"Imponderable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the present century the reigning physical philosophy held to the existence of what were called imponderables. The phenomena of heat were explained as due to an imponderable substance called "caloric," which ordinary matter could absorb and emit. A hot body was one which had absorbed an imponderable substance. It was, therefore, no heavier than before, but it possessed ability to do work proportional to the amount absorbed. ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... formulated with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling his laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... inherent qualities of inorganic matter. The ordinary chemical affinities of different substances may draw them together into such compounds as albumen and fibrin, which are the proximate principles of organic tissues. The action of electricity, heat, light, or some other mysterious imponderable agent, on these proximate principles, may produce globules, or germinal vesicles. These germs, multiplying themselves by fissiparous generation, will constitute a stock of animals of a low type, such as a tribe of infusory animalcules. Then "this simplest and most ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western university, he had entered the celluloid ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the glands of internal secretions as an interlocking directorate presiding over all the functions of the organism is still exceedingly meagre. As yet, we seem to be knocking at the portals of the chemistry of the imponderable. There are holes in the bronze doors, and we glimpse the unfathomable distances of unexplored regions. But we do see something, and we do glimpse a beginning. Already the outlines of a differential anatomy, and a different physiology and a differential psychology, which will explain ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn's nearness—not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the languages spoken by Europeans, in their airy sounds, are more permanent monuments than granite or enduring brass. Stamped on these light, imponderable words are marks of a gray antiquity going back to times before Herodotus, before Moses and the book of Genesis, before the Vedas in India, before the Zendavesta in Persia. It has been proved, first, that nearly all the languages of Europe belong to one linguistic family, and therefore that ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... plan for the "man of commerce" who would cross from one region to the other, with his "assorted cargo,"[344] for in that cargo were the destinies of two sections and his greatest commerce was to consist in the exchange of imponderable ideas. The ideal which inspired Douglas never found nobler expression, than in these words with which he replied to Webster's slighting reference to ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... generis', is a miracle in the philosophic sense. Thus: the corporeal ponderable hand and arm raised with no other known causative antecedent, but a thought, a pure act of an immaterial essentially invisible imponderable will, is a miracle for a reflecting mind. Add the words, 'praeter experientiam': and we have the definition of a miracle in the popular, practical, and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. Sublimed into imponderable vapour, I mingle and am lost in the endless foods of those vast globular volumes of vaporous mists, which roll upon their flaming orbits ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... professional expression for a ship that is stranded in gentle circumstances. But the feeling is more as if the ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a surprising sensation. It is as if your feet had been caught in an imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once. This sensation lasts only a second, for even while you stagger something seems to turn over in your head, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Around me was a humming, glowing intensity of tiny sounds and infinitely small, infinitely rapid vibrations. The whole room grew luminous. The Robot, seated now at a table, showed for a moment as thin as an apparition. All this room—Mary lying beside me, the mechanism, myself—all this was imponderable, intangible, unreal. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousnesses. At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence—or imponderable, I think—that pervades the twentieth century, we have not the superstition that we are offering anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage, curator, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... organized, to which admission should be free. In similar lectures the great military problems might be discussed from the standpoint of military philosophy, and the hearers might gain some insight into the legitimacy of war, its relations to politics, the co-operation of material and imponderable forces, the importance of free personality under the pressure of necessary phenomena, sharp contradictions and violent opposition, as well as into the duties of a commander viewed ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... that the place of this block ought to be in the magnetic axis, as a sort of gigantic calamite, from whence the imponderable fluid whose currents made an inexhaustible accumulator set up at the confines of the world should issue. Our compass could not have enabled us to determine whether the marvel before our eyes really was at the magnetic pole of the southern regions. All I can say is, that its needle staggered ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... endowed; nor had it been hardened and coarsened beyond power to allure. There was no visible imperfection to detract from its charm; but, gazing on her, Whitmore felt something lacking, something spiritual, imponderable, yet immediately