From the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the French Revolution the masses everywhere were influenced by the emotional, and at times hysterical, abstractions of the French encyclopedists; and that these had influenced thought in the American colonies is readily shown in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its unqualified assertion of the equality of men and the absolute right of self-determination.

Thus, that extreme concentration of the attention, that perfect abstraction from outward things, which in hysterical persons is the effect of weakness and passive-mindednessof the inability to resist and shake off the spell of passions and emotions; is in others the effect of active self-control, of voluntary concentration, of a complete mastery over passions and emotions.

The legislators in their hands would have been the embodiment of law; they would have represented an abstraction in a form whose harmonious beauty nothing could alter.

Suddenly, I passed from abstraction to intentness; for there, in its standing place, I made out a long undulation, rounded off with the heavy dust.

Those whose mental bias is towards physical science should realize this Law of Growth as the creative force throughout all nature; and those who have a mathematical turn of mind may reflect that all solids are generated from the movement of a point, which, as our old friend Euclid tells us, is that which has no parts nor magnitude, and is therefore as complete an abstraction as any spiritual nucleus could be.

I said all this I must confess, however, not without misgiving, for I could not but be sensible that, in spite of all my allegations to the contrary, my audience was disposed to regard a prediction of this nature, proceeding from a Prime Minister, less as a speculative abstraction than as one of that class of prophecies which work their own fulfilment.

The idea of elevating an abstraction into a great first cause was certainly a long stride in philosophic generalization to be taken at that age of the world, following as it did so immediately upon such partial and childish ideas as that any single one of the familiar "elements" could be the primal cause of all things.

Those retreats of prayer and contemplation have something so congenial to the mind of man, that, perhaps, there is scarcely one that does not propose to close his life in pious abstraction with a few associates, serious as himself.

Then falling into a reverie of sweet and unbroken stillness, with her eyes fixed in abstraction on the fire, Venetia reviewed her life from the moment she had known Plantagenet.

I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach.

No mere abstractions like Time and Space could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled.

" Leaving the Gospeler lost in dark abstraction near the black mantel, the Flowerpot allowed the sexton of the establishment to conduct her funereally into the place assigned for her interview, and stopped aghast before a huge black object standing therein.

A few peasants were seen kneeling in utter immobility and self-abstraction beneath a lamp, which seemed to issue in a crimson flame from a colossal two-fold silver heart, suspended from the ceilingtheir untutored minds were elevated into the belief of a heavenly commune.

You fanatics, with your useless abstractions about human rights, are injuring trade, and endangering the peace of the country.

But beyond a mere gentle abstraction at times he retained his usual calm.

IV., is that Lamb was never a very serious wooer, and that Alice Wn was more an abstraction around which now and then to group tender imaginings of what might have been than any tangible figure.

But his memory doubtless gained an immense additional advantage from his habitual seclusion, from his unconcern with the distracting customs of society, and, most of all, from the imperturbable abstraction under which he studied and observed.

In Euclidean geometry we assume definitions of 'points,' 'lines,' 'surfaces,' etc., which are never found in nature, but form the most convenient abstractions for measuring things.