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Gravitation   /grˌævɪtˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Gravitation

noun
1.
(physics) the force of attraction between all masses in the universe; especially the attraction of the earth's mass for bodies near its surface.  Synonyms: gravitational attraction, gravitational force, gravity.  "The gravitation between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them" , "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love"
2.
Movement downward resulting from gravitational attraction.
3.
A figurative movement toward some attraction.



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"Gravitation" Quotes from Famous Books



... this remarkable result. This would be a supposition hard to reconcile with the present proportion of land and water on the surface of the globe and with the phenomena of terrestrial contraction and gravitation."[2] ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... similar to what are called discoveries in natural philosophy, in the arts of life, and in some sciences; as the system of the universe, the circulation of the blood, the polarity of the magnet, the laws of gravitation, alphabetical writing, decimal arithmetic, and some other things of the same sort; facts, or proofs, or contrivances, before totally unknown and unthought of. Whoever, therefore, expects in reading the New Testament to be struck with discoveries in morals in the manner in which ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... The leaven, like gravitation, follows the same law on smaller spheres that it follows on the larger. Brother infects sister, and sister brother; parent child, and child parent; shopman shopmate. We often lament the contagious influence of evil, and it is right that we should; but it is an unthankful, unhopeful ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... the people, absolutely opposed to the lesson of their history and to all the experience of the ages in which France had been so great. It could not rest on traditions, or interests, or any persistent force of gravitation. Unless the idea that was to govern the future was impressed with an extreme distinctness upon the minds of all, they would not understand the consequences of so much ruin, and such irrevocable change, and would drift without a compass. The country that had been so proud of its kings, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... observable ever begin or continue to be? In this way. When the first womb of things was pregnant with all the future, there would probably have been existent at any rate not more than one of the formulae which we now call natural laws. This one law, of course, would have been the law of gravitation. Here we may take our stand. It does not signify whether there ever was a time when gravitation was not,—i.e., if ever there was a time when matter, as we now know it, was not in existence;—for if there ever was such a ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... organisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. We may modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneously to evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subvert gravitation: "Je m'en suis apercu etant par terre," is the only result, as in Moliere's lesson ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... without it. It is useless to give it notice to quit, and pretend that it is gone when you have only put a new name upon the door. We must not call it 'attraction,' lest there should seem to be a power within; we are to speak of it only as 'gravitation,' because that is only 'weight,' which is nothing but a 'fact,' as if it were not a fact that holds a power, a true dynamic affair, which no imagination can chop into incoherent successions.[255] Nor is the evasion more ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature—water, snow, wind, gravitation—become ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... trembling towards contact, when once brought into neighborhood? Say rather, heart swelling in presence of the Queen of Hearts; like the Sea swelling when once near its Moon! With the Wanderer it was even so: as in heavenward gravitation, suddenly as at the touch of a Seraph's wand, his whole soul is roused from its deepest recesses; and all that was painful and that was blissful there, dim images, vague feelings of a whole Past and a whole Future, are heaving ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... Lancashire and the chief Midland manufacturing counties the attraction of their own industrial centres acts more powerfully in their immediate neighbourhood than the magic of London itself. Thus, if we were to take the map of England and mark it so as to represent the gravitation towards cities, we should find that every remotest village was subject to a number of weaker or stronger, nearer or more distant, forces, which were helping to draw off its rising population into the eddy of city life. If we ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... with the wind that inconveniences and humiliates you by blowing off your hat in a street full of people. He had no quarrel with me. Neither would a boulder, falling on my head, have had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law by which he was moved—not of gravitation, like a detached stone, but of self-preservation. Of course this is giving it a rather wide interpretation. Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have existed without being married. Yet he told me that he had found ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... a blank, an emptiness. Her heart when it cried out to him produced the queer, creepy effect of a man talking to himself—there was no one to hear or to answer. There was a needle but no pole; there was a law of gravitation, but nothing to justify the ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King

