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More "Incontrovertible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strict adherence to the laws and traditions of the Provinces, no disrespect had been intended to him, no invasion of his constitutional rights, and that on his part his lifelong devotion to the House of Nassau had suffered no change. He repeated his usual incontrovertible arguments against the Synod, as illegal and directly tending to subject the magistracy to the priesthood, a course of things which eight-and-twenty years before had nearly brought destruction on the country and led both ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Wendell? Yes, he knew with incontrovertible certainty that he was Paul Wendell. But he also knew, with almost equal certainty, that he was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was living—had lived—in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But he knew nothing of the Captain other than the certainty of identity; ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was not discussing the value of shorter working hours, she was pointing out that "equal pay" cannot rule for an entire group of workers when restrictions apply to part of the group and not to the whole body. We meet here, not a theory, but an incontrovertible fact. Pay is not equal, and cannot be, where conditions are wholly unequal. Protection for the woman worker means exactly what it would mean for the alien man if by law he were forbidden to work Saturday afternoon, overtime or at night, ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... justice, and a complaisant judiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on the Continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were to propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... in all the formalities attendant upon the case, Mr. Forrest proved of infinitely more value than the accomplished tutor. The former, an officer reared with deep regard for established law and order, accepted the situation as a fact, the laws as incontrovertible, and considered himself and friends, although involuntarily, as the offenders. The German-American scholar, on the contrary, spent fruitless hours in striving to argue the officials out of their stand and in preaching a crusade against the laws they were sworn to obey. Forrest ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... he had not been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been brought to bear upon it in vain—these things terrified him. The incontrovertible fact ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Roscius, if the Name can sooth him; a Critic; nay, an Orator; but I shall be bold to assert, that we have many, very many, in this Kingdom, of far greater Powers than that Gentleman, whereof some of his Orations, so called, are incontrovertible Testimonies. ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... that he bases his conduct—his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action—upon a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... announcement from Col. Bledsoe that he would resign soon, and that it was his purpose to ask the President to appoint me chief of the bureau in his place. I said I preferred a less conspicuous position—and less labor—but thanked him. He said he had no influence with the Secretary—an incontrovertible fact; and that he thought he should return to the University. While we were speaking, the President's messenger came in with a note to the colonel; I did not learn the purport of it, but it put the colonel in a good humor. He showed me the two first words: "Dear Bledsoe." He said ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... this vitally important question, we shall most of us, I take it, agree upon certain points. In the light of recent knowledge upon, and extended experience of the subject, one such point which now appears incontrovertible is that there are thousands die annually—directly or indirectly—through overfeeding where one dies through insufficient nourishment. And it may at once be said that, as regards these thousands, the death certificates are practically valueless as data in relation to erroneous dieting, so that ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... true that are not expedient to say. Sink everything into Dewey-Aguinaldo cooeperation, that was on both sides honest even if it did not imply any actual arrangement, which, of course, Dewey himself could not make. That here you have the facts,—undenied—incontrovertible." [38] ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... believe are the established phrases—but will he be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking—'Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... taste, but he ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner, it would find its ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... had shown a lack of respect for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in principle identical with incontrovertible logic. In giving the views of the dissenting minority on the action ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the United States will never seek war except for the defence of her rights, her obligations, or her necessary interests. In that sense our policy may always be defensive only, although it may compel us at times to steps justified rather by expediency—the choice of the lesser evil—than by incontrovertible right. But if we have interests beyond sea which a navy may have to protect, it plainly follows that the navy has more to do, even in war, than to defend the coast; and it must be added as a received military axiom that war, however defensive in moral character, must ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... foregoing low wages, the discouraging result of excessive fines, long hours, and unwholesome sanitary conditions, not only the physical system is injured, but—the result we most deplore, and of which we have incontrovertible proof—the tendency is to injure ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... the eighth and sixteenth centuries. They contain theogonies, accounts of the creation, philosophical speculations, fragmentary history, and may be brought to support any sectarian view, having never been intended as one general body, but they are received as incontrovertible authority. In