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Inchoate   Listen
adjective
Inchoate  adj.  Recently, or just, begun; beginning; partially but not fully in existence or operation; existing in its elements; incomplete. "Neither a substance perfect, nor a substance inchoate."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Inchoate" Quotes from Famous Books



... cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... Jimmy that the shadowy and inchoate vision of a combat, a fight, a brawl of some kind persisted in flitting about in the recesses of his mind, always just far enough away to elude capture. The absurdity of the thing annoyed him. A man has either indulged in a fight overnight or he has not indulged in a fight overnight. There can ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... word. Of the physical basis of desire, of what takes place in the brain, we know nothing. With the psychic fact, the feeling of agitation and unrest, we are all familiar. Of the tendency of desire to discharge itself in action we are aware. A desire appears to be an inchoate volition—that which, if ripened successfully and not nipped in the bud, would become a volition. It may be looked upon as the first step toward action—a step which may or may not be followed ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... (Infernus), is simply a lower state of inchoate and imperfect being, "of saints nipped in the bud." Infant damnation is only a gentle sadness—"levis tristitia." All positive suffering in hell is probably temporal, and therefore must at last cease. The lost souls will enjoy there quite ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance; evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... point, mention of St. Marys began to appear in metropolitan papers. These were read with the peculiar thoroughness of those who, for the first time, found themselves of definite interest to the outside world. Simultaneously the air became full of prophecy, rambling and inchoate. The citizens had not yet come to regard developments as being in any particular their own. They had—for the best reasons—put no money in, but now began to profit by changed conditions. The works were still a thing apart, a new and somewhat romantic area from which anything, ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... individual taste; but since such a taste is, obviously, in a measure "acquired," the compiler of any list of books must endeavor, by a frank and almost shameless assertion of his taste, to rouse to a divergent reciprocity the latent taste, still embryotic, perhaps, and quite inchoate, of the young person anxious to make some sort of a start. Such a neophyte in the long voyage—a voyage not without its reefs and shoals—will be much more stirringly provoked to steer with a bold firm hand, even ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys

... which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain- pipe for the spirit—a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... overtook her at Cesare's announcement—Gheta and Mochales to marry! She was certain that the arrangement had not existed that morning. A fleet inchoate sorrow numbed ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... them to organize themselves into a State, prepared to take its place as an equal, sovereign member of the Federal Union. The claim, afterward advanced by Mr. Douglas and others, that this declaration was intended to assert the right of the first settlers of a Territory, in its inchoate, rudimental, dependent, and transitional condition, to determine the character of its institutions, constituted the doctrine popularly known as "squatter sovereignty." Its assertion led to the dissensions which ultimately resulted in a rupture of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... pell-mell dinner was at first a thing inchoate, awkward, impossible, criticism halted when the actual service at table began. The chef at the White House had been brought to this country by Mr. Jefferson from Paris, and no better was known ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... the ill-will of General Manager North? I have, and it is distinct from and in addition to his hostility for the unearning branch for which I am responsible. I'm sorry for it, because I may need his good word for my inchoate scheme later on. It came up over some maintenance-of-way charges. He is as shrewd as he is unscrupulous, and he knows well how to pile the sins of the congregation on the back of the poor scapegoat. To make a better showing for the main line, and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... inchoate face under the bushes, her eyes diffused rays of warm and kindly light as, licking her lips, she, with a slow movement, smoothed the breast of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... nights working at this huge marble with a paper cap on his head, in which he stuck a lighted candle to see by. The solitary figure of the old man in the vast and dimly lighted studio, groping round the inchoate marble; the stillness of the night, broken only by the sharp click of the mallet and the grating of the chisel, is a picture of many of the bravest hours of his old age. Vasari, observing all this, and wishing to do the revered ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... made out, and the winch-wheels and ventilators on deck were inchoate masses which took shape only when they were within reach. The green starboard-light threw a sickly glare over the surges which rose to the rail. I had to feel my way along and not release my grip until I had found ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... sufficient to avoid all other contracts, on account of the imbecillity of judgment in the parties contracting; a fortiori therefore it ought to avoid this, the most important contract of any. Therefore if a boy under fourteen, or a girl under twelve years of age, marries, this marriage is only inchoate and imperfect; and, when either of them comes to the age of consent aforesaid, they may disagree and declare the marriage void, without any divorce or sentence in the spiritual court. This is founded on the ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... constitution and a free-State government. Unofficially the supporters of the new government took measures for its defense. In the following spring, Governor Robinson sent his first message to the State legislature in session at Topeka; and Reeder and Lane were chosen senators for the inchoate Commonwealth.[546] ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... easily managed Alice. This fellow's strange death gives him the halo of martyrdom. He is out of my reach now. The old man must have feared the 'Iron Gate' of Death! And, after all, his plans to 'efface' Clayton were only inchoate. I cannot terrify them with any hearsay projects. I must get what I can, cling to ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... visible in the white glare through the haze of dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder, vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a swiftly rising storm. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks: for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford, Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine streets that would attract attention even in ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... celebrate his victory in a solemn ritual dance. In Greek art and literature, on the other hand, where we might expect to find an even more advanced conception, we are faced with one seemingly more primitive and inchoate, i.e., the idea of a constantly recurring cycle of Birth, Death, and Resurrection, or Re-Birth, of all things in Nature, this cycle depending upon the activities of an entity at first vaguely conceived of as the 'Luck of the Year,' the Eniautos Daimon. This Being, at one stage ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... there may have been, if not recollections of a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate thoughts of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring out of darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find myself in the land of vague fancy, gliding ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... held interest in certain circles in Washington had they been known, passed on their course, and toward that very region which had half in jest been named as the storm center of the day—the state of Missouri, anomalous, inchoate, discordant, half North, half South, itself the birth of compromise and sired by political jealousy; whither, against her will, voyaged a woman, herself engine of turbulence, doubt and strife, and in company now of a savage captor who contemplated nothing ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... will sometimes gives his wife property in lieu of dowry. In this case, she may, after his death, elect to take either such property or her dower; but she cannot take both. While the husband lives the wife's right of dower in only inchoate; it cannot be enforced. Should he sell the land to a stranger, she has no right of action or remedy until ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... the merely technical character of these poems, it may be suggested that in spite of much in them that is rough and inchoate, they show that Toru was advancing in her mastery of English verse. Such a stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful, could hardly be recognized as the work of one by whom the ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt

... history of the eighteen centuries you will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule and the world is made up of them—at least it was in my college days. Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft

... discriminations of other sensations which blend with those of the musical tone. Among such secondary helps the most important are the muscular sensations which accompany the innervation of the larynx and other organs used in producing musical tones. For we ordinarily innervate these organs (at least in an inchoate and partial way)—that is, we sound the note to ourselves—when trying carefully to judge of its ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... interminably upon the old business of the wonderful medicine in the vagrants' blessed horn that had a strong odour of whisky; but what an admirably humorous figure is this same Darby O'More! Out of the Poor Scholar alone, that inchoate masterpiece, you could illustrate a dozen phases of Carleton's mirth, beginning with the famous sermon where the priest so artfully wheedles and coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the boy who is going out on ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... are wholly in the dark as to the management of the inns. We then hear of governors, treasurers, and the control of affairs in the different houses lay with the senior members of the societies, who were styled ancients or benchers. The apprentices may be regarded as inchoate Serjeants—Serjeants in the making, persons on the way to become Serjeants. The Serjeants had their own inns; and, on joining the brotherhood, the newly-appointed dignitary was rung out of the inn to which he had previously belonged by the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... She was, in fact, not thinking of the bundle or the gun; or if she thought of them—Such rigid instruments as words, worn blunt with usage and misuse, are quite inadequate to describe the faint and fugitive character of that thought,—the idea still in its inception, inchoate, embryo. She was going to Murray's for news of Philip Haig; and all beyond that ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... inchoate regret, of passionate agnosticism as to the world's meanings, if any, does one too often wake, and know not why! Henry, on some mornings, would wake humming (as the queer phrase goes) with prosperity, and spring, warm and alive, to welcome the new day. On other mornings it would ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... notes together, and passed out. Dave looked at Mr. James Ward wonderingly, until that gentleman broke his train of inchoate thought. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London

... contribution of the nineteenth century towards political internationalism is of a more positive character. It consists in a series of inchoate and fragmentary but genuine attempts of the Great Powers to work together upon critical occasions in the interests of 'justice and order', as they understood those terms, and to embody in acts or conventions some policy which is the result of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... responsiveness, as well as sympathy. My knowledge of feminine nature, its extraordinary gifts of emotional and personal intuition, was of the scantiest, if it had any existence at all. But my own emotional side was active, and my mind an inchoate mass of ideals and more or less sentimental longings for social betterment. And so, with Sylvia's gentle acquiescence, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... something perfectly inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of a good child who has only good ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... on the part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals" and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might be expected from such an inchoate mass of men, revolutionaries to the core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form of the Communist Manifesto, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... ponderous. I heard also the rattle of stones as they gave way under that giant tread. They drew nearer. They were close upon me. I heard the crashing of the bushes round the entrance, and then dimly through the darkness I was conscious of the loom of some enormous shape, some monstrous inchoate creature, passing swiftly and very silently out from the tunnel. I was paralysed with fear and amazement. Long as I had waited, now that it had actually come I was unprepared for the shock. I lay motionless and breathless, whilst the great dark mass whisked by me and was ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the next generation's or century's civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds of others. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... about; and she would have been less or more than woman had she not wished to learn the whole truth in a matter of this nature. She hoped that her lover was right, and that Graham's heart, in accordance with his development theory, was so inchoate as to be incapable of much suffering. She was not sure, however. There was something she surmised rather than detected. She felt it now in Mrs. Mayburn's presence, and caught a glimpse of it in the flush that was fading from ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... an inchoate and dependent community, which can be erected into a State only in two ways: first, formally, by an enabling act of Congress, giving permission to the inhabitants to set up for themselves; and second, informally, by a spontaneous and general movement of the people, which Congress must afterwards ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... Arabs, the Hutaym tribe is divided into a multitude of clans, septs, and families, each under its own Shaykh. All are Moslems, after the Desert pattern, a very rude and inchoate article. Wellsted knew them by their remarkably broad chins: the Bedawi recognize them by their look; by their peculiar accent, and by the use of certain peculiar words, as Harr! when donkey-driving. The men are unwashed and filthy; the women walk abroad ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... air,' so as John Walden was long past the age when men are called young, it is difficult to determine the kind of buoyant element on which he trod when he left the Manor that evening. Youth!—what were its vague inchoate emotions, its trembling hesitations, its more or less selfish jealousies, doubts and desires, compared to the strong, glowing and tender passion which filled the heart of this man, so long a solitary in the world, who now awaking to the consciousness ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... to what he would include in these and the main criteria which he gives for each of them. He would place the savage condition as being that of the lowest tribes known to us. They have little or no agriculture; their commerce is very inchoate and rude: they have no knowledge of the metals as such; their best weapon is the bow and arrow, or the throwing stick; and their best tool is the stone hatchet and the stone spade. This is very much like the lowest condition of the "wild people" to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... ought to be registered and Parliament ought to be dissolved. But a zealot of a Premier will not appeal; he will follow his formulae; he will believe he is doing good service when, perhaps, he is but pushing to unpopular consequences, the narrow maxims of an inchoate theory. At such a minute a constitutional king—such as Leopold the First was, and as Prince Albert might have been—is invaluable; he can and will prevent ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... God is the primary mediatrix; the Father, at her intercession, obtains for the founder an auspicious audience of the Son; and the Son authenticates the use to be made of his name in this instance; and so it is that the inchoate order is to be the "Society ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... very fatiguing enterprise, and also, for Edward Henry, a very nervous one. He was as awkward in displaying that inchoate theatre as a newly-made father with his first-born. Pride and shame fought for dominion over him. Nellie was full of laudations. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... still inchoate Whig party in 1836, and the extraordinary popularity of Jackson, resulted in the complete victory of Mr. Van Buren. But the General's chosen successor and political heir found the great office to which he had ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... certain hard common-sense in facing the complicated phenomena of political life must be expected in every progressive people. In some respects we as a nation seem to lack this; we have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it. Such an ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... was "promptly adopted" by the geographers, at the same time it "came slowly into use," for geographical knowledge was then in an inchoate state, especially as respected the New World. It is said to have first appeared on a map ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci in 1514; but in a pamphlet accompanying "the earliest known globe of Johann Schoener," made in ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... before Augustus. And what had he to oppose against the seasoned veterans of the English army, thrice armed in the consciousness of their unparalleled achievement?—Five weak and astounded battalions, and a horde of inchoate peasants. But Montcalm did not falter; by ten he had taken up his position, and by eleven, after some ineffectual cannonading, to allow time for the arrival of re-enforcements which came not, he led the charge. The attack was disordered by the uneven ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... succession of her sons. The continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother from college ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... opinion. Luke VII, 47: "Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much."(1006) 1 Pet. IV, 8: "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."(1007) 1 John IV, 7: "Every one that loveth is born of God."(1008) St. Augustine seems to identify the two habits in such passages as the following: "Inchoate love, therefore, is inchoate righteousness; ... great love is great righteousness; perfect love is perfect righteousness."