Citations:perfectability

English citations of perfectability

Noun: "the state or quality of being able to be perfected"

					1840 1857 1873	1903 1914 1920 1921 1922 1975
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1840, Frederick Marryat, Olla Podrida, Chapter 49:

  Corporeal attributes and necessities are thrown on one side, as they would destroy the charm of perfectability.

• 1857, S. H. Hammond, Wild Northern Scenes, Chapter XVI:

  This theory I have predicated upon the progress of the material world, aside from animal life, showing that what may have been impossible thousands of years ago, may be possible, or about becoming possible now; that we are about entering upon a new era in the advancement of all things towards perfectability, and that the advent of that era may be marked by an established communication between the living and the spirits of the departed.

• 1873, Henry Coppée, English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History, Chapter XXXVI:

  Shelley's principles were irrational and dangerous. He was a transcendentalist of the extreme order, and a believer in the perfectability of human nature.

• 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XIV:

  So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.

• 1914, Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, Chapter V:

  He had noticed in his circle many an otherwise promising union result in disappointment and dismay, purely in consequence of the false estimate formed by bride or bridegroom concerning the imagined perfectability of the other.

• 1920, Sax Rohmer, The Golden Scorpion, Chapter III:

  The man who has learned the Fifth Secret of Rache Churan—who has learned how to control his will—holds a power absolute and beyond perfectability.

• 1921, Allen Johnson, A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Yale University Press (1921), page 19:

  In him as in his two intimates, Gallatin and Madison, there was a touch of that philosophy which colored the thought of reformers on the eve of the French Revolution, a naive confidence in the perfectability of man and the essential worthiness of his aspirations.

• 1922, Louis Berman, The Glands of Regulating Personality, Chapter X:

  In our ability to exercise a control over these disturbances of balance, to be developed in the future, lies one of the great hopes for a chemical perfectability of human life and nature.

• 1975, Scott Nearing, Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History, Chapter 17:

  8. Aiming at the Truth—the workability, improvement and the perfectability of our planet Earth as a recognized, accepted and essential part of our planetary chain and of our Island Universe.