Even the energy which is seemingly applied to destructive tasks is really subsidiary to a constructive ideal.

Thus the hewing of timber is a destructive task, but its object is not to scatter trees around, but to make a clearing on which to plant wheat; or to have lumber, in order to build a house.

Similar experiments have proved that two of the most destructive of epizootic diseases, sheep-pox and glanders, are also dependent for their existence and their propagation upon extremely small living solid particles, to which the title of microzymes is applied.

It however left the slave population then existing in a state of bondage, and for this necessary compromise the nation seventy-five years later was to pay dearly by one of the most destructive civil wars in the annals of mankind.

The lust has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive.

More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of quantity, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of quality.

In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his nobler self.

That Magna Charta has not wholly escaped the destructive tendencies of a mechanical age.

He had recently bought a little island in the middle of the river, just below the dam, and proposed erecting a new mill upon it; but as the Tunxis (the Indian name of our river) was liable to rapid and destructive freshets, the mill required a deep and secure foundation and a lower story of stone.

Thus, to Saturn, [symbol: Saturn], they gave languid and even destructive influences, for no other reason but because they had been pleased to make this planet the residence of Saturn, who was painted with grey hairs and a scythe.

Except in China, where a law still more sanguinary and destructive prevails in cases of murder, there is hardly a similar instance of deliberate legal severity to be found among nations elevated above barbarism.

The spirit of modern inquiry, and the tendency of modern scholarship, both of which are often said to be solely negative and destructive, have, in truth, restored to splendor, and almost created anew, far more than they have assailed with censure or dismissed from consideration as unreal.

And although they may, to shun such a thought, or be rid of such a contemplation, run away from it to some unprofitable diversion, or, perhaps, suffer themselves to be rallied out of such a thought, so destructive to the way they walk in; yet, to be sure, that man does not feel the peace and tranquillity he does who believes a future state, and is a good man.

That in the nighttime all the winds most destructive to ships are generated.

In this, he described a fatal disease during which the individual affected became languid and weak, and developed a dingy or smoky discoloration of the whole surface of the body, a browning or bronzing of the skin, caused generally by destructive tuberculous disease of the suprarenal or adrenal bodies.

In them all, we may suppose, Life, tired of inventing merely prehensile, destructive and reproductive organs, hit upon the happy thought of contrivances which are in essence chemical factories to speed up the rate of variation and so of a higher evolution.

Nor has it only this destructive or combustion side.

And anger, the destructive passion, must have appeared early upon the scene of life.

I cannot but fear that by an ill-timed and useless opposition to schemes which, however destructive or unjust, we cannot obviate, we shall subject ourselves to numberless calamities, that the ocean will be covered with new fleets of privateers, that our commerce will be interrupted in every part of the world, and that we shall only provoke France to seize what she would at least have spared some time longer.

Had Stella's gentler touches moved the lyre, Soon had the monarch felt a nobler fire: No more delighted with destructive war, Ambitious only now to please the fair; Resign'd his thirst of empire to her charms, And found a thousand worlds in Stella's arms.

90 Let error act, opinion speak, And want afflict, and sickness break, And anger burn, dejection chill, And joy distract, and sorrow kill, Till, arm'd by Care, and taught to mow, Time draws the long destructive blow; And wasted Man, whose quick decay, Comes hurrying on before his day, Shall only find, by this decree, The Soul flies sooner back to me.

So true is it, that lies are by their very nature self-destructive.

Stable societies are amply furnished with force enough to resist all effort in a destructive direction.

It is a mistake of the same kind to suppose that the destructive criticism of the French philosophers a hundred years ago was the great operative cause of the catastrophe which befel the old social régime.

The master error of the latter is to suppose that men are moved mainly by their passions rather than their interests, that all their passions are presumably selfish and destructive, and that their own interests can seldom be adequately understood by the persons most directly concerned.