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h makes an act or an event unavoidable; irresistible force; overruling power; compulsion, physical or moral; fate; fatality. So spake the fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds. Milton.

Physical force or steadiness; muscular power and control; constitutional vigor. he led me on to mightiest deeds, Above the nerve of mortal arm. Milton.

To constrain by physical, moral, or legal force; to put under obligation to do or forbear something. The obliging power of the law is neither founded in, nor to be measured by, the rewards and punishments annexed to it. South. Religion obliges men to the practice of those virtues which conduce to the preservation of ou…

ands in the way, or opposes; anything that hinders progress; a hindrance; an obstruction, physical or moral. If all obstacles were cut away. And that my path were even to the crown. Shak.

To perform a work or labor; to exert power or strengh, physical or mechanical; to act.

The act or process of operating; agency; the exertion of power, physical, mechanical, or moral. The pain and sickness caused by manna are the effects of its operation on the stomach. Locke. Speculative painting, without the assistance of manual operation, can never attain to perfection. Dryden.

Having the power of acting; hence, exerting force, physical or moral; active in the production of effects; as, an operative motive. It holds in all operative principles. South.

To resist or antagonize by physical means, or by arguments, etc.; to contend against; to confront; to resist; to withstand; as, to oppose the king in battle; to oppose a bill in Congress.

That branch of physical science which treats of the nature and properties of light, the laws of its modification by opaque and transparent bodies, and the phenomena of vision.

Full of pain; causing uneasiness or distress, either physical or mental; afflictive; disquieting; distressing Addison.

A kind of pseudomorph, in which there has been a change of physical characters without alteration of chemical composition, as the change of aragonite to calcite.

The change of one mineral species to another, so as to involve a change in physical characters without alteration of chemical composition.

Having the quality of enduring; physically able to suffer or bear. Patient of severest toil and hardship. Bp. Fell.

Capable of being penetrated, or seen through, by physical or mental vision. [R.] God, whose secrets are pervious to no eye. Jer. Taylor.

The tendency of the mind toward, or its preoccupation with, physical phenomena; materialism in philosophy and religion. Anthropomorphism grows into theology, while physicism (if I may so call it) develops into science. Huxley.

heory that the fundamental phenomena of life are to be explained upon purely chemical and physical principles; -- opposed to vitalist.

inciples of both physics and chemistry; dependent on, or produced by, the joint action of physical and chemical agencies. Huxley.

The science which treats of the earth's exterior physical features, climate, life, etc., and of the physical movements or changes on the earth's surface, as the currents of the atmosphere and ocean, the secular variations in heat, moisture, magnetism, etc.; physical geography.

The natural constitution, or physical structure, of a person. With his white hair and splendid physique. Mrs. Stowe.

. -- Platinum metals (Chem.), the group of metallic elements which in their chemical and physical properties resemble platinum. These consist of the light platinum group, viz., rhodium, ruthenium, and palladium, whose specific gravities are about 12; and the heavy platinum group, viz., osmium, iridium, and platinum, w…