"Assignable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bear upon it than he.[692] By observations on the summit of the Faulhorn, as well as by direct experiment, he demonstrated, nearly thirty years ago, the leading part played by water-vapour in generating the atmospheric spectrum; and he had recourse to similar means for appraising the share in it assignable to oxygen. An electric beam, transmitted from the Eiffel Tower to Meudon in the summer of 1888, having passed through a weight of oxygen about equal to that piled above the surface of the earth, showed the groups A and B just as they appear in the high-sun spectrum.[693] Atmospheric action ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... far. Evolution, apparently, has still a wide space to traverse, even in what may be assumed to be the material sphere. What can it make of the marvellous stores of memory or of the apparently boundless play of the imagination, which by its working in sleep, sometimes with no assignable materials for the fancy, seems ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... own political destinies, and indeed incapable of self-government. Such is the fundamental basis and essential justification of the rule now maintained in Rome, under the protection of foreign bayonets. This is a conquered city, virtually if not nominally in a state of siege, without assignable period. The Pope's guards are partly Swiss and partly native, that is, chosen from the families of the Nobility; but the "power behind the throne" is maintained by the thousands of French soldiers who ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the constant agency of a Divine Being, and to him who believes that no such Being exists in the universe. They are equally incredible, whether related to have been wrought upon occasion the most deserving, and for purposes the most beneficial, or for no assignable end whatever, or for an end confessedly trifling or pernicious. This surely cannot be a correct statement. In adjusting also the other side of the balance, the strength and weight of testimony, this author ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... fight this country for the possession of what is now British Columbia. His short figure gave an impression of abounding strength and energy which obtained him the nickname of "the little Giant." With no assignable higher quality, and with the blustering, declamatory, shamelessly fallacious and evasive oratory of a common demagogue, he was nevertheless an accomplished Parliamentarian, and imposed himself as effectively upon the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... that in the strange measure he fell upon, there was not a touch of latent Insanity; whereof indeed the actual condition of these Documents in Capricornus and Aquarius is no bad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings, toilsome enough, are without assigned or perhaps assignable aim; internal Unrest seems his sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen on him, and he were "made like unto a wheel." Doubtless, too, the chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note of preparation, for example, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... irrepressibly out of the facts, like the Djin from the jar which the fisherman so incautiously opened; and like the Djin again, being vaporous, shifting, and indefinable, but unmistakably gigantic. However modest the bases of one's calculation may be, the minimum of time assignable to the coal ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... asked me whether he should not hail them before they got farther away from us; frankly confessing, as he put the question, that his horse was nothing like equal to the pace of the horse ahead. Mechanically, without assignable purpose or motive, I declined his offer, and told him simply to follow at any distance he could. While the words passed my lips, a strange sensation stole over me: I seemed to be speaking as the mere mouthpiece of some other voice. From feeling hot, and moving about restlessly the moment ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the scheme, I have endeavored that no primary, and that even no secondary, service of the state should suffer by its frugality. I mean to touch no offices but such as I am perfectly sure are either of no use at all, or not of any use in the least assignable proportion to the burden with which they load the revenues of the kingdom, and to the influence with which they oppress the freedom of Parliamentary deliberation; for which reason there are but two offices, which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Charles Badger Clark, Jr., and Herbert H. Knibbs. To these two authors, as well as others who have permitted me to make use of their work, the grateful thanks of the collector are extended. As will be seen, almost one-half of the selections have no assignable authorship. I am equally grateful to these ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... extant authority. On the other hand, seventy-six passages differ both from the Hebrew and LXX where the two are together, ninety-nine differ from them where they diverge, and besides these, three, though introduced with marks of quotation, have no assignable original in the Old Testament at all. Leaving them for the present out of the question, we have a hundred instances of agreement against a hundred and seventy-five of difference; or, in other words, the proportion of difference to agreement is as ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... sheep and a crossbred sheep each cost the same sum, say, for convenience, L10, to rear and maintain; and that there are no special costs assignable to the wool and the mutton respectively, as, of course, in ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... get into the worst fishing-boat?-There is no assignable reason for that, but very often you will find that certain men who have been unfortunate just ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... the phenomenal law of conservation of energy, sometimes the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same. This law is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his special vaguenesses "mental force" and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... corresponding to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, then in what particular stage of that development may we, the tenants of this respectable little planet Tellus, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... purport of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such mysterious terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There seemed to be no assignable cause for the fact that the mixture of rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stood for some moments trembling for no assignable reason, as he saw in front of the range a fat German hired girl sitting in the lap of a fat ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... had escaped from the affair, they took the hint, and, running up along the slope of the Acrocorinthus, succeeded in repelling an attack of the Argives and the rest. While they were still deliberating what they ought to do, down fell a capital from its column—without assignable cause, whether of earthquake or wind. Also, when they sacrificed, the aspect of the victims was such that the soothsayers said it was better to descend from ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... at Abbeville, represented in my first diagram, the air is absolutely calm at the ground surface, and the motion of its upper currents extremely slow. There is no local reason assignable for the presence of the cirri above, or of the thundercloud below. There is no conceivable cause either in the geology, or the moral character, of the two sides of the town of Abbeville, to explain why there should be decorative fresco on the sky over ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... the girl; and, laughing, she ran to the glass to admire herself. 'Barnes said I looked sweet this morning;' and five minutes after she was tossing her head nervously, declaring she was miserable, and often she burst out crying for no assignable cause. Mrs. Barton consoled and flattered gaily; but the sweet placid countenance was sometimes a little troubled. As the girls left the breakfast-room one morning she said, as if asking ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... of Augustus, who reverently visited it. Southwards still, over the hills of Parnassus, which remained for the inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his presence, he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From Boeotia he passes to Attica; to the villages first; at last to Athens; at an assignable date, under Peisistratus; out of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is reducible to some kind of being and some degree of good. But there is no assignable kind of being to which such a power can belong; as anyone may see by running through them all. Nor is it reducible to some degree of good; for neither is it one of the goods of least account, since sacraments are necessary ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... to the same inheritance of enforced conformity that we glide so easily towards the studied increase of pain. If some men were able to perceive what lay in the other scale, if they made a free choice, after deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, and the few ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... is, What laws can we assign which will determine the process of composition? The phrase 'association' admittedly expresses some general and very familiar truths. Innumerable connections may be established when there is no assignable ground of connection in the ideas themselves other than the fact of a previous contact. One idea not only calls up the other, but in some way generates a belief in an independent connection. We hear thunder, for example, and think of lightning. The two ideas are entirely distinct and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... attested by the multiplied schemes of pillage and plunder to which the public domain has been exposed within the past thirty or forty years. Among these the project of Land Bounties to soldiers has been conspicuous. Of the millions of acres disposed of by the Government through assignable land-warrants in the pretended interest of the soldiers of the Mexican War a very small fraction was appropriated to their use. The great body of the land fell into the hands of monopolists, who thus hindered the settlement and productive ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... aquatic salamanders; and when placed in the water the young ones swim about like the tadpoles of the water newt. Now, to suppose that these utterly useless gills were specially designed is to suppose design without any assignable purpose; for even the far-fetched assumption that a unity of ideal is the cause of organic affinities, becomes positively ridiculous when applied to the case of embryonic structures, which are destined to disappear before the animal is born. Who, for instance, ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... in the central part of the oasis. I asked the talebs the meaning of some of the names of the gates, but they could not tell. Many proper names of places and persons, amongst them as with us, have now no assignable meaning ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... you are in the wrong.'—'You think so?' he would reply calmly, at the same time asking for my reasons, which he would listen to with great patience, and openness to conviction. Indeed, it was evident that the firmest opposition, so long as it rested upon assignable grounds and principles, won upon his regard; whilst his own nobleness of character still moved him to habitual contempt for timorous and partial acquiescence in his opinions, even when his infirmities made him most anxious ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... when your host invites you to dine at a given hour, you pay him the compliment of arriving punctually at his house. In England alone, the incomprehensible and discourteous custom prevails of keeping the host and the dinner waiting for half an hour or more—without any assignable reason and without any better excuse than the purely formal apology that is implied in the words, ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... and of the traditions of her family and clan, now not only her mother was dead, but the whole family of the Epulones had perished except herself and the Brinnarian clan was represented by but three families, her relationship to which was fainter than any assignable degree of cousinship; then she had been full of elation at her lofty position in the world, now she was perfectly at home in her environment and felt no emotion at ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Vienna, especially to the Hungarian Majesty, this wonderful reconquest of Bohemia, without battle fought,—or any cause assignable but Traun's excellent manoeuvring and Friedrich's imprudences and trust in the French,—was a thing of heavenly miracle; blessed omen that Providence had vouchsafed to her prayers the recovery of Silesia itself. All the world was crowing over Friedrich: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... definition we have gained is of the absolutely static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations between space-points and time-points, which relations themselves are as fixed as the points are. It gives positions assignable ad infinitum, but how the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention. The body gets there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions, however numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, so Zeno, using nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternative but to ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations. Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself, since it is not contingent or questionable at all. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of animals arise more slowly than those of plants; they are therefore less easily watched, and less easily assignable to their true causes, but they arise none the less surely. As regards these causes, the most potent is diversity of the surroundings in which they exist, but there ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... replied he, with a faint smile bordering on a sneer: 'to abuse your friend and knock him on the head without any assignable cause, and then tell him the deed was not quite correct, but it's no matter whether he pardons ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... June I had been badly wounded in the head, and for three months was incapacitated for service. In truth, I had done no actual duty since, being then, as for many years afterward, subject to fits of fainting, sometimes without assignable immediate cause, but mostly when suffering from exposure, excitement or excessive fatigue. This combination of them all had broken me down—most ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... a surprising result—a result that normally would not have happened. Yet, on this particular day, it could not have happened differently. It had been a red-letter day from the beginning, from no assignable cause an exciting joyous day, and the thrill of the hard fast game, the shower, the rub, the walk, had brought her up to what engineers speak of as ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the constituent parts of the mineral bodies as "de lames infiniment minces;" but who is it does not see, that these infinitely thin plates are no other than bodies of three dimensions, contrary to the supposition; for, infinitely thin, means a certain thickness; but the smallest possible or assignable thickness differs as much from a ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... set forth in the preceding chapter, all mental states are effects of physical causes, it follows that what are called mental faculties and operations are, properly speaking, cerebral functions, allotted to definite, though not yet precisely assignable, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... whereof they ought to fear, but for whom, nevertheless, the very thought of death is fraught with all manner of terrors. As some are naturally afraid in the absence of light, and tremble with fear at being alone in a dark and lonely dwelling, or spot, or place, so there are many who, without assignable reason, other than a native tendency, are appalled at ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... his own pleasure; and as he had seized the lands without our knowing why or wherefore, so the portion which he took away from some persons he gave to others, in the same arbitrary manner, and without any assignable reason. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... imitated; as they sometimes betrayed the flights of a madman, and sometimes the asperities of a cynic. His attachments were warm, but fickle both in choice and duration. He would frequently part from one, with whom he had lived on terms of close intimacy, without any assignable cause; and his enmities, once fixed, were immovable. There was, indeed, a kind of venom in his antipathies; nor would he suffer his ears to be assailed, or his heat to relent, in favour of those against whom he entertained animosities, however capricious and unfounded. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Cases Illustrative of the Idea of Capital. Chapter IV. Fundamental Propositions Respecting Capital. 1. Industry is Limited by Capital. 2. Increase of Capital gives Increased Employment to Labor, Without Assignable Bounds. 3. Capital is the result of Saving, and all Capital is Consumed. 4. Capital is kept up by Perpetual Reproduction, as shown by the Recovery of Countries from Devastation. 5. Effects of Defraying Government Expenditure by Loans. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... is a delight to literary students; not a volcanic outburst to shake the foundations of society. Nearly all that he has to tell us is that he ran away from school, spent some time in London, for no very assignable reason, in a semi-starving condition, and then, equally without reason, surrendered at discretion to the respectabilities and went to Oxford like an ordinary human being. It is no doubt a proof of extraordinary literary power that the facts ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... breaking faith with him, or in treating him worse than he deserves, or worse than other people who have no greater claims, in each case the supposition implies two things—a wrong done, and some assignable person who is wronged. Injustice may also be done by treating a person better than others; but the wrong in this case is to his competitors, who are also assignable persons. It seems to me that this feature in the case—a right in some person, correlative to the moral obligation—constitutes ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... ascribed to him. And what is meant by its being a matter of history? why, that it has ever been so believed, so declared, so recorded, so acted on, from the first down to this day; that there is no assignable point of time when it was not believed, no assignable point at which the belief was introduced; that the records of past ages fade away and vanish in the belief; that in proportion as past ages speak at all, they speak in ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... and forward before the door. The vaguely terrible suspicion which had risen in his mind at the terminus had forced itself by this time into a definite form which was abhorrent to him. Without the shadow of an assignable reason for it, he found himself blindly distrusting his wife's fidelity, and blindly suspecting Mr. Bashwood of serving her in the capacity of go-between. In sheer horror of his own morbid fancy, he determined to take down the number of the house, and the ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... is a low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to blight ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... end of Victoria Street began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact, the Evening Star declared that it was one more instance of the astonishing instinct of human beings en masse; for it was not until an hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet the truth remained that ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase for ever and be greater than any assignable quantity, yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... that, so far as you know, your husband capriciously struck you out of his will, without assignable reason or motive for doing so, and without other obvious explanation of his conduct than that he acted in this matter entirely under the influence of Mrs. Lecount, I will immediately take Counsel's opinion touching the propriety of disputing the will on this ground. If, on ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins |
