For instance, some of us were of the opinion, and many still are, that the coming and going of meteorological phenomena was accidental and could not he foreseen.

If those causes are known to us, we have the conviction that that phenomenon is necessary, is fate, and, if we do not know them, we think it is accidental.

The town appeared, in comparison, to be but an accidental projection on the hillside.

Now we affirm, that, with accidental exceptions, nationality has always been a matter of race, and was eminently so in the instances he quotes.

The causes of the failure having been found accidental, and capable of a remedy, it was resolved that an attempt should be made immediately in the House in a new form.

But the populations whom the Spaniards have converted to their religion have lost all originality, all sense of nationality; yet the alien religion has never really penetrated into their inmost being, they never feel it to be a source of moral support, and it is no accidental coincidence that they are all more or less stamped with a want of dignity....

INon-necessary, remote, outward, adventitious, or accidental causes: as first from the Nurse.

Many of these accidental causes, which I shall entreat of here, might have well been reduced to the former, because they cannot be avoided, but fatally happen to us, though accidentally, and unawares, at some time or other; the rest are contingent and inevitable, and more properly inserted in this rank of causes.

Education, of these accidental causes of melancholy, may justly challenge the next place, for if a man escape a bad nurse, he may be undone by evil bringing up.

Let them bear witness that have heard those tragical alarms, outcries, hideous noises, which are many times suddenly heard in the dead of the night by irruption of enemies and accidental fires, &c., those panic fears, which often drive men out of their wits, bereave them of sense, understanding and all, some for a time, some for their whole lives, they never recover it.

In this labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage, multae ambages, and new causes as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed: to search out all, were an Herculean work, and fitter for Theseus: I will follow mine intended thread; and point only at some few of the chiefest.

Every thing of the kind before his time was isolated or accidental, and every subsequent attempt has been pursued on scientific or known principles, which he invented and established.

From these considerations Don Henry granted their request; and, yielding to the adventurous spirit which this accidental discovery had excited, he permitted several persons to join in a new projected voyage, among whom was Bartholomew Perestrello, a nobleman of his household.

The circumstance of serpents taking up their abode in the large anthills, must be entirely accidental.

This is true especially of those incidental or accidental modes of response which so frequently appeared in connection with my work that I came to look upon them, the surprises of each day, as my chief means of insight.

Pray, missy, did you find dat in some accidental cotton bag?

It is very easy to assume, that, because events in Nature are in one sense accidental, and the operative forces which bring them to pass are themselves blind and unintelligent, (all forces are,) therefore they are undirected, or that he who describes these events as the results of such forces thereby assumes that they are undirected.

Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature without negativing design in the theist's view.

Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical agencies, than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat-bog, and its transformation into coal?

Returning to the accidental element, it is evident that the strongest point against the compatibility of Darwin's hypothesis with design in Nature is made when natural selection is referred to as picking out those variations which are improvements from a vast number which are not improvements, but perhaps the contrary, and therefore useless or purposeless, and born to perish.

Andnote it wellthese numerous and successively slight variations and gradations, far from suggesting an accidental origin to chairs and to their forms, are very proofs of design.

The negotiation, repeatedly suspended by accidental circumstances, was, however, by mutual agreement and express assent, considered as pending and to be speedily resumed.

His character requires that he estimate the happiness and misery of every condition; observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and know the changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions, and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondency of decrepitude.

Wherefore all those laws which are supposed to be eternal and immutable are, on the contrary, arbitrary, accidental, and made without cogent necessity; for there is none of them that can be accounted for by the essence of bodies.

Motion is so very accidental, and super-added to the nature of bodies, that we do not find in this nature of bodies any primitive or immutable law by which they ought to move at all, much less to move according to certain rules.