detected and missed. And this impression ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... imponderable force of the intellect to the problem and check with you later. Now, Gene, about the proposed Galactic Service, the Council, and so on. What is the reaction? Yours, ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... beloved of heavenly mothers; and they came running from the house, their golden hair shining like aureoles about their eager faces. Their sandaled feet hardly touched the ground, and, indeed, could they have been weighed at that moment, it surely had been found that they had become almost imponderable because of the ethereal lightness of their spirits. Their arms were outstretched; their eyes burning ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... been recognised as such till quite recently—not till that medium, the vibrations of which cause the manifestations of mediumistic energy, was recognised. In the same way that the phenomena of light were inexplicable until the existence of an imponderable substance—an ether—was recognised, so mediumistic phenomena seemed mysterious until the now fully established fact was recognised, that between the particles of ether there exists another still more rarified imponderable ...
— Fruits of Culture • Leo Tolstoy
... therefore the wisest of all the world's sages stands accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and understand the true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is far greater. Indeed, it is 'life atoms' that a man in a blind passion throws ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... went forth where she would be, the spell of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through the winding galleries—silent, haunted—to the great staircase, and below into the crowded court. And when they ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... beside her blood-dark seas, Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, Screams in her travail, and the planets hark Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades, Wrenching the night's imponderable arc. ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... settled either, had it not happened, after a long time and much discussion, that someone accidentally weighed a fish, when it was found there was no difference. The question of expression, however, could not be decided in that way, expression being imponderable; and it was pretty generally acknowledged that the truth could not be ascertained and must therefore remain a matter of opinion. But that did not stop the talk. Once, indeed, someone declared positively ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... understand the world. The root of the evil is that a whole range of the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know nothing of intellectual wealth. And yet the real wealth of a nation consists in its imponderable possessions—in those things wherein one man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not proved incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics. An inexhaustible treasure is freely open to all who have passed through a good course of mental training, a treasure ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... outstretched hands. Yet if he lit a candle it had no power to stir its flame; yes, while it still blew sharp upon him the flame of the candle did not move. Then the wind would cease, and within him the intangible, imponderable power would arise, and the voices would speak like the far, far, murmur of a stream, and the thoughts which he could not weigh or interpret would soak into his being like some strange dew, and, soft, soft as falling snow, invisible feet ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... evolution, a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... him, of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... convinced by her reading, as well as by messages in writing, believes that the spirits of her dead are trying to communicate with her, and so sits night after night terrified yet hoping, waiting for further instructions from the imponderable ones.'" Britt turned a few pages rapidly. "Listen to this. Here is the key to the old man's change of heart: 'To-night the child began to speak to me in the voice of a man. Hoarse words rose from deep in her throat, a voice and ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... sun in parallel lines, and strikes the globe and its superficial ethereal envelope just as we have shown its action on the atmosphere; but in this last case the magnetic equator is not a great circle, neither can we suppose its effects to be an accumulation of a fluid which is imponderable at points 90d from the plane passing through the centre of the earth and sun, and coincident with the plane of the central meridian, and a depressing effect on that meridian. Its precise influence must be, from the nature of the cause, to ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... conclusion—a conclusion which is neither exclusively my own, nor very new—we shall find a certain satisfaction in watching the discussions of physicists on the essence of matter, on the nature of force and of energy, and on the relations of ponderable and imponderable matter. We all know how hot is the fight raging on this question. At the present time it is increasing in intensity, in consequence of the disturbance imported into existing theories by the new discoveries ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... stupid convention in it. It was fatuous to miss so little the fine perceptions one didn't have: so far from its showing experience it showed a sad simplicity not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn't know what old frumps his father might have frequented—the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point suggestive ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Southern noons. If no ghost resided in the melancholy ruin hard by, there might well be some imponderable hostile essence afloat in the still air of midday. Anything, he felt, could happen at this unearthly hour. The wildest follies might be committed at the bidding of this ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... deep-caved southern sea, With lifted hand and voice of gathered sound, And echoes in his tossing quiver bound And loosed from height into immensity; Yet of his freedom tires, remaining free. —Moulding and remoulding imponderable cloud, Uplifting skiey archipelagian isles Sunnier than ocean's, blue seas and white isles Aflush with blossom where late sunlight glowed;— Still of his freedom tiring yet still free, Homelessly roaming ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... was sitting on his lonely porch, twisting his dextrous cigarettes, and brooding darkly on the mischances that had overtaken him of late. It was hot and steamy in the valley, no stars were visible; the known world, muffled in a close and imponderable cloak, was without any sign of life, of motion, of variety. Gordon heard footsteps descending heavily from the road, a bulky shape loomed up before him and disclosed the features of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... issuing orders—a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the imponderable, ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... might have been to him. Wherein lay the real difficulty of those sacrifices will perhaps hereafter be explained by those who knew the secret of the political circumstances and the personal character of the men with whom he was brought in contact; and who would not think of weighing imponderable sacrifices on the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... entertained the opinion that chemical combination is an inter-penetration of the particles of different kinds of matter, and that all matter is susceptible of infinite division. This has proved to be altogether a mistake. If matter were infinitely divisible in this sense, its particles must be imponderable, and a million of such molecules could not weigh more than an infinitely small one. But the particles of that imponderable matter, which, striking upon the retina, give us the sensation of light, are not in a mathematical ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... condemning, the true meaning of the figurative statement? Why should we scoff before we understand? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvium a something, a stuff, or a substance, invisible, and imponderable though it be? If the learned authors of "The Unseen Universe" object to light, heat and electricity being regarded merely as imponderables, and show that each of these phenomena has as much claim to be recognized as an objective reality as matter ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH{3} and H{2}O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this imponderable dust. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... evident from the fact that, though he is often honored as the creator of the dynamical view of nature, he rejected actio in distans as absurd, and deemed it indispensable to assume some "cause" of gravity (consisting, probably, in the impact of imponderable material particles). It was his disciples who first ventured to proclaim gravity as the universal force of matter, as the "primary quality of all bodies" (so Roger Cotes in the preface to the second edition ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... themselves in the concrete duration, in which alone there is true generation and not only a composition of parts. It is true that the creation and annihilation of which they speak concern the movement or the energy, and not the imponderable medium through which the energy and the movement are supposed to circulate. But what can remain of matter when you take away everything that determines it, that is to say, just energy and movement themselves? The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... has no grounds for supposing that light is in any way absorbed or destroyed merely by its passage through the "ether," that imponderable medium which is believed to transmit the luminous radiations through space. This of course is tantamount to saying that all the direct light from all the stars should reach us, excepting that little which is absorbed in its passage through our own atmosphere. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... reflected chatter, was his son like? What would he be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of glass. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation. It was easier to remain in the dancing class than to be sent out in an agony of revolt and ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... declared flying impossible to man, yet today men fly. Lavoisier was right, no doubt. Combustion is the combination of an element with oxygen. He proved that with his chemist's balance. Yet how did he prove that some imponderable element does not leap from wood in flame? As well say that when a man dies the spirit has not left the body because he weighs the same. Watching the falling embers of the Yule log leap into flames before they turn gray, I am apt to think that the intuition of the alchemists touched a truth ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... clusters of atoms in iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than that of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... and that you know that I am Steering," smiled the visitor, sinking into a chair adaptably, though he realised that, for two men who had never seen each other before, the meeting had been unusual. He also realised that, off somewhere in the sphere of imponderable influences, the effect when his hand clasped the big man's hand had been exactly that of the ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Now here, now there, and