(1009) According to the Tridentine Council, "the justification of the impious" takes place when "the charity of God ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... at him wonderingly, and her heart began to beat with a strange quick thrill. It is not always easy to see the outlines of a soul's development, or the inchoate formation of a great love,— and though everything in a certain sense moved her and appealed to her that was outside herself, it was difficult to her to believe or to admit that she, in her own person, might be the cause of an entirely new set of thoughts and emotions ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... systematically to the drafting of a national constitution. To this course it was impelled by the propaganda of Gambetta and other republican leaders, by fear on the part of the Legitimists and Orleanists that the existing inchoate situation would lead to a Bonapartist revival, and by a new modus operandi which was cleverly arranged between the republicans and the Orleanists. Convinced that an Orleanist monarchy was, at least for a time, an impossibility, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... Thelma, was a riddle impossible of explanation. He thought, too, with a sort of generous remorse, of that occasion when Sigurd had visited him on board the yacht to implore him to leave the Altenfjord. He realized everything,—the inchoate desires of the desolate being, who, though intensely capable of loving, felt himself in a dim, sad way, unworthy of love,—the struggling passions in him that clamored for utterance—the instinctive dread and jealousy of a rival, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... thoughts on the subject but they were all inchoate and unsatisfying. He got only one conclusion out of them—that for some mysterious reason he had surrendered to Betty and was going to work to ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... aided Jane Hardie to note down the "preliminary process of the Incubation of disorders of the Intellect," resumed: "Now, sir, your son appears to be in a very inchoate stage of the malady: he has cerebral Kephalalgia ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... become less even than a memory, and so, perhaps, we ought to leave it in the limbo of things inchoate and unaccomplished. But this it was not, most emphatically. Decidedly it had its day, lived and sowed seeds for good or evil through its period of brief existence: so many painters of the grand style took their note from it; it did so much to introduce the last phase of Italian art, the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... possibility of using electricity for conveying intelligence, and that he gave utterance among his intimates to these dreams; but the practical means of so utilizing this mysterious agent did not take shape in his mind until 1832. An inchoate vision of the possibility of using electricity is far different from an actual plan eventually elaborated into ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... perhaps no reason why, granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university" with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A college such as this is a mob, not an organism, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... The Fall of Man, that is to say, offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that such a subject, as it exists in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the poet touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem or the debris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated fact, but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which already appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some degree ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... The statute does not create an absolute or indefeasible right immediately on the expiration of twenty years. Unless and until the dominant owner's claim is brought into question (s.4) no absolute or indefeasible title can arise under the act. The dominant owner has only an inchoate right to avail himself under the act of the twenty years' uninterrupted enjoyment, if his claim is brought into question. But in the meantime, however long the enjoyment may have been, his right is just ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... influences of the evil around him in the world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... keep his hand in and get his new apparatus into working order, Monsieur Andre was taking his friends again every Sunday, the family lending themselves for his experiments with unequalled good-humor, for the prosperity of that inchoate, suburban industry was a matter of pride to them all, arousing, even in the girls, that touching sentiment of fraternity which presses the humblest destinies together as closely as sparrows on the edge of a roof. But Andre Maranne, with the inexhaustible resources of his high forehead, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... houses, the post-office, a drug store, a tiny school-house with a belfry and no bell and the little row of cottages west of the main-line tracks where all the good people lived— which conglomerate mass of inchoate architecture is all that saved San Pasqual from the ignominy of being classed ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... material world—it is certain that the thirst for the ideal ever increases in exact proportion with the development of the race. The true and high task of the artist, the poet, is to divine these wants of humanity, to cultivate these inchoate aspirations for the infinite, to hold its nectar to the toil-worn, weary lips, to soothe and elevate the restless spirits, to cultivate, in accordance with the essence of Christianity, this excess of moral and intellectual being, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... different and China spared much national and international humiliation. Six years of stormy happenings had certainly bred in the nation a desire for constitutionalism and a detestation of military domination. But this desire and detestation required firm leadership. Without that leadership it was inchoate and powerless, and indeed made furtive by the constant fear of savage reprisals. A great opportunity had come and a great opportunity had been lost. President Li Yuan-hung's personal argument, communicated to the writer, was that in sealing the Mandate dissolving Parliament he had chosen ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... the earth as a molten globe, rapidly spinning on its axis—spinning in about three hours. Gradually, by reason of some disturbing causes, a protuberance, a sort of bud, forms at one side, and the great inchoate mass separates into two—one about eighty times as big as the other. The bigger one we now call earth, the smaller we now call moon. Round and round the two bodies went, pulling each other into tremendously elongated or prolate shapes, and so they might have gone on for a long time. But they ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... Falconbridge for his mother's trangression with the lion-hearted king—such a sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere faemina for the perfections of a mulier. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institutions—that which, by her very corruptions and abuses co-operating with her laws, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... in Fig. 15 bears much the same relation to that of Fig. 14 as did the clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain half-formed sentiment; it is the outrush into ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... exercised by the great writers of Russian romance. In the works of men like Tourguenef and Dostoievsky the Russian people appear to have recognised, for the first time, that their real condition was truthfully depicted, and that their inchoate aspirations had found sympathetic expression. "Dans le roman, et la seulement," De Voguee says, "on trouvera l'histoire ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... in detail the improvements in the animal forms, the help and co-operation of man were required. The amphibian and reptile forms which then abounded had about run their course, and were ready to assume the more advanced type of bird or mammal. These forms constituted the inchoate material placed at man's disposal, and the clay was ready to assume whatever shape the potter's hands might mould it into. It was specially with animals in the intermediate stage that so many of the experiments ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... then, dreaming in my peaceful bed of the things that immediately ensued, have I wakened to find my extremities icy cold and my body bathed in an icy moisture! Yet, in my waking hours, whene'er I seek mentally to reconstruct those hideous scenes I marvel that I should preserve so confused, so inchoate a recollection of it all, though from the picture certain episodes stand out in all ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... chief economies of a Trust so long as it remains at warfare, for it is compelled to expend all that it gains from the enlarged scale of business and from the cessation of competition among its constituent companies upon the strife with its single antagonist. A Trust in this inchoate condition has no special economic character distinguishing it from other large aggregates of competing capital. It is with fully-formed trusts which are able to control prices and regulate to some degree production and profits that we are concerned. An economic Trust ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... lies the advantage, in an ecclesiastical point of view, of their more rudimental state, I mean of the ancient style of architecture, of Gothic sculpture and painting, and of what is called Gregorian music, that these inchoate sciences have so little innate vigour and life in them, that they are in no danger of going out of their place, and giving the law to Religion. But the case is very different when genius has breathed upon their natural elements, and has developed them into what I may call intellectual powers. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... after she bade him good-night and left him, his thoughts a medley of vague impressions, confused, half-formed, inchoate. He tried to fix his mind on Simon Varr and ended by surrendering it to the vivid, vital personality ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... adhered to the very end, and which did much to precipitate the war. Forgetful of the solidarity of European civilization, and the fact that by policy and diplomatic intercourse continuing through many centuries a united European State exists, even though its organization be as yet inchoate, he took the ground that Austria should be permitted to proceed to aggressive measures against Servia without interference from any other Power, even though, as was inevitable, the humiliation of Servia would destroy the status of the Balkan ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... them and the rebellion to uttermost destruction in one action. It was upon this assumption that the journals of the North satirized, abused, vilified Scott, and clamored day by day for an "advance upon Richmond." The damnation of public clamor, and not the incompetency of the general, set the inchoate armies of Scott upon that fatal adventure. But that humiliating, incredible, and for years misunderstood Sunday, on the plateaus of Manassas, where, after all, blundering and imbecility brought disaster, but not shame, upon the devoted soldiery, aroused the sense ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it becomes denser though still translucent, as it seemingly absorbs some of the fluid by which it is surrounded. The model of the future animal, exact even to the dainty contours ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate speculations that ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... republic appeared to have its emblem in the vast unfinished Capitol, at that moment surrounded by masses of stone and prostrate columns never yet lifted into their places, seemingly the moment of high but delusive aspirations, the confused wreck of inchoate magnificence, sadder than any ruin of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... advancement of the country. When the people have moved steadily along any road, the men who have led them on that road have been selected as subjects. When the people have refused to enter upon a road, or, having entered, have soon turned back from it, the leaders upon such inchoate or abandoned excursions have for the most part been rejected. Those who have been exponents of ideas and principles which have entered into the progress and have developed in a positive way the history of the nation have been chosen; those who have unfortunately linked themselves with rejected ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... rank of orators and statesmen. He said that it was not clear to him that our title was exceptional up to 54 deg.40'. Our claim to the territory north of the Columbia River was the Spanish title only, and this had been an inchoate right. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... of the war, which many had supposed would be brief, was still undetermined. While affairs were in this uncertain and inchoate condition, and the Administration had no declared policy on some of the most important questions, Congress came together fired with indignation and revenge for a war so causeless and unprovoked. A large portion ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... rock, yet uncreate, Amid a chaos inchoate, An uncreated being sate; Beneath him, rock, Above him, cloud. And the cloud was rock, And the rock was cloud. The rock then growing soft and warm, The cloud began to take a form, A form chaotic, vast and vague, Which issued in the cosmic egg. Then the Being ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... his shoulder through the gap. Yes, I could see it, too. In the deep shadow of the tree there was a deeper shadow yet, black, inchoate, vague—a crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It was no higher than a horse, but the dim outline suggested vast bulk and strength. That hissing pant, as regular and full-volumed as the exhaust of an engine, spoke of a monstrous ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... totally ignorant of the fact that they were but the reflection of his own inchoate need born in the anguish of his wife's death; he was not conscious of the veering of his sensibility—sharpened by the hoarse cry from the stiffening lips of Lettice—to the world without. He thought of the possibility before him ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... of oil upon my lips, and there was a greasy scum upon the woodwork of the machine. Some infinitely fine organic matter appeared to be suspended in the atmosphere. There was no life there. It was inchoate and diffuse, extending for many square acres and then fringing off into the void. No, it was not life. But might it not be the remains of life? Above all, might it not be the food of life, of monstrous life, even as the humble grease ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... building, he cheerfully sacrificed for works of public utility. He inaugurated and urged forward many benevolent and scientific enterprises, and schools of art and music. This extraordinary man seemed to have a prophetic sense of the value and ultimate success of inchoate public improvements, and when he once adopted a scheme allowed nothing to discourage him. He engineered the Holborn Viaduct enterprise, and I notice that at a late meeting of the brave Channel Tunnel ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and in a large percentage ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... of the slave were not yet ended. The time came when he was permitted to become a citizen. For two years he had led an inchoate, nondescript sort of existence: free without power or right; neither slave nor freeman; neither property nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments of the States and the military power which controlled ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... his life, he could understand the abject deference that must be shown to public opinion. He, who considered himself, and not without reason, a gentleman, must defer to the inchoate, unreasoning, unrelenting, and barbaric point of view of men and women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole or breeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in the manipulation of a knife and ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... at the curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings, Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... this quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy—not to speak of its echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own feet, and, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and illusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully calmed the air around the dead man’s grave? So long as the man to be portrayed cannot ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... doors of opulent companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms below, and it was only this recollection of past human occupancy ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... nonperformance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made of him a useful citizen and have instilled into his mind a firm belief that the freedom and liberty of which we boast is not an inchoate substance to be dreamed of and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... you, arming each new little settlement proved important," Amspaugh said. "But really, it expressed nothing more than the first inchoate stirrings of asteroid nationalism. And the origins of that are much more subtle and complex. ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson

... and lessons, dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him—with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle's talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all. He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... physical harm when we lose temper; the tart speech takes virtue out of us. A woman would better fatigue herself by righting an untidy chamber than scold a servant for neglecting it. Foreigners comment surprisedly upon the "anxious faces" of American women even of the better class. The inchoate condition of our domestic service has undoubtedly much to do with the premature seams that mar what would else be fair and sweet, but I incline to the belief that more is due to a certain irritableness which is a ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... Huge, inchoate commonweal, Lo, at last we catch the thrill: Now we found and forge the steel, Scoop a channel for ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... men." But it is nevertheless the meaning of human life. And this we can readily conceive. The last word may transform the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... through a priest. But just as a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that is in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help their secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of devotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will have nothing ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... desertion quite as keenly as did his mother and father, for his schemes, though inchoate, were ambitious, and his heart was set upon them. Lorelei's obstinacy ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal, with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories and inchoate postulations. He made no headway. He felt but could not define. He was afraid to. Definition of his present tendencies would plump him back into ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that "divine average" of common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human interest. It is something deeper far ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... the usual amount of friendly respect from the Blackfeet. They have also an inchoate polytheism, 'Above Persons, Ground Persons, and Under Water Persons.' Of the first, Thunder is most important, and is worshipped. There is the Cold Maker, a white figure on a white horse, the Wind, and ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... in the end both he and Mueller grew disgusted and the lessons were abandoned. I dare say Mueller was in a humdrum way a good coach; he could have prepared candidates for our absurd academic examinations; but for an artistic genius, bursting with inarticulate ideas and inchoate purposes he was worse than useless. So Richard had to muddle along as he best might, while his good relatives doubted whether he would ever be able to do anything at all, until by good fortune he tried Theo. Weinlig. Weinlig saw what was wrong and what was wanted; instead of Mueller's "you ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... The inchoate character of the Cabinet for a considerable period explains what might otherwise seem to be an anomaly,—the delay of Jefferson in occupying his post. He did not arrive until March 21, 1790, when Washington ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford

... stowed In vaults of rock, for creature king Of future age to fit the key Of genius in their ancient locks; Stowed wealth to bless a nation, whose Motto: "Onward! Light!" befits it For that mountain's home, which pierced through Inchoate night; stowed signet seal, With which to stamp that fair land's Queen Of States, whose crested monogram, With sheaves of wheat entwined, the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... of astral entities, is also much the most important to man. Being entirely his own creation, it is inter-related with him by the closest karmic bonds, and its action upon him is direct and incessant. It is an enormous inchoate mass of semi-intelligent entities, differing among themselves as human thoughts differ, and practically incapable of anything like classification or arrangement. The only division which can be usefully made is that which distinguishes ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... government became clearer, and as the natures of the various animals were more closely studied, means were devised of guarding against their anger and securing their friendship and aid. Our earliest information of savage life reveals in every tribe an inchoate pantheon of beasts. All the essential apparatus of public religion is present in these communities in embryonic form—later movements have had for their object merely to clarify ideas and ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... for Philadelphia have been a dream for many years, and spasmodic efforts have been made from time to time to produce the reality, but as yet nothing tangible has resulted. The idea has been too inchoate to develop much enthusiasm, and year after year our citizens have returned from enjoying the delights of foreign gardens, and mildly wondered, in the true Philadelphia style, why we should not have them. Nor is this marvelous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... slightest noise, an increase in the wind, the snap of an expanding hull plate, the crackle of static over my radio. I whirl around to see who, or what, is watching me. My skin crawls and prickles as though I were covered with ants. My mind is filled with black, inchoate dread. In three words, I'm scared stiff! Yet there is nothing tangible—nothing I should be frightened about, and this terrifies me even more. For I know where this continual fear and worry can lead—to what ends ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone

... representation of their contents from memory, was substantially just. The public mind appears still in a state of astonishment. There never was a moment in which the aid of an able pen was so important to place things in their just attitude. On this depend the inchoate movement in the eastern mind, and the fate of the elections in that quarter, now beginning and to continue through the summer. I would not propose to you such a task on any ordinary occasion. But be assured that a well digested analysis of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... whom is the great central being, and the other two derive their titles from their productive attributes. But as to what they produced or how they produced it, no special indication is given. Thereafter two more Kami are born from an elementary reedlike substance that sprouts on an inchoate earth. This is the first reference to organic matter. The two newly born Kami are invisible like their predecessors, and like them are not represented as taking any part in the creation. They are solitary, unseeable, and functionless, but the evident idea is that ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... covers all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and everything we know about the primitive ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... looking for another. Naturally she loses her place in the slack season and pursues her search at the very moment when positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is therefore most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganized and inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing young people in industry. This is obvious from the point of view of their first positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen, or from the innumerable places they hold later, often as high ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... during the classical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been noticed, shows a tendency to experiment in combining their use with that of the Graeco-Latin rhythms. The combination, in the writing of the new school, of a sort of inchoate verse with an elaborate and even pedantic prose was too artificial to be permanent; but about the same time attempts were made at a corresponding new style in regular poetry. Rhymed verse as such does not appear till later; the work of the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... questions to which this condition of things gave rise, I assumed at the outset that the obligations of the treaty with Mexico were to be respected and enforced. This treaty had stipulated for the protection of all rights of property of the citizens of the ceded country; and that stipulation embraced inchoate and equitable rights, as well as those which were perfect. It was not for the Supreme Court of California to question the wisdom or policy of Mexico in making grants of such large portions of her domain, or of the United States in stipulating for their protection. I felt the force of what ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham

... spend their days, but I know as little about the exact function of a Buergermeister as about the functions of a Mayor. In short, my knowledge of Germany, like my knowledge of England, is based on a series of life-long, unclassified, more or less inchoate impressions, and the only excuse I have for writing about either country I find in my own and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... continental, and the limitations of continental warfare tend to veil the fuller meaning of the principle he had framed. Had he lived, there is little doubt he would have worked it out to its logical conclusion, but his death condemned his theory of limited war to remain in the inchoate condition in which he had ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... treason, and that whoever is concerned in it is a traitor and must expect a traitor's punishment. It has been common to call secession a political heresy. The rebellion, the fruit of secession, stamps it as more and worse than simply a heresy. It is inchoate treason, and only awaits the favorable conditions to become open and flagrant. The patriotism, therefore, of any man may fairly be suspected, who, refusing to be taught by the experience of this war, revealing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... to notice that in Master Raynal's religion, as in Richard Rolle's, hermit of Hampole, there appears to have been some of that inchoate Quietism which was apt to tinge the faith of a few of the English solitaries. He was accustomed to attend mass devoutly and to receive the sacraments, and on his death-bed was speeded into the next world, ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson

... process operating on men with incredible swiftness. Their tastes became edgeless ... they entertained themselves with big, splashy things, asking for noise and glare and an inchoate massing of colour, and crowds and crowds of bare girls. There was a demand for Nakedness, not the nakedness of cleanly, natural things, but the Nakedness that is partly covered, the Nakedness that hints ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... vastly younger. The United States has an established form of government which has been the same for a hundred years and, all good Americans hope, will remain unchanged for centuries to come. The British Empire is still groping inchoate: it is all makeshift and endeavour. It is in about that stage of growth in which the United States found herself when her transcontinental railways were still unbuilt, when she had not yet digested Texas or California, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... return to Potosi, that the subject of the mines which I had been inquiring about, so far as relates to their management as a part of the public domain, was one that belonged properly to the United States Government; Missouri was but a territory having only inchoate rights. The whole mineral domain was held, in fee, by the General Government, and whatever irregularity had been seen about the collections of rents, &c., constituted a question which Congress could only solve. I determined to visit Washington, and lay the subject before the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... ramifying, and inchoate Commonwealth of Great Britain lies the heaviest responsibility. It is a task unequally shared between those of her citizens who are capable of discharging it. Her task within the Commonwealth is to maintain the common character and ideals and to adjust the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... the early part of the period specified, the working theology of the Roman Church has undergone but few, and, as pertaining to our subject, unimportant, changes or developments. Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme was inchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developing itself step by step. The principal changes now concerning us to notice in the passage from patristic eschatology as deducible, for instance, from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... the secret of Walker's curiosity—that he respected him. He would have liked to talk to him—not precisely to ask his advice, but to lay before him some of the difficulties that were inchoate in his soul. He had an idea that this man with the grave, suffering face—yes, there was suffering in his face, as one could see on closer ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King

... man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct. He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America. Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate. But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results. The Anglo-American may be considered the latest new-comer into this planet. Let us, then, a little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... very distinctly stated in the Bible; when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" in the darkness that was "upon the face of the deep,"[205] the great deep of matter showed no forms, it was void, inchoate. Form was given by the Logos, the Word, of whom it is written that "all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made."[206] C. W. Leadbeater has well put it: "The result of this first great outpouring ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... give-and-take on the part of all concerned. The Manchu dynasty has collapsed, though the "Emperor" still remains as a quasi-sacred, priestly personage, and the princes have been pensioned off. The Great Republic of China has come into being, albeit it is in large measure inchoate and, as it were, on trial. China has long been the land of rebellions and risings, and it is hardly to be expected that the novel republican form of government, however well constructed, intentioned, or conducted, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... appraising eyes, she ignored the women as, already, she had ignored the men. With obliterating unconcern, she reduced them to the fluidity of the inchoate. Other matters occupied her, and, primarily, a trick, an extremely shabby one, from which she ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... fog pressed out into uncouth, dumbly pathetic shapes by the struggle for existence that seethes below it always—always! Decidedly I must begin to-morrow to practise walking. It seems a necessary step towards acquainting myself with the inner life of these inchoate millions, which must be well worth knowing. Papa, on arriving at our door, plunged into an altercation with a cab-tout. What a man! And yet sometimes I could find it in my heart to envy his robustness, his buoyancy. ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... bed his thoughts became more tumultuous than ever; while among all the inchoate and fragmentary sketches of this dreadful day, now rising before him, the clearest was of his uncle collapsed in a big chair with a white tie dangling from his hand; and one conviction, following upon that picture, became ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... disappointed and to see humanity growing either more savage or physically weaker, simultaneously with each phase of enlightenment. These things are perhaps truer of society in Europe, and in some of the States, than in our young Dominion, where everything was necessarily in a somewhat inchoate condition. Yet had it not been for the great men who providentially appeared in our midst—our history, our manners and customs, our whole career as a nation would simply have been a repetition of European civilization with all its defects, ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... questions such as these: Had they any belief in God? Did they believe in the immortality of the soul? Taking their own clear-cut conceptions, discriminated by a developed terminology, these missionaries tried to translate them into languages that had neither the words nor the thoughts, only a vague, inchoate, tangled substratum, out of which these thoughts and words later differentiated themselves. Let us ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... voyage across. Tiers of narrow, steel bunks, three deep, on all sides. An entrance in rear. Benches on the floor before the bunks. The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning—the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage. Nearly all the men are drunk. Many bottles are passed from hand to hand. All are dressed in dungaree pants, heavy ugly ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill



Words linked to "Inchoate" :   incipient



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