"Plasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still persist, and the instinct of personal rivalry? In how many has the crude desire for material ownership or the impulse to punish an affront by physical attack died out? Experimental evidence is even proving that the general plasticity of the nervous system, which has always been considered to be transitory, is of very, very much longer ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... think of accusing him of making no effort to analyze the mental processes which his tests bring into play. It is true that many of Binet's earlier assumptions proved untenable, and in this event he was always ready, with exceptional candor and intellectual plasticity, to acknowledge his error and to plan ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... keeping men of far greater abilities to play like puppets, and despising those whom it has brought down to its own level. The petty fixed idea naturally prevails; it has the advantage of persistence over the plasticity of great thoughts. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the art of making pottery. Its invention required no great effort of intelligence, and its fabrication presented no great difficulties. Man had but to knead the soft clay which he trod under his foot, and the plasticity of which he could not fail to notice. This clay hardened in the sun, and hollows were formed as it shrunk — the first vessel was discovered! Experience soon taught man to replace the heat of the sun by that of the fire, and to add a few bits of some hard substance to give the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... there are already eager and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and plasticity. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... to which clay is put, it is necessary to know its degree of plasticity, tensile strength, shrinkage (both under air and fire), fusibility, color, specific gravity, and chemical properties. The testing of clay for its various possible uses is a highly specialized job, usually beyond the range of a geologist, although certain ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... a spindle-form body and a high degree of plasticity, the contour constantly changing. A distinct, usually striped cuticle is invariably present. "Eye-spots" are absent. Fresh ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst of the garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are, of course, approximate only. They show that as the sediments grow in depth there is a rising of the geotherm of plasticity—whatever its true temperature may be—gradually reducing ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used while damp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pise.[171] Spread out in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one to another by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with which they were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the courses above.[172] The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single huge block. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorways and drains, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... ground, was a room for work in sculpture, in which medium Gauguin took much interest, using clay and wood, the latter both for bas-relief and full relief, Gauguin being hampered, Baufre said, by lack of plasticity in the native clay. Next to this workroom was a shelter for the horse and cart, for Gauguin had the only wheeled ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comic whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call the ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... forward movement is possible in the world. It is to youth, therefore, that this book is finally addressed, to the adolescents, to the students, to those who are yet in the schools and who will presently come to read it, to those who being still plastic can understand the infinite plasticity of the world. It is those who are yet unmade who must become the makers. After thirty there are few conversions and fewer fine beginnings; men and women go on in the path they have marked out for themselves. Their imaginations have become firm and rigid even if they have ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... or viscous liquids at air temperature, they melt on the application of heat and can be made sufficiently fluid to mix with the mineral aggregates that may be used in the road surface. Upon cooling, the bituminous materials return to the previous state and impart a certain amount of plasticity to the mixture, at the same time serving as a binding or cementing agent, which is sufficiently stable for many classes ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... are lovers. And these are the happiest times of our lives. We are not commoners then; we are emperors. We touch the sceptre and it is a magic wand. We rule the world, shaping it as we will, dropping from between our fingers all the stony obstacles that would interfere with its plasticity. Between childhood and love, and between love and death, the world rules us and bruises us. But in childhood, and again in love, ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot |
