Their keen interest in this fruitless endeavour provided valuable knowledge for how to identify and work with elements, which in turn, furnished the foundation for modern chemistry.
Some of the definitions Johnson later entered under "vanity" in his Dictionary suggest the range of meaning of his title, including "emptiness," "uncertainty," "fruitless desire, fruitless endeavour," "empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment; petty object of pride," and "arrogance".
After much fruitless endeavour, the chimpanzees would apparently give up and sit quietly in a corner, but some minutes later they might jump up and solve the problem in an apparently novel manner for example, by using a bamboo pole to rake in the banana from outside or, if one pole was not long enough, by fitting one pole into another to form a longer rake.
Unfortunately, this transpired to be a fruitless endeavour and the general conclusion now is that only two such genes exist.
For those who don't see their own need for personal change, most forms and ways of dealing with the experience become a fruitless endeavour.
It is largely a middle ground focus, not an over-kill effort to force the mind or a violent effort to destroy aspects of it (which is a fruitless endeavour), nor is it its opposite - no effort.
Contrary to many ideas about meditation, 'no pain, no gain' is something the Buddha described in his first discourse (the Dhammacakkapavattana sutta) as a fruitless endeavour, or in Buddhist terminology 'wrong view'.
Analyzing comedy is a notoriously fruitless enterprise.
Mid-70s Lennon rejoining Abbey Road Beatles at another?), but there's more of a feeling with We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic of a group aiming for mass acceptance, with the concomitant sense that if they don't achieve it it will have been a fruitless, vainglorious endeavour.
Concern with first or final causes (see teleology) was to be excluded from the scientific endeavour as fruitless or hopeless (if not meaningless).