back again, her feet scarce touching the floor, her loose skirt, held out between her dainty fingers, resembling wings, she swam through the air, up and down the room of the old plantation house, as though she were indeed the creature of an element wherein all was imponderable, light and free of hampering influences. Darting, nodding, beckoning, courtesying to something that she saw—it must have moved you to applause, had you seen Miss Lady dance! You might have been restrained by ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... then, leaving their miraculous hours out of the account—and, being incommensurable, imponderable, they couldn't be included in an inventory—their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to revisit Arcady, to seize a golden day that looked neither toward the past nor toward the future, complete in ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... his canoe out of water, and bonnets himself with it. He wears it on head and shoulders, around the impassable spot. Below the rough water, he gets into his elongated chapeau and floats away. Without such vessel, agile, elastic, imponderable, and transmutable, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot would be no thoro'fares for human beings. Musquash might dabble, chips might drift, logs might turn somersets along their lonely currents; but never voyager, gentle or bold, could speed through brilliant perils, gladdening the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... around the divine hand which guides them, have no other reason for existence, for movement, and for duration, than to compel the acknowledgment, fear, admiration, and adoration of God, by that supreme sense, that sense superior to all other senses, that sense imponderable and impalpable, invisible yet beholding all things,—that ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... be a much less consequential discovery, did it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... for their volatile offspring to subject her to either of the schemes of the equally unscrupulous philosophers. Indeed the most complete knowledge of the laws of nature would have been unserviceable in her case; for it was impossible to classify her. She was a fifth imponderable body, sharing all the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... physics has been marked by bold hypotheses dealing with imponderable forces, and by experiments disclosing hidden properties of matter. The hypothetical ether has been as fruitful in the liberation of thought as the demonstration of the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea. The charm of these first bidders for the year's favor is neither in the ethereal texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed, blood-stained, ancient leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... however, regarding their use. They generate a ray of almost infinite frequency, much higher than the disintegrating ray the Jovians use. Instead of resolving materials into light and energy, these devices will absolutely destroy the ether, that imponderable substance which permeates and fills ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... an enormous quantity of papers and photographs. On one of the papers he read: "New differential electroscopic condenser. Fundamental properties of substance intermediary between ponderable matter and imponderable ether." Strange irony of fate that the professor's precious papers should be restored to him at the very time when an attempt was being made to deprive him of his daughter's life! What are papers worth ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... preparatory to planting them with bulbs for spring blossoming. The keen, pungent scent of the newly-turned earth hung in the humid air, as, mingling with it—a less agreeable incense—did the reek of the mud-flats. On the right the twin ilex trees formed a mass of soft imponderable gloom. Above and behind them the sky was like smoked crystal. The lawn lay open and vacant. Upon it nothing hopped or crept. The garden birds had eaten their suppers long since, and sought snug bosky perching places for the night. Even the unsleeping ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... leaven, ferment, barm[obs3], yeast. lighter-than-air balloon, helium balloon, hydrogen balloon, hot air balloon. convection, thermal draft, thermal. V. be light &c. adj.; float, rise, swim, be buoyed up. render light &c. adj.; lighten, leaven. Adj. light, subtile, airy; imponderous[obs3], imponderable; astatic[obs3], weightless, ethereal, sublimated; gossamery; suberose[obs3], suberous[obs3]; uncompressed, volatile; buoyant, floating &c. v.; portable. light as a feather, light as a thistle, light as air; lighter than air; rise like a balloon, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... helium balloon, hydrogen balloon, hot air balloon. convection, thermal draft, thermal. V. be light &c adj.; float, rise, swim, be buoyed up. render light &c adj.; lighten, leaven. Adj. light, subtile, airy; imponderous^, imponderable; astatic^, weightless, ethereal, sublimated; gossamery; suberose^, suberous^; uncompressed, volatile; buoyant, floating &c v.; portable. light as a feather, light as a thistle, light as air; lighter than air; rise like a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... you see, man, that an idea is something, yet it is not a substance. Thought, which is so potent a factor in this world, is not a substance, yet it cannot be called nothing. It is a condition—it is the result of brain-atoms in action. Electricity is sometimes described as an 'invisible imponderable fluid,' but that is not quite correct, because a fluid is a substance. It is a better definition to say that electricity is a manifestation of energy—a result of ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude—perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... forces, which regarded them as material entities, may now be regarded as abandoned. Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, etc., which have hitherto been considered under the self-contradictory designation of "Imponderable Elements," or immaterial matter, are now, by common consent, beginning to be ranked as pure forces; having passed through their material stage, they are regarded as kindred and convertible forms of motion in matter itself. The old notions, that light consisted of moving corpuscles, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... to the astronomer is delicate enough to determine the weight of a comet. All that we can accomplish in any circumstances is to weigh one heavenly body in comparison with another. Comets seem to be almost imponderable when estimated by such robust masses as those of the earth, or any of the other great planets. Of course, it will be understood that when we say the weight of a comet is inappreciable, we mean with regard to the other bodies of our system. Perhaps no one now doubts that a ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... understand that I felt I had the man's soul naked before me. An imponderable hand plucked away my ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Queen Sylvia Tereu, and comforted her. Then, finding her quite willing to be comforted, Jurgen sat for a while upon the dark steps, with one arm still about Queen Sylvia. The effect of the potion had evidently worn off, because Jurgen found himself to be composed no longer of cool imponderable vapor, but of the warmest and hardest sort of flesh everywhere. But probably the effect of the wine which Jurgen had drunk earlier in the evening had not worn off: for now Jurgen began to talk wildishly in the dark, about the necessity of his, in some way, avenging the injury inflicted upon his ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... one particular woman. . . . But the mood was ephemeral; he had been too close to her a moment before. Moreover, she was still unpossessed. . . . She seemed to take shape slowly in the white whirling snow, as white and imponderable. . . . A Nordic princess drifting northward over her steppes. . . . God! Would he ever get her? . . . If he did not it would be because one of them was qualifying ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Electricity, Prof. O. J. Lodge warns us, quite rightly, that perhaps, after all, there is no such thing as electricity—that electrification and electric energy may be terms to be kept for convenience; but if electricity as a term be held to imply a force, a fluid, an imponderable, or a thing which could be described by some one who knew enough, then it has no degree of probability, for spinning atomic magnets seem capable of developing all the electrical phenomena we meet. It must be thought of as a condition ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... greatly changed. It frightens me now to think that I might have missed the Washington life, and Whitman,... and much else that has counted for so much with me. What I might have gained is, in the scale, like imponderable air. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... considered by most philosophers as a real substance, immediately emanating from the sun, and from all luminous bodies, from which it is projected in right lines with prodigious velocity. Light, however, being imponderable, it cannot be confined and examined by itself; and therefore it is to the effects it produces on other bodies, rather than to its immediate nature, that we ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... professes to do away with the very idea of God, takes these factors for granted; and yet I suppose he would object to being told that he believes in the doctrine of the Trinity. But he does, for he begins by assuming infinite space filled to the farthest with matter ponderable and imponderable, and forthwith proceeds to weigh, measure, and divide the latter as though it were finite! Here are two terms of the doctrine of the Trinity at once. We get the third as soon as Professor Haeckel sets to work to explain the cosmic process, for as ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... perfect are the animals! How perfect is my Soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids are perfect; Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and surely they yet ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... insight rather than orderly processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier. The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous and imponderable forms—which is the tendency of modern science—to render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... contact with its pasturage, the green cabbage-leaf. Here, there, in its immediate neighbourhood, each grub emits from its spinning glands short cables so slender that it takes an attentive lens to catch a glimpse of them. This is enough to ensure the equilibrium of the almost imponderable atom. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... must be broken up by a coup d'etat. This was easily effected by redistributing the seats and arranging the scholars according to classes, so that a mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious imponderable, should find himself between two non-conductors, in the shape of small boys of studious habits. It was managed quietly enough, in such a plausible sort of way that its motive was not thought of. But its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... suggest the future—these, and these only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials; but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions, the mind. Did we call the latter imponderable? Ah, let us rather proclaim that the slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera of passions arous'd by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite blocks ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... delights to believe, I may quote the story of the Prince of Huai-nan, second century B.C., who is said, after years of patient experiment, to have finally discovered the elixir of life. Immediately on tasting the drug, his body became imponderable, and he began to rise heavenward. Startled probably by this new sensation, he dropped the cup out of which he had been drinking, into the courtyard; whereupon his dogs and poultry finished up the dregs, and were soon sailing up ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... ample crop with plum and rhubarb jam. No more when twilight fades from tower and tree Shall I conceal what still remains of thee Lest that the housemaid or, perchance, the cat Should mischief thee, imponderable pat. Ah, mine no more! for lo! 'tis noised around How thou wilt soon cost seven bob a pound. As well demand thy weight in radium As probe my 'poverished poke for such a sum. Wherefore, farewell! No more, alas! thou'lt oil These joints that creak with unrewarded toil; No more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... inspiration and origin. The great Pantheistic divinity is spoken of by Pantheists as the great soul of the universe, while the more materialistic look upon it as the universe itself, body and soul. With them the soul is the fountain of all the imponderable forces, vegetable and animal life, the mesmeric influences, galvanism, magnetism, electricity, light and heat; and the body the sum of all the ponderable substances; in one word, "God is everything, and everything is God." This system ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... flask will fill the whole vessel when slightly warmed, with blood red vapors, which have a density of nearly 6.00, air being one. It is a non-conductor of electricity, and suffers no change of properties from heat, or any other of the imponderable agents. It dissolves slightly in water, forming ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... are directly causative no one can say. Their influence is imponderable. But whatever their influence, the Committee is firmly of the opinion that practical measures to control what is offensive to many would be an indication of a renewed concern for the moral welfare of young people. The result would be the replacement of ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... phenomena on mechanical principles, and it maintained its ground until, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the undulatory theory proved itself to be a much better working hypothesis. Heat, up to that time, and indeed much later, was regarded as an imponderable substance, caloric; as a thing which was absorbed by bodies when they were wanned, and was given out as they cooled; and which, moreover, was capable of entering into a sort of chemical combination ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... was just that: the Italian Neutralists stood for material advantages, advantages tangible, ponderable, palpable; the Interventionists stood for moral advantages, intangible, impalpable, imponderable—imponderable at least on the scales used by their antagonists. On the eve of the war these two Italian characters stood facing each other, scowling and irreconcilable—the one on the aggressive, asserting itself ever more forcefully through the various organs of public opinion; the other on the ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... light, living upon sunbeams. * * * Her spirit often seemed to be separated from her frame. The spirits of all things, of which mankind in general have no perception, were perceptible to and operated upon her, more particularly the spirits of metals, herbs, men, and animals. All imponderable matters, even the rays of light, had an effect upon her when she was magnetised." The smell of flint was very agreeable to her. Salt laid on her hand caused a flow of saliva: rock crystal laid on the pit of her stomach produced rigidity of the whole body. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of survivals. Chance—that convenient ancient word to denote the interaction of many imponderable forces—has ruled one way in one place and otherwise in another. Sometimes monuments have alone survived, sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give reasons for this contrast of fates. At Pola, gates, temples, and amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past and the modern town-square ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... her head, with a gesture revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity of structure—the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her eyes; ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be unconscious of the contact. Others have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... is an elastic gas consisting of imponderable atoms, which, as we are told by works on molecular physics, are, in proportion to their size, as far apart as the celestial bodies are from each other in space. This distance is less than the 1/3000000 x 1/1000', or the one trillionth of a foot. The vibrations of the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... was as much lacking as ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more penetrating—like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse. Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define it he had said ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... . is the imponderable physical agent, cause, force or the molecular movement, by which, under certain conditions, certain phenomena, chiefly those of attraction and repulsion, . . ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... my decision in the end. It is a mighty force that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. It is very difficult to put one's finger on the imponderable, but I may venture to say that it is Flora de Barral who is really responsible for this novel which relates, in fact, the story ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... loitered about the scene of the crime to watch the offenders make a certain kind of fools of themselves. From the white bench back of the first tee this cynic would rejoice mirthfully at topped or sliced drives or the wild swing that spends all its vicious intent upon the imponderable air. His presence came to be a trial to beginning players, who took no real pleasure in the game until they reached the second tee, beyond ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of clouds, relieving ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... hour later he was out in the open air, walking with a strange new activity. His very body seemed imponderable. He crossed the railway near the Kimball House and went on to Decatur Street. Along this street he walked for a few blocks and then turned off. Before long he was in the most dilapidated, sordid part of the city. He knew where Henderson lived. He had seen ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the imponderable, transcendental virtues of charity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and likewise wisdom, in order that, having reached the farther shore of the sea of existence, you may become ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... I can," he said. "Let us begin with the assumption that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good. Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and indivisible it must have a spacial content? You ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... engenders a taste for them. Partly through our Puritan origin, partly through our preoccupation with the development of the material resources of our country, we, as a people, have failed to cultivate some of the imponderable things of the spirit. So far as we have had to do with its creation, our environment in town and village is generally ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... boards behind him brought a smile to his lips; but he neither turned nor stirred. An instant later, hands cool and imponderable as snowflakes rested on his forehead, and silken strands of hair brushed it softly as his wife leaned over him, nestling her head against ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... independently of the animal-body, and stands in only a temporary connection with certain organs of that body—the soul-, or mental-organs. It has been imagined that this soul-matter, which resembles that imponderable ether which is the medium of light, is diffused between the ponderable molecules of the soul-organs and especially of the nerve-cells, and that this connection of the imponderable "soul" with the ponderable body subsists only so long as the individual life lasts. At ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... do not change. If these parts took to changing, we should split them up in their turn. We should thus descend to the molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms that make up the molecules, to the corpuscles that generate the atoms, to the "imponderable" within which the corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex. In short, we should push the division or analysis as far as necessary. But we should stop only ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... vapour. The question now is, Was not the power 'potential' in both of them, requiring only the proper conditions of temperature to bring it into action? Again I answer for myself in the affirmative. I am, however, quite willing to discuss with Mr. Martineau the alternative hypothesis, that an imponderable formative soul unites itself with the substance after its escape from the liquid state. If he should espouse this hypothesis, then I should demand of him an immediate exercise of that Vorstellungs-faehigkeit, with which, in my efforts to think clearly, I can never dispense. I should ask, At what ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... work. The great bulk of his fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working, and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of having to deal with two principal facts—disease and medicine—both accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the patient represented such or such an aggregation of material—muscle, nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue—which might be counted upon to respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of faith. ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... are being accomplished by such meditation. First, we are getting control of the mind and learning to direct it where and how we choose; and, second, we are attracting and building into the bodies we possess certain grades of imponderable matter that will make thinking and acting along these lines easier and easier for us until they are established habits and we actually become in daily life patient, courageous and compassionate. Whatever qualities or virtues we desire to possess may be gained through the art of meditation ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... is a function of the ether. And the ether is an imponderable substance, so impalpable that it passes right through all solids as though they ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... weight, but of no bulkier size? Indeed, if in a ball of wool there be As much of body as in lump of lead, The two should weigh alike, since body tends To load things downward, while the void abides, By contrary nature, the imponderable. Therefore, an object just as large but lighter Declares infallibly its more of void; Even as the heavier more of matter shows, And how much less of vacant room inside. That which we're seeking with sagacious quest Exists, infallibly, commixed with ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... it. As every student of science knows, air appears to be the chief medium for conveying vibration of sound, metal is the chief medium for conveying electric vibrations, while to account for the vibrations of heat and light we have to assume (or imagine) an invisible, imponderable ether which fills all space and has no property of matter that we can distinguish except that of conveying vibrations of light in its various forms. When we pass on to human life, we have to theorize chiefly by ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids perfect; Slowly and surely they have pass'd on to this, and slowly and surely they yet ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Chemical affinities and revulsions are believed to be only the more delicate forms of electrical attraction and repulsion; the ultimate particles of matter, no less than matter in masses, being subject to the control of electrical laws. The imponderable agents, light and caloric, under the ingenious tests of scientific scrutiny, are beginning to give some very decided indications of being simply electric phenomena. Indeed, the doctrine or theory that ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... them saving them, they lie wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether they are believers, whether they are really trusting in the atonement, whether they are truly sorry for their sins—the way to madness of the brain, and despair of the heart. Some even ponder the imponderable— whether they are of the elect, whether they have an interest in the blood shed for sin, whether theirs is a saving faith—when all the time the man who died for them is waiting to begin to save them from every evil—and first from this self which is consuming them with trouble ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... hard to say. Friendship between alien intelligences is an imponderable. They are not dangerous, I think. We've come across other groups that could not maintain equilibrium after the atomic war stage and you know the results. Introversion. Retreat. Gradual ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... friend, is an agglomeration of imponderable particles, which, relatively to their dimensions, are as far removed from each other as the celestial bodies are in space, so say works on molecular physics. It is these atoms that by their vibrating movement produce light and heat by making four hundred ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable, imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... could not live by powder alone. The imponderable moral factors had to be considered, chief of which was the popular support or opposition which Congress and the army might count upon under certain circumstances. No doubt people were patriotic and wished to maintain their rights; but no doubt people would be more patriotic ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... opinion was entertained that all of the phenomena of nature might be reduced to one principle of explanation; that there was more than a connection between the imponderable agents—more than a relationship even,—that there ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... workshop is the brain of man! Its noiseless machinery cuts, and carves, and moulds, in the imponderable material of ideas. It works its endless miracles through the brawny arm of labor, and the deft fingers of skill, and the world moves forward by its magic. Aladdin rubbed his lamp and the shadowy genii of fable performed impossible wonders. The dreamer of to-day rubs his fingers ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... receiving almost no light save through the arched glass roof over which the moon was climbing in a pale sky of night blue, a veritable sky of the opera, the silhouette of the famous dancer stood out all white, like a droll little shadow, light and imponderable, which seemed rather to be flying in the air than springing over the floor; then, erect upon the tips of her toes, supported in the air only by her extended arms, her face lifted in an elusive pose, which left nothing visible but the smile, she advanced quickly towards the light or fled ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... imminent, immobile, immure, immutable, impalpable, impeccable, impecunious, imperturbable, impervious, implacable, implicit, impolitic, imponderable, importunate, imprecation, impromptu, improvise, imputation, inadvertent, inamorata, inanity, incarcerate, inchoate, incidence, incision, incongruent, inconsequential, incontinent, incorporeal, incorrigible, incredulity, incumbent, indecorous, indigenous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... largest Time-cage. The giant mechanism which had captured us sat at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... sole creatures in St. Augustin, save themselves, visibly alive and awake. Yet whether other beings, other presences, unmaterial, imponderable, intangible, did not walk the streets along with them, is open to doubt. More than once Damaris shrank close to Carteret, startled by and apprehensive of she knew not what. For who dare say in such ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... has produced, in the last fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed. But what are they finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show? A something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely, the life which shapes and makes—that which the old school-men called "forma formativa," which they call vital force and what not—metaphors all, or rather counters ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... that informed them—had held her loveliness intact, preserving the clear lines of youth after its bloom was gone, and making her seem like a lover's memory of herself. So she appeared at first, a bright imponderable presence gliding toward him out of the past; but as her hands lay in his the warm current of life was renewed between them, and the woman ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton |
