quasi-mechanical

Updated: May 29, 2025

In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an unexampled pitch of accuracy.

H. G. (Herbert George) Wells - When the Sleeper Wakes

All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays — Second Series

In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an unexampled pitch of accuracy.

H. G. (Herbert George) Wells - The Sleeper Awakes: A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes

The extreme right flank was comparatively narrow, and as it was a point liable to a determined attack, strong earth-works had been hastily thrown up entirely across it, and it had been further protected by a thick, impenetrable mass of abattis, the materials for which were so plentifully furnished by the Virginia woods and in the construction of which the quasi-mechanical army was rapidly efficient.

Henry Morford - Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862