But as there is a double motion of the stars, that is, under the primum mobile, and round the world, by both which, as we have said, they influence, we must consequently suppose, that the significators rule over things subjected to them by this twofold (or double) motion, to wit, under the primum mobile, and round the world.

A primum mobile, therefore, being essential to the celestial mechanism, the same may be proved geometrically to originate in a solar repulsion, or in a repulsive force produced by whatsoever cause, and emanating spontaneously from the central luminary; …

Dante [Alighieri] now mounts up from the Heaven of the fixed stars to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven.

The equinoctial was supposed to revolve, because it was the "girdle" of the primum mobile, and turned with it.

Far more extravagant (insanior) yet is the idea of the whirling of the supposititious primum mobile, which is still higher, deeper, more immeasurable; and yet this incomprehensible primum mobile would have to be of matter, of enormous altitude, and far surpassing all the creation below in mass, for else it could not make the whole universe down to the earth revolve from east to west, and we should have to accept a universal force, an unending despotism, in the governance of the stars, and a hateful tyranny.

Have we got among our primum mobiles the force of such elastic vapours as be generated for the purpose out of nonelastic substances, and are not incondensible? A good magazine of vitr[iolic] acid and powder'd marble would not only save the expence of air in feeding fire, but generate heat.

[M]otion is transferred and modified; by none of them produced:—in all of them motion finds a channel; in none of them … a source. … [W]hat are the several sources of motion, and what are the corresponding prime movers, or primum mobiles?

The Universal Goddess, the World Mother, is among the oldest, "longest-winded," of the great supporting divinities known to the myths of the world. … For just because she is the Great Mother, so was she there before anything else. She is the primum mobile, the first beginning, the material matrix out of which all came forth.

The great wheels, the primum mobiles, that have gone so violently and brought us into this confusion, I move that you will proceed against them, and that the king's gracious intentions may have farther effect, and those only excepted.

Some of the oil-shops colour this [essence of anchovy] with bole armeniac, rose pink, Venice-red, &c.; but all these additions deteriorate the flavour of the anchovy, and the palate and stomach suffer for the gratification of the eye, which, in culinary concerns, will never be indulged by the sagacious gourmand, at the expense of these two primum mobiles of his pursuits.

In the consideration of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who preceded them. … We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself;— …

Simultaneous with these changes, but referring themselves to a totally different order of causes the seat of which is wholly exterior to our globe, and which depend entirely on the action of the sun and moon as the ultimate causes—the prima mobilia—of all these oceanic and atmospheric movements to which continents owe their destruction and reproduction, we have the continual formation of new strata at the bottom of the ocean; …

But when we come to look upon them [strata of the earth], not, indeed, as the prima mobilia, but at least as the instruments, the levers and wedges with which the real primum mobile, the central heat, does its rough work on the crust of our globe, they lose their claim to this ideal permanence, and come to be considered as, in fact, newer than the rocks they penetrate and displace.

The standard metaphor for the role of the grand jury in early modern law was the primum mobile, the wheel that allowed all other wheels to begin their turning.

The primum mobile and main engine of the Information Society in Europe, NDS [new digital services] have been the focus of urgent attention among European Institutions and Member States who are suddenly confronted with the arduous task of transitioning regulations conceived in a very different analogue environment.

Perry would have it that [Hubert] Harrison was "a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X." This formulation, however, is a bit of a stretch: it makes Harrison the primum mobile behind, for example, the Montgomery bus boycott that King spearheaded in the fifties, …

The absolute intractability of the Irish question for successive waves of the English liberal consensus remains with us, at least in the diminuendo of Ulster, to this day; but revolving round this primum mobile of colonialism (and recall: Ireland was put to the sword by parliament, not monarch) are all the other crystal spheres of the expansive English cosmos.

The American poet Ange Mlinko's fifth book is "Distant Mandate" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her title, borrowing a phrase from the writer László Krasznahorkai, refers to art's primum mobile, its primordial first domino. The drive to create art is a "mandate" so ancient that it should probably by now have expired, and yet when it arrives, still, it is always in a hurry.

Primum mobile

Meaning

Noun

Synonyms