... for the mote in his eye, while from the eye of the speaker himself extends, at an impossible angle, a huge wedge of wood, longer than his head, from which he appears to suffer no inconvenience, and which seems to have defied the laws of gravitation! ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... perfectly good order," said the malicious husband, who descried a most abominable bit of road ready for his purpose; and, suiting the action to the word, he put his spicy nags into a hand-canter. Bang went the springs together; and, despite of all the laws of gravitation, madame and I kept bobbing up and down, and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... take with us when we leave this world and enter the next. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." "Whatsoever a man soweth the same shall he reap," is a law as immutable as the law of gravitation. Our Lord has mercifully opened up a way, a highway, out of a life of sin into a life of holiness. The first step in this way, nay, the first step towards it, is repentance. This involves a very great change in the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... circles circulating and the luminaries shining in vacuo. We want to know how they were brilliant, and what they illuminated. If you wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of gravitation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan them in vain ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... acceleration. The more the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less will be the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less the inducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attack upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born to speak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going on in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even in the case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as the Italian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... going through a wood, should be struck by a falling tree and pinned down beneath it. Suppose that another man, coming that way and finding him there, should, instead of hastening to give or to bring aid, begin to lecture on the law of gravitation, taking the tree ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp the full conception of a spherical earth and its relations with the heavenly bodies as presented by him. So it was also with the final acceptance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case. That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel—and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. We quarrel on ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... in the eighteenth century ran in general an even and logical course. The age succeeding Newton's had for its special task to demonstrate the universal validity, and trace the complex results, of the law of gravitation. The accomplishment of that task occupied just one hundred years. It was virtually brought to a close when Laplace explained to the French Academy, November 19, 1787, the cause of the moon's accelerated motion. As a mere machine, the solar system, so far as it was then ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... Indies naturally gravitate to, and may be expected ultimately to be absorbed by, the continental States, including our own. I agree with them also that it is wise to leave the question of such absorption to this process of natural political gravitation. The islands of St. Thomas and St. John, which constitute a part of the group called the Virgin Islands, seemed to offer us advantages immediately desirable, while their acquisition could be secured in harmony with the principles to which I have alluded. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... interpreted as the oracles of God, is to justify the suspicion that it is groundless and arbitrary, at best a matter of loyalty or good form. I shall present morality as a set of principles as inherent in conduct, as unmistakably valid there, as is gravitation in the heavens. I shall hope to make it appear that the saving grace of morality is directly operative in life; needing no proof from any adventitious source, because it proves itself ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... monotony to the rows of villas, however picturesque they may be in themselves, which face the sea at other places. So artistic is the appearance of the houses that the term 'Style Duinbergen' is used by architects to describe it. Electric lighting, a copious supply of water rising by gravitation to the highest houses, and a complete system of drainage, add to the luxuries and comforts of this plage, which is one of the best illustrations of the wonders which have been wrought among the dunes by that spirit of enterprise which has done so much for modern ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond

... belief. They raced and chased to and fro, up, down and across, in circles, triangles, parabolas and rectangles, until it was fairly bewildering. Really, they seemed to move just as freely and certainly on the tree-trunk as if they were on the ground, with no such thing in sight as the law of gravitation. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the New Model, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it does in Newton's investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering of landscape, or Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absent altogether if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy, energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industrious administrators ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... said, which is initiated anywhere on the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar system—every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period are only ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... no chance of hit or miss—it is inevitable as life—it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the rest, but in the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... larger scenes are topped with charming figures of angels in primitive skies of the "twisted ribbon" style of cloud, angels whose duty and whose joy is to trump eternally and float in defiance of natural laws of gravitation. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... hold more than an actual thimbleful, though they need not hold a pint, and should bear some relation to the laws of gravitation in their poise upon the saucer. They should have a smooth rim. A fluted edge is a most uncomfortable finish for a drinking vessel. The wafer-basket may be silver, china or ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... rightly understood and applied will do for medical science what the law of gravitation has done for physics and astronomy, and what the laws of chemical affinity have done for chemistry, they will place medical science in the ranks of exact sciences. The understanding and proper application of these truths will explain every fact and phenomenon in the processes of health, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... occurrence of 'spontaneous' and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men, Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and produce ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big c, which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a working man standing alone, and without ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... force save of that which emanates from human volition. All our knowledge of force presents it as an effort of intelligent will. "We are driven," says Winchell, "by the necessary laws of thought, to pronounce those energies styled gravitation, heat, chemical affinity and their correlates, nothing less than intelligent will. But as it is not human will which energizes in whirlwind and the comet, it must be divine will." "In all cases, the creative power of God is an act of power, and ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... only to go out of your way to do a kind and perfectly disinterested action and experience the glow of sheer happiness that it brings, in order to realize that you are dealing with a law of life that is as sure and unalterable as the law of gravitation. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin

... dare not tell. Even Scheff, who knows some things, dares not tell. If Illowski's discovery—which is based on the great natural laws of heat, light, gravitation, electricity—if this discovery were placed in the hands of fools, the world would perish. Music has been so long the plaything of sensuality, the theatre for idle men and women, that its real greatness is forgotten. In Illowski's hands it is a moral force. He comes to ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... column of basalt quivers to its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man out of dust,—once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... by cows is attended by such severe muscular exertion, jars, jolts, mental excitement, and gravitation of the womb and abdominal organs backward that it may easily cause abortion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... was in this very plague year that Newton formulated his theory of gravitation. Incredible as it may seem, at this same date even such men as Dryden held ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe

... rolling, whose Cause-of-Liberty verses let no man inquire after]: Stair prints Memoirs, Van Haren makes Odes; and with so much prose and so much verse, perhaps their High and Slow Mightinesses [Excellency Fenelon sleeplessly busy persuading them, and native Gravitation SLEEPILY ditto] will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... had taught him, and whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word for explaining one's failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars, wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction, and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where the blue and green and yellow flames from the smelters and the belching black smoke from the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... within an architectural niche. His head rests on a pillow, the tassels of which fall downwards towards his feet. When placed against a wall the need for a pillow may vanish, but the meaning and use of the niche becomes apparent, while the tassels no longer defy the laws of gravitation. He becomes a standing figure at once, and the flying putti above his head assume a rational pose. It has been suggested that this and similar tomb-plates were always intended to be placed upright, and that the delicate ornamentation, of which ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, and the circumstances surrounding our habitation, as the stone projected from the hand, or the shot from the mouth of the cannon can escape the bounds of gravitation. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... from action to action, from progress to progress, with a rapidity dangerous while it dazzles; resembling in this the career of individuals impelled onward, first to obtain, and thence to preserve, power, and who cannot struggle against the fate which necessitates them to soar, until, by the moral gravitation of human things, the point which has no beyond is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the prelude of their fall. In such states Time indeed moves with gigantic strides; years concentrate what would be the epochs of centuries in the march of less popular institutions. The planet ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... itself quickly, unceremoniously, and easily. Ethelberta had let him go a second time; yet on foregoing mornings and evenings, when contemplating the necessity of some such explanation, it had seemed that nothing less than Atlantean force could overpower their mutual gravitation towards ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... are for ever regulated by a moral law of gravitation, which, like the physical one, holds them down to earth. The bright glory of day, and the silent wonders of a starlit night, appeal to their minds in vain. There are no signs in the sun, or in the moon, or in the stars, for their reading. They are like some wise men, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... save the situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready money from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported the old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase, sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready money, and spent that capital as though it had ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... not," said he; "but such as they are, they show me the inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is ubiquitous and eternal—as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him—he takes half a minute to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. "I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the "Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation? Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr. Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot understand ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... boulder that he was, no sooner did he perceive a truth than he rolled after it with all the massive gravitation of his being, inconsiderate as to what might lie in his way;—from which it is to be inferred, that, with all his intellect and goodness, he would have been a very clumsy and troublesome inmate of the modern American Church. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... if they were the only agents known in this world. But every man knows that he himself possesses the power to control the laws of nature, by bringing a higher law to arrest a lower; as when the power of vegetation arrests the law of gravitation, and sends the drop of rain which had trickled down the outside of the bark of the pine, climbing up again a hundred feet; or as when the power of animal life converts a hundred weight of grass into a leg of mutton; ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... the child of all her gravity. If you ask me how this was effected, I answer: In the easiest way in the world. She had only to destroy gravitation. And the princess was a philosopher, and knew all the ins and outs of the laws of gravitation as well as the ins and outs of her boot-lace. And being a witch as well, she could abrogate those laws in a moment; or at least so clog their wheels and rust their ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald

... thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the place of gravitation as the centre, thus naively declaring mind and not matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this, feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... in preference to Newton's explanation; for, excepting the law of parsimony, there is certainly no other logical objection to the statement that the movements of the planets afford as good evidence of the influence of guiding angels as they do of the influence of gravitation. ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that "the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation," and affirms that "much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear

... and began to wonder why they fall. 3. He studied the cause of their falling, wishing to discover whatever laws of nature he could. 4. He watched various falling objects, and tried to calculate their velocity ("rapideco"). 5. Finally he recognized that force which is called gravitation. 6. Of course ("kompreneble") gravitation had always existed, but its laws were not noticed or clearly defined until Newton studied the matter. 7. If gravitation should not exist any more, no rain would fall, but instead ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman

... gravitation of the 'common-sense' philosophy to pure empiricism. He was the last in the genuine line of Scottish common-sense philosophers. When after what may be called the unphilosophical interregnum which followed Brown's death, Hamilton became professor, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... sun and the moon and the stars, to the animal creation, and the trees, and every living thing. So Chesterton pictures God, giving His name to what others, including Christians, call natural law, or the laws of God, or the laws of gravitation, conservation of energy, and so on, but always laws. For which reason, one is compelled to assume that in his opinion God is now [1915] saying to Himself, "There's another bloody war, do it again, sun," and gurgling with delight. It is dangerous to wander in ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, i.e., that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its leaps, yea, the grasshopper springing from the earth, sets this law at defiance. Almost every common law of matter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... break me. I sprang into the saddle, but before I could seat myself or put my foot in the stirrup, she jerked her head away from Bernard, and commenced a series of exciting manoeuvres, rearing, plunging, and kicking. For about five minutes I defied all the laws of gravitation. But when the coachman tried to seize her bridle, she shied so suddenly that I was surprised to find myself on terra firma. I jumped up directly and assured every one that I had not hurt myself in ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland

... "The gravitation-screen generators, sir," he said. "Number one went to the bad about an hour and a half ago. We have been working upon it steadily since; but I have to report, sir, that it ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... written with more force if he had been acquainted with various small details relating to the position and surroundings of many of the caves. The heavy cold air of winter sinks down into the glacieres, and the lighter warm air of summer cannot on ordinary principles of gravitation dislodge it, so that heat is very slowly spread in the caves; and even when some amount of heat does reach the ice, the latter melts but slowly, for ice absorbs 60 deg. C. of heat in melting; and thus, when ice is once formed, it becomes a material guarantee for the permanence ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... view of showing that if the Nebular Hypothesis be true, the genesis of the solar system supplies one illustration of this law, let us assume that the matter of which the sun and planets consist was once in a diffused form; and that from the gravitation of its atoms there resulted a gradual concentration. By the hypothesis, the solar system in its nascent state existed as an indefinitely extended and nearly homogeneous medium—a medium almost homogeneous in density, in temperature, and in other physical attributes. The first ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... against the Grand-Duke? Kur-Sachsen, the Polish Majesty again? Belleisle himself must have paused uncertain over such a welter,—and probably have done, like the others, little or nothing in it, but left it to collapse by natural gravitation. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... later embodied in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-time cooperators denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed memories well stored with ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... another example, the greatest law of physics—Newton's law of gravitation. Huge balls of lead, as used by Cavendish, produce by their gravitational effect a minute rotation of a delicately suspended bar, carrying smaller balls at its extremities. But no such feeble means sufficed for ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale

... universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different forces which act as invisible agents upon the subtle and imperceptible forms of matter. These invisible agents or ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... it is stated, that Newton's proving, that, if a body revolved in an elliptical orbit with the sun as a focus, the force of gravitation toward the sun would always be in the inverse ratio of the square of its distance, "was equivalent to proving, that, if a body in space, free to move, received a single impulse, and at the same moment was attracted to a fixed centre by a force which diminished as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... that subject. One Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of St. Andrews, was the only sensible, or at ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation—this wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... which a year ago was one foot high, has now become two feet high, while it is unchanged in proportions and structure—what are the necessary concomitant changes that have taken place in it? It is eight times as heavy; that is to say, it has to resist eight times the strain which gravitation puts on its structure; and in producing, as well as in arresting, every one of its movements, it has to overcome eight times the inertia. Meanwhile, the muscles and bones have severally increased their contractile ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... explain, how men could be poets, or orators, before they were aided by the learning of the scholar and the critic? we may inquire, in our turn, how bodies could fall by their weight, before the laws of gravitation were recorded in books? Mind, as well as body, has laws, which are exemplified in the course of nature, and which the critic collects only after the example has shown what ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... on the head by a lump of coal, and the judges of the First Division of the Court of Session were considering whether his case raised a question of law or of fact. "The only law I can see in the matter," said Lord Maclaren, "is the law of gravitation." ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... vein in the soil of intellect will sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe" of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies." Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of Xenocrates, and was so struck with the energy ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... constantly prancing by, with private prickings of spurs, for the benefit of the perambulating flower-bed. Some of these gentlemen affected painfully tight uniforms, and little caps, kept on by some new law of gravitation, as they covered only the bridge of the nose, yet never fell off; the men looked like stuffed fowls, and rode as if the safety of the nation depended on their speed alone. The fattest, greyest officers dressed most, and ambled statelily along, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott

... he, "do you know, I'm a bit puzzled in some ways, about—well, about night and day, and temperature, and gravitation, and a number of little things like that. Puzzled. We're facing problems here that we don't realize ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... morning I observed a camel crawl, Laws of gravitation scorning, On the ceiling and the wall; Then I watched a fender walking, And I heard grey leeches sing, And a red-hot monkey talking Did not seem the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... dream of creation absolutely without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative basis of differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are apt to lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is perhaps all that Plato ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making "matter" less and less material. Their world consists of "events," from which "matter" is derived by a logical construction. Whoever reads, for example, Professor Eddington's "Space, Time and Gravitation" (Cambridge University Press, 1920), will see that an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern physics. I think that what has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... are mountains, no difference would be noticed between this and any other part of the earth's surface; but if there is water, why, we ought to expect some such state of things as More describes. The gravitation test has also been tried, with very nearly the same result. The surface of the earth at the equator, being farthest from the centre of gravity, indicates the least weight in bodies; but at the poles, where the surface is nearest the centre ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he laid before the Royal Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666; but the erroneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth's diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and it was not till 1687, on the eve of the Revolution, that the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... the contending classes."[20] Here is a summary of that conflict which Professor Small declares "is to the social process what friction is to mechanics."[21] It may well be that "the fact of class struggle is as axiomatic to-day as the fact of gravitation,"[22] yet, when Marx first elaborated his theory, it was not only a revolutionary doctrine among the socialist sects, but like Darwin's theory of evolution it was assailed from every angle by every school of economists. The important practical question that arises out of this scientific ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. That there is a great deal more assent than ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... its elements of deer and Injun. We were conscious of curious illusions, such as a deer with a dozen heads growing out of all parts of a body as spherical as this, our earth, and an Injun with legs that vetoed all laws of gravitation ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... earth is continually giving out female particles, and the male parts of rocks and living bodies are equally continually trying to reach them. That's gravitation." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... Ludgate Hill, was then carried off by the prince, and bore him three sons, who in time became generals. The story is perhaps traceable to Dr. Wilmot, whose daughter married the Duke of Cumberland. Phillips found time to attack the Newtonian theory of gravitation, to advocate a memorial to Shakespeare, to compile a book containing a million of facts, to write on Divine philosophy, and to suggest (as he asserted) to Mr. Brougham, in 1825, the first idea of the Society for Useful Knowledge. Almost ruined by the failures during the panic in 1826, he retired ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... any form for which the weakness and the need of the dependent creature call. Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation, the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is protean. Here it flames as light, there burns as heat, there flashes as electricity; here as gravitation holds the atoms together, there as chemical energy separated ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... United States' territory: each Province enforcing its separate, and differing, tariffs, the one against the other, and others, through its separate Custom House; it was not matter of surprise to find a growing gravitation towards the United States, based, alike, on augmenting ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... was fair. She felt as the freed Psyche must feel when she drops the clay, and lo! the whole chrysalid world, which had hitherto hung as a clog at her foot, fast by the inexorable chain our blindness calls gravitation, has dropped from her with the clay, and ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... like the original work on gravitation or relativity. No possible computer would be of any use. That ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... and those of a chemical, origin. By the name mechanical are designated beds of mud, sand, or pebbles produced by the action of running water, also accumulations of stones and scoriae thrown out by a volcano, which have fallen into their present place by the force of gravitation. But the matter which forms a chemical deposit has not been mechanically suspended in water, but in a state of solution until separated by chemical action. In this manner carbonate of lime is occasionally precipitated ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... Russian soil, in Russian hearts, is the purpose of these lectures to show. For while the laws of the spirit are ever the same in essence, the character of their manifestation varies with time and place, just as in Nature the same force appears in the firmament as gravitation when it binds star unto star, as attraction when it binds in the molecule atom unto atom, and in man as love when it binds heart unto heart. The phenomena therefore, natural to all literature, we shall also find here, but modified by the ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material—being what it is—behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is the law of being of that which obeys ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... has recently shown, by a very able analysis, that there are strong grounds for believing that not only the molecular forces which unite the particles of material bodies depend on the electric fluid, but that even gravitation itself, which binds world to world, and sun to sun, can no longer be regarded as an ultimate principle, but the residual portion of a far more powerful force, generated by that energetic agent which ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... moment that the laws of magnetism, insofar as concerns the relation between distance and power of attraction, are exactly matched by the laws of gravitation." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... gravitation Jacob Brice presently was walking slowly and apparently aimlessly around to where she was standing. He said nothing, however, when he was beside her, and she seemed entirely unconscious of his presence. Her ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... anything save his fixed thought of being with her. As to any harm, there could be none. He had so long regarded Grace as the best woman in the world, that even after the day of kisses, his mind continued in its inertia of faith,—even the gravitation of material facts were unable to check ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the mammalian vertebrates; and his lower jaw, his ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... other science, we must admit facts even when we cannot explain them. The facts of what we call gravitation are obvious, and any attempt to disregard them would result in disaster, yet no satisfactory explanation of gravitation has yet been discovered: many theories have been suggested, but no theory has yet been proved to be true. In the same way it may be necessary to admit that two ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid. To seclude these persons from the rest of the world so that the dreaded spiritual danger shall neither reach them nor spread from them, is the object of the taboos which they have ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... all very foolish and romantic and impossible, and no one recognized this more readily than he. No American ever married a princess of a reigning house, and no American ever will. This law is as immovable as the law of gravitation. Still, man is master of his dreams, and he may do as he pleases in the confines of this small circle. Outside these temporary lapses, Carmichael was a keen, shrewd, far-sighted young man, close-lipped and observant, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... too generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... can rescue from the house on fire! Look at the fisheries all over the world—the herrings of Scotland and the cod of the Baltic might defy us but for thee. What were wells and windlasses without thee? useless as corkscrews to empty bottles. Thou art the strong arm of the pulley and the crane. Gravitation itself, that universal tyrant, had bound all things to the earth but for thy opposition. The scaffolds were thine from which grew the Colosseum, and the Pyramids have arisen in thine arms. The kite of science, which went cruising ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... with that of much smaller bodies. One method is to compare, by balancing the weight of two balls, one above a globe of lead, as large as practicable, and the other below it, so as to have the attraction of the leaden globe pulling up and counteracting the gravitation to the earth. The effect is very slight and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... connecting up a single phenomenon of a body falling a distance of a few feet on the earth with all similar phenomena, through the law of gravitation discovered the unity of the universe. Though Newton carried on important investigations in astronomy, studied the refraction of light through optic glasses, was president of the Royal Society, his chief ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... streams of fire. To the accuracy of this observation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were "possessed," as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched toward truth like an invincible troop. Truth seemed the missing half of their own sphere, toward which, by a subtle and lordly gravitation, they swung. When Tennyson's instincts speak, he is democrat; when his reason and his prejudice (for he was surcharged with both) speak, he is hot aristocrat. When he is biographer for royal Arthur, his instinct speaks, and his conviction holds that character and deeds do and shall count ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... and other good division commanders. On the Southern side may be instanced N.B. Forrest and J.B. Gordon; but these men rarely attained to more than secondary positions, the highest places falling, as if by gravitation, into the hands of West Pointers. An influence there was in the little academy on the Hudson which somehow brought to pass a superior warlike efficiency. The training at West Point, supplemented as it usually was by campaigning on the plains, although duty was done only by men in squads, and the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... outside us and we are not conscious of them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... of nature. In this case also he was quite unprovided with any reason for expecting from physical principles that such a law as he discovered must be obeyed. It is quite true that Kepler had some slight knowledge of the existence of what we now know as gravitation. He had even enunciated the remarkable doctrine that the ebb and flow of the tide must be attributed to the attraction of the moon on the waters of the earth. He does not, however, appear to have had any anticipation of those wonderful discoveries which ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... of the Alps, there are seasons of the year when no traveler passes but at the expense of life, on account of the terrible "thunderbolts of snow" that hang suspended on the sides or summits of the mountains. None can know their hour; but descend they must, by all the laws of gravitation, with resistless energy, sweeping all before them. At such times, all who pass creep along with trembling caution. They move in single file, at a distance from each other, hurrying fast as possible, with velvet step, avoiding all noise, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... in their geographical distribution tend to follow a social and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... that it recurs the dreamer reasons in this way: "I have had before now in a dream the illusion of flying or floating, but this time it is the real thing. It has certainly proved to me that we may free ourselves from the law of gravitation." Now, if you wake abruptly from this dream, you can analyze it without difficulty, if you undertake it immediately. You will see that you feel very clearly that your feet are not touching the earth. And, nevertheless, not believing yourself asleep, you have lost sight of the fact ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson

... dinner, as comforters of your sad heart. Perhaps, too, he was a little glad to feel Esther leaning gently upon him once more. Their love was too sure and lasting and ever-present to have many opportunities of being dramatic. Nature does not make a fuss about gravitation. One of the most wonderful and powerful of laws, it is yet of all laws the most retiring. Gravitation never decks itself in rainbows, nor does it vaunt its undoubted strength in thunder. It is content to make little show, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... glossy. A little lower down it assumed a fleecy form; and then shot forth in millions of tubular shapes, which chased each other more like sky-rockets than anything else to which I can compare them. The changes were as singularly beautiful as they were varied, in consequence of the difference in gravitation, and rapid evaporation, which was taking place before the waters reached the bottom. Dense clouds of vapour rose for a considerable height, mingling with the atmosphere, and presenting in their descent the most brilliant rainbows. From the rocky sides of the immense basin hung shrubs and bushes, ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... II., "Henry VIII.," with a grand spectacle of a coronation, had been presented at the theatres, the armour of one of the kings of England having been brought from the Tower for the due accoutrement of the champion. And here we may note a curious gravitation of royal finery towards the theatre. Downes, in his "Roscius Anglicanus," describes Sir William Davenant's play of "Love and Honour," produced in 1662, as "richly cloathed, the king giving Mr. Betterton his coronation suit, in which he acted ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course of gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... larger thrust exerted by the screw in pressing forward the shaft and with it the vessel, but by the gravitation against the stern of the wave of water which the screw raises by its rapid rotation. This wave will only be raised very high when the progress of the vessel through the water is nearly arrested, at which time the centrifugal action of the screw is very great; and the vessel ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... is the story of Newton, who felt an apple fall upon him as he lay under a tree, and thought to himself: "Why did that apple fall?" Such was the simple origin of the theory of the gravity of bodies, and that of universal gravitation. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... mere good feeling of neighbors, the companionable sentiment of cities and clans, proves a valuable succedaneum for that deeper principle which is good for all places and times. But this sentiment, like gravitation, diminishes in the ratio of the square of the distance, and at any considerable remove can no longer be reckoned upon as a counter-balance to the lawlessness of egotism. Athenians could be passably just, or at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... plants, (3) AKASH or ether, inert and structureless, as a basis for transmitting subtle forces, (4) the solar fire as the cause of all other forms of heat, (5) heat as the cause of molecular change, (6) the law of gravitation as caused by the quality that inheres in earth-atoms to give them their attractive power or downward pull, (7) the kinetic nature of all energy; causation as always rooted in an expenditure of energy or a redistribution of motion, (8) universal dissolution through the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... the behaviour of gases under varying temperature and pressure assumes the form pv RT; so stated, this law is independent of chemical composition and may be regarded as a true physical law, just as much as the law of universal gravitation is a true law of physics. But this relation is not rigorously true; in fact, it does not accurately express the behaviour of any gas. A more accurate expression (see CONDENSATION OF GASES and MOLECULE) is (p a/v^2)(v - b) RT, in which a and b are quantities which depend ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... it is to go back in imagination to the days before men grasped the meaning of natural law! We take gravitation for granted but, when Newton first proclaimed its law, the artillery of orthodox pulpits was leveled against him in angry consternation. Said one preacher, Newton "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism" ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... Strassburg, or Notre Dame—has a thousandfold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is simply a building; these are poems. I never look at one of them without feeling that gravitation of soul toward its artist which poetry always excites. Often the artist is unknown; here we know him; Erwin von Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest, in architecture. We visited his house—a house old and quaint, and to me full of suggestions ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I 'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation;' And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall or with ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... With an extraordinary width of comprehension, an extraordinary pliability of intelligence, Voltaire touches upon a hundred subjects of the most varied interest and importance—from the theory of gravitation to the satires of Lord Rochester, from the effects of inoculation to the immortality of the soul—and every touch tells. It is the spirit of Humanism carried to its furthest, its quintessential point; indeed, at first sight, one is tempted to think that this quality of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... will sit, Aunt Pen; for that is preferable to staggering about the room with a partner who has no idea of the laws of gravitation." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... tie they recognized was a partnership in gain. What civilization or true citizenship could there be in a society in which the family circle and its kindred outgrowth—the school and the church—were unknown! The denizens of that mountain camp slid, by an irresistible law of gravitation, away from civil order, from social beneficence, and from humanity. They gorged themselves, and swore, and wrangled, and fought, and like the "dragons of the prime," they tore each other in their selfish greed for that which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she had floated into Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she heard the popular doom of them both in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley

... wasted a single moment in defending God's Word in my pulpit. I have always held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; God will take care of His Word if we ministers only take care to preach it. We are no more called upon to defend the Bible than we are to defend the law of gravitation. My beloved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, has well said that if ministers, "instead of trying to prop the Cross of Christ, would simply point men to that Cross, more souls would be saved." ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... Kaiser Karl's in particular, is not to be called an intentionally unjust one; the contrary, I rather find; but it is, beyond others, ponderous; based broad on such multiplex formalities, old habitudes; and GRAVITATION has a great power over it. In brief, Official human nature, with the best of Kaisers atop, flagitated continually by Jesuit Confessors, does throw its weight on a certain side: the sad fact is, in a few years ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... as a missile against the royals; but he was soon instructed in a method of employing it, which always grievously annoyed the enemy. Theoretically, I presume poor Jacko knew no more of the laws of gravitation, than his friends, the seamen, did of centrifugal action, when swinging round the hand-lead to gain soundings, by pitching it far forward into the water; but both the monkey and his wicked associates knew very well, that if a handspike ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... a perplexing character may often be found in the idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeared difficile and contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... purposely admitted through a small opening, distinctly saw the aphides ejecting the fluid from their bodies with considerable force, and this accounts for its being frequently found in situations where it could not have arrived by the mere influence of gravitation. The drops that are thus spurted out, unless interrupted by the surrounding foliage, or some other interposing body, fall upon the ground; and the spots may often be observed, for some time, beneath and around the trees affected with honey-dew, till washed ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... such circumstances. It has peopled the world with fools and knaves. It delays the coming of Christ's kingdom. There are a few wise men, but they are held down as gravitation holds the rock. There are laws of attraction in the world of mind as in that of matter. Good and evil are its poles. Every atom between them is held in place by the operation of opposing forces. The general mass of mind lies within narrow ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller

... into the novel. It involves some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces—sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers. These were not original ideas; they ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... slowly, even through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,—except the way in which I licked the boy who ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... marvelled greatly at the severe curvature of the extremities of the cycle-track, which were shaped like the interior of a huge bowl, and while I was demonstrating to them how, from scientific considerations and owing to the centrifugal forces of gravitation, it was not possible for any rider to become a loser of his equilibrium—lo and behold! two of the competitors made the facilis descensus, and were intermingled in the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... legislature, if it so pleased, might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute, without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if the legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure, in a few years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily formularized for working ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude



Words linked to "Gravitation" :   drift, levitation, travel, natural philosophy, fall, attraction, attractive force, gravitate, movement, physics, change of location, drop, solar gravity, trend, gravity



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