we are ignorant of the gold. We live, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures taken to secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred even after as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retaining unbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured over the bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all their pores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening around them, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged for more than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keeping to which ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... him almost painfully. Even this momentary possession of pure isolation and fluidity seemed to her so terribly desirable that she felt herself as if damned, out ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... very improbable. Each of them, accordingly, broke in its turn into several masses, which were obviously endowed with a movement of rotation coinciding in direction with the common movement of revolution, and which, in consequence of their fluidity, assumed spheroidal forms. In order, next, that one of those spheroids may absorb all the others belonging to the same ring, it is sufficient to suppose it to have a mass greater than that of any other ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... with forceps. Pus may become very thick and gummy from the administration of morphin. Opiates do not lessen pus formation, but they do lessen the normal secretions that ordinarily increase the quantity and fluidity of the pus. When to this is added the dessicating effect of the air inhaled through the cannula, unmoistened by the upper air-passages, the secretions may be so thick as to form crusts and plugs that are equivalent to foreign bodies and require removal with forceps. Diphtheritic membrane ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... Ease, fluidity, grace, imagination, energy, earnestness, mark his work. No wonder is it that Franklin said, "Others can rule, many can fight, but only Paine can write for us the English tongue." And Jefferson, himself a great writer, was constantly, for many years, sending to Paine manuscript for criticism ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... common at that period in the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata, infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that the only way ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... and putrefactive, is the natural decomposition of animal and vegetable matters, to which a certain degree of fluidity is necessary; for where vegetable and animal substances are dry, as sugar and glue for instance, and are kept so, no ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger

... essential affinities with his contemporaries, who has been accurately characterized as the "tres exceptionnel, tres curieux, tres solitaire M. Claude Debussy"? One is struck, first of all, in savoring his art, by its extreme fluidity, its vagueness of contour, its lack of obvious and definite outline. It is cloudlike, evanescent, impalpable; it passes before the aural vision (so to speak) like a floating and multicolored mist; it is shifting, fugitive, intangible, atmospheric. Its beauty ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... gave me a bill of exchange payable at sight in eight days on M. Genaro de Carlo. I told him that the ingredients were lead and bismuth; the first, combining with mercury, and the second giving to the whole the perfect fluidity necessary to strain it through the chamois leather. The Greek went out to try the amalgam—I do not know where, and I dined alone, but toward evening he came back, looking very disconsolate, as ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... volcanoes show any trace of molten lava. There can hardly be tides on the moon, but there may be tides in the moon. It may be that the interior of the moon is still hot enough to retain an appreciable degree of fluidity, and if so, the tidal control would still retain the moon in its grip; but the time will probably come, if it have not come already, when the moon will be cold to the centre—cold as the temperature of space. If the materials of the moon were what a mathematician would call ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... half of the century continues the same tendencies with a notable development in the fluidity of the language and an increasing interest in popular poetry. Gomez Manrique (d. 1491?) was another warrior of a literary turn whose best verses are of a severely moral nature. His nephew JORGE MANRIQUE (1440-1478) wrote a single poem of the highest merit; his scanty other works are forgotten. The ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... which hold for the one may be applied to the other. Likeness is vanishing unlikeness, passivity arrested activity, evil a lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals men with infinitely little reason, plants animals with vanishing consciousness, fluidity a lower degree of solidity, etc. In the whole world similarity and correspondence rule, and it is everywhere the same as here—between apparent opposites there is a distinction in degree merely, and hence, analogy. In the macrocosm ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... consider the means of thinning the blood, when it has been deprived, by too profuse transpiration in hot, dry winds, of its aqueous particles, and rendered thick and viscid. Water would easily supply this want of fluidity if it were capable of mingling with the blood when in this state; acid matter cannot be ultimately combined with the blood when the body is in this state. In order to find a menstruum by which water may be rendered capable of combining ultimately with the blood, of remaining long in combination ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... philosophy has been Darwinism. Indeed, the Pragmatic is the only philosophizing which has completely assimilated Evolution. The 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 ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... food is reduced to a state of fluidity, the pyloric orifice of the stomach is unclosed, and it is thrust onwards through the alimentary canal, receiving in the duodenum the secretions of the liver and pancreas, after which it yields to the lacteals its nutrient portion, and the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... distended and the heart's action more labored, paracentesis must be done. The point at which the aspirating needle should be inserted into the pericardium depends somewhat on the conditions in each individual case. It is often best to insert an exploratory needle first. This will determine the fluidity and character of the exudate. If pus is found, a more radical surgical procedure than simple paracentesis must be done immediately. The point of puncture for aspiration most frequently chosen is in the fourth or fifth intercostal space, ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... gleams and subtle suggestions that thrill moment by moment, and disappear as soon as seen, only to be followed by equally beautiful, enchanting and surprising effects, and with it all, is a mobility, a fluidity, a rippling, flowing, waving, tossing series of effects that belong only to enchanted water—water kissed into glory by the sun and moon, lured into softest beauty by the glamour of the stars, and etheralized by the quiet and subtle charms of the Milky Way, and of the Suns, Comets and Meteors ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... General Morphology suffers a good deal from the arid, schematic, almost scholastic manner of exposition adopted. Haeckel's Prussian mania for organisation, for absolute distinctions, for iron-bound formalism, is here given full scope. A treatment less adequate to the variety, fluidity and changeableness of living things ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... arguments made into a synthesis; and this collaboration of several concordant activities ends in a conclusion which can never represent the truth, but only the probable truth. The study of the laws of the mind shows us too clearly, in fact, their fluidity with regard to the laws of nature for us not to accept probabilism. There exists no certitude—only very varied degrees of probability. Daily practice contents itself with a very low degree of probability; judicial ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... destructive. It chiefly originated in a fundamental mistake of physical principles. About the time that India tea was introduced to Europe, a grievous error crept into the practice of medical professors; they falsely imagined that health could not be more promoted than by increasing the fluidity of the blood. This opinion once established, it is no wonder that mankind, with one accord, adopted the infusion of India tea, which was then a novelty to Europe, as the best means of obtaining the above effect. By the advice of Bentikoe chiefly was the pernicious custom of drinking warm ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith

... I say nothing of the climate of tropical India as a contributory cause. The way in which Hindu learning was and is transmitted, is itself almost sufficient explanation of the independence and the fluidity of religious doctrine. Hinduism has no recognised Theological Faculties as training schools for the priesthood. Buddhist monasteries of the early Christian centuries we do read of, institutions corresponding to our universities, to which crowds of students resorted, and where ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... one attitude possible. No man of business could resent the recording of his considered words, but the tablet and pencil and the quietly bent red head were extraordinary obstacles to the fluidity of eloquence. Rosenthal found his arguments less ready and his methods modifying themselves. The outlook narrowed itself. When he returned to his office and talked the situation over with his partner, he sat and bit ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... which these two opposing conditions prevail there will be no hard and fast line; but with the downward increase of fluidity there will be a gradual failure of the mechanical conditions and an increase of the hydrostatic. Thus while the uppermost layers of the crust may be transported to the full amount of the crustal displacement acting from the south (speaking still of the Alps) deeper down there will be a ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... obvious instance of the perils of consistency in the world of business. But, quite apart from this, nothing but fluidity of judgment can ever lead the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... with a rush. Before him rose the high peaks of the binding mountains, high, impassable, black peaks, towering like a wall of rock. It was the wall of the world, and he could not scale it. Before him stretched the curve of the southern sea, in a crescent, but for all its fluidity, as impassable as the backing wall of rock. Between the two he was hemmed in, on a narrow strip of land, enclosed between the mountain wall and the curving reach of sea. He and all his futile interests lay within that narrow strip ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... thought and secretion go together. Degradation of mind and corruption of the body are concomitants. There is a very close affinity between mental and moral perversion and physical prostitution, of which fact too many are unconscious. Nervous influence preserves the fluidity of the blood and facilitates its circulation, for it appears that simple arrestment of this influence favors the coagulation of the blood in the vessels; clots being found in their trunks within a few minutes after the brain and spinal marrow are broken down. Habitual constipation is the source ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... three feet high in a single night, be accounted for by radiation? It appears to me to be very easily accounted for by supposing that the water in the deep above was so quietly cooled down as to retain its fluidity until the shaking it got on flowing over the weir suddenly produced congelation. I think that radiation would not go on at the ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... When they thought they painted water, in fact, they were like "those happier children, sliding on dry ground," and had not the chance of wetting a foot. Water, too, is a thing to be anatomized, a sort of rib-fluidity. The moving, transparent water, in shallow and in depth, of Vandervelde and Backhuysen, is not the least like water; they are men who "libelled the sea." Many of our moderns—Stanfield in particular—seem naturally web-footed; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... present, and where the remedies by which the cure is effected, have no relation to such causes? Again, if the discharge depended upon a mechanical cause, the water should in every case be of a uniform fluidity, and the progress of its accumulation likewise uniform; so that the operation of tapping should have no tendency to induce a more rapid refilling of the cavity. Yet, the contrary of all this is a subject of daily observation. In addition to this, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... Cavallo, and dividing before reaching the Observatory flowed to the right and to the left—the stream which flowed to the north very soon reached the plain, and before night came on had partially destroyed the small town of Massa di Somma. One of the peculiarities of this eruption was the great fluidity of the lava; another was the never-ceasing thundering of the mountain. During that day we observed several violent explosions in the great stream of lava: we thought from the enormous volumes of black smoke emitted on these occasions that new craters had ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... water easily evaporates, and in case of the accident of even a moderate elevation of temperature, it would be expelled from the joint entirely. Mr. Girard proposes, therefore, to employ the water to act, first, by its pressure, to lift the Journal to be lubricated; and secondly, by its fluidity, to form a liquid bed or cushion between the journal and its box, on which the journal may rest in its revolution, without touching the metal ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... West. There were farms in Simcoe county now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he saw the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common ground between the farmer and the labour class. Working in his own fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the farmers ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... The fluidity of his own dual nature, and recoil from the Aruna temptation, inclined him peculiarly to idealise the clear-eyed, self-poised Western qualities so diversely personified in Lance and this compelling girl. Yet emphatically he did not love her. He knew the great reality too well to delude himself ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... piled on one another, exhibiting the sinuosities of the calcareous rock of the higher Alps. These enormous ledges, sometimes horizontal, sometimes inclined and undulating, are indicative of the ancient fluidity of the whole mass, and of the combination of several deranging causes, which have determined the direction of each flow. The top of the circular wall exhibits those curious ramifications which ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... is on a similar basis that there is a science of rigid dynamics, with elasticity and fluidity excluded; and thus also can there be a hydrodynamics in which the consequences of ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... composer was well versed in old and ancient music; he knew all the old scales, eight in number, and used them in his compositions with compelling charm. The influence of the old Gregorian chant has given his music a certain fluidity, free rhythm, a refinement, richness and variety peculiarly ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... many features which I have indicated as pointing to a former fluidity of the earth may be explained here. We shall see in the course of this work that the mountain chains and other great irregularities of the earth's surface appear at a late stage in its development. Even as we find them to-day, they are ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world—making the stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease—above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill,—has produced a version of the 'Odyssey' much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and which is delightful to ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie

... method, apparently, has been to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable flavour of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by the fluidity and freedom ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... denied that the astronomers and geologists have made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed, that such a body as the moon represents a stage ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter

... affirm. It may be said that this comes to much the same thing as if they had formally decided in the last or neutral sense. It is not so. This illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away, breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men can never walk as confident ...
— On Compromise • John Morley



Words linked to "Fluidity" :   fluidness, runniness, thinness, fluid, changeability, liquidity



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