former times great efficacy was attached to sacrifice and religious austerities, but the objects once accomplished in that way are now compassed by mere faith. In the Baghavat Gita, the text-book of the modern ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... wished to find in the prophet some plain and incontrovertible proofs of the Messiahship of Christ, to use against Moslems and Jews. While thus searching, I found various passages that would bear an explanation according to my views, and read on till I came to the fifty-second chapter, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... inconsistency wherever it existed. He won many of his lawsuits by the straightforward method of showing that the one or two vital statements on which the whole case of the opposition rested were false, inasmuch as they were inconsistent with well-established and incontrovertible facts. An instance of ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... be in accordance with his political bias; or should there be nothing uttered by any speaker that may suit his purpose, these ear-trumpets will change the sounds of words and the construction of sentences in such a way as to be incontrovertible, although every syllable should be diverted from its original meaning and intention. They have also the power of larding a speech with "loud cheers," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... of fatalism. Here he has not only the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling. But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds. Not even at Alan Seeger's bidding can ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... vulgar elements of the Belgian population did transgress, there still remains incontrovertible evidence that almost unheard-of kindness was shown to the invading army, and that Germans had displayed brutal insolence to Belgians before a state of war had been declared. Nearly every single letter ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... that the only rational procedure is to begin by determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that several copyists, independently reproducing an ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... enough, and on the plane of purely physical science, and we may therefore be assured that it is not the way in which the memory of the Logos acts; yet it is neatly worked out and absolutely incontrovertible, and as I have said before, it is not without its use, since it gives us a glimpse of some possibilities which otherwise might not occur ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... that the full exercise of this noble function of the associative faculty is inconsistent with absolute and incontrovertible conclusions on subjects of theoretic preference. For it is quite impossible for any individual to distinguish in himself the unconscious underworking of indefinite association, peculiar to him individually, from those great laws of choice ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... upon his panel at any moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Foerster's attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Foerster's evidence appears incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the negro's the guilty man. The facts speak for themselves, and facts are incontrovertible. As surely as the sun shines, Carpenter killed your daughter. Why, then, continue this gossip, slander which besmirches Withers and is bound to attack your ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... conclusion of a life spent rather diligently in study, and in association especially with astronomical practice and physical experiments, I have, in view of certain hitherto unpublished facts, decided to make public almost incontrovertible evidence that in the planet Mars the continuation of our present life, in some instances, has been discovered by myself. I will not dwell on the astonishment I have felt over these discoveries, nor attempt to describe that felicity ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... The incontrovertible part was that things came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late '80's when the two Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of that evening they would come down the side road from ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up this statement, for its truth was incontrovertible, and showed that the father's ill-will was too tangible a thing to be concealed; ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... to his summers, Mr. Port—after a month spent for the good of his liver in taking the waters at the White Sulphur—of course went to Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... The Prince paid us two visits, but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such entire reliance ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... deal, without doing too much; and thirdly, that there really had occurred no circumstances in the Cabinet, or with the King, sufficient to account for their summary dismissal. There is no denying that his first position is incontrovertible, that he makes out a very fair case for his second, and his argument on the third throws great doubt upon the matter in my mind, having previously had no doubt that the King had a good case to show to the world. It is not so much the Duke's opposition to this or that particular ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... increased humanity; and in part it may be so, for the nature of a people can never undergo a sudden and entire change. But I can myself vouch for the lenity which they displayed when they have had the power, and to wit great provocation, to have acted otherwise. The incontrovertible facts, too, remain that Mussulman Turkey has been the first to relinquish the unchristian custom of decapitating prisoners, and other inhuman practices, which the so-called Christians appear little inclined to renounce. This will, of course, meet with an indignant denial ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... sense; that power of execution which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration." Assuredly, no "new definition" can be an effective one which conflicts with Goethe's incontrovertible dictum. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... with too much respectful anxiety as if it were as real as ourselves. He who can give so perfectly the texture of common life, the solidities of common sense, likes to wave his wand over the domain of sturdy prose and incontrovertible custom, and to show how plastic it is, and how easily pierced, and how readily transformed. He has a malicious pleasure in confusing the boundaries of nature and fancy, and mocking the purblind understanding. In the "Midsummer Night's Dream" we have ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... There never was the least symptom of mental disturbance in him after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters (in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense and kind heart, some ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... All these spectators in the background had watched for a long time past; and a simultaneous thrill had run through the household, which no one was conscious of being the cause of, which was instinctive and incontrovertible. If not yesterday, then to-day; or to-morrow, if anything should come in the way to-day. Things had come to such a pitch that they could go no farther. Of this every one in Markland was sure. There is something that gets into the air when excitement and self-repression run high, and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... not arraying evidence for a trial, but leaning over the brink of introspection in the attitude of Narcissus. One need seek no farther than self-love, it may be suggested, to find the motive for the poet's absorption in his reflection. Yet it is incontrovertible that the self-infatuation of our Narcissus has its origin in the conviction that no one else understands him, and that this conviction is founded upon a very real attitude of hostility on the part of his companions. The lack of sympathy between the English poet ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... to the White Bear," said Hans, in the tone of one who states an incontrovertible fact, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as an incontrovertible truth impossible to dispute; but then he had never until lately felt the smallest desire to travel through life accompanied by any one person. He had fallen in and out of love as often as was wholesome or possible for so hard-working a young man, and always looked upon the experience as ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... violating the law. The number of men and women consecrated to God by vows of chastity forms but an imperceptible fraction of the human family, their proportion in the United States, for instance, being only one individual to about every four thousand. Moreover, it is an incontrovertible fact that the population increases most in those countries in which the Catholic clergy exercise the strongest influence; for there married people are impressed with the idea that marriage was instituted not for the gratification of the flesh, but for the procreation ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... secured a copy. And the letter to Charles Jenkinson of 20 June 1777 and to Dr. Dodd of 26 June were of the sort that an enterprising lady might well have wheedled copies from the Doctor. The important point is that the inclusion of the letters in the 1789 printing of the Enquiry provides incontrovertible proof of Miss Reynolds' ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... friends and the enemies of Christianity admit that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is vital to the religion that bears His name. The Christian confidently appeals to it as an incontrovertible fact; the sceptic denies it altogether as a historical reality. "If the resurrection really took place," says an assailant of it, "then Christianity must be admitted to be what it claims to be—a direct revelation from God." "If Christ be not risen," says the Apostle Paul, ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... of revelation and his reduction of Christianity to what he called its "natural" and hence incontrovertible basis carried with it a corollary, that of man's absolute right to religious enquiry and profession. Here he became specific, borrowing from Lockean empiricism his conditions of intellectual assent. "Evidence," he said, "ought to be the sole ground of Assent, and Examination is the ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... interpreted in the light of the "incontrovertible maxim" that "the courts of no country execute the penal laws of another."[91] In the leading case of Huntington v. Attrill,[92] however, the Court so narrowly defined "penal" in this connection as to make ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... better days, seemed seconded by a phalanx of ghostly beings, who had untimely passed away by means of fearful treatment, and by the living miseries of multitudes of shapeless deformed ones, who ever stood unpleasant and incontrovertible witnesses of the cruelties and ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had been made—and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there was the letter! If he, Jimmie Dale, had been in time even ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... means represents the actual state of affairs in a generator, because, as was explained in the previous chapter, a carbide vessel cannot be filled completely with solid; and, indeed, were it so "filled," in ordinary language, much of its space would be still occupied with air. Nevertheless it is incontrovertible that an acetylene plant calculated to supply so many burners for so long a period of time must be very much larger if it is constructed on the non-automatic principle, when the carbide is decomposed all at once, than if the automatic system is adopted, when the solid remains ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... He had long been the butt of all their witticisms, but now Anton was very sorry to see that he was universally disliked. Even the quartette had given him up—at least there was decided enmity between him and both basses. Whenever Specht ventured upon an assertion that was not quite incontrovertible, Pix would shrug his shoulders and ejaculate "Pumpkins." Indeed, almost all that Specht said was met by a whisper of "pumpkins" from one or other; and whenever he caught the word, he fell into a towering passion, broke off ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Alexander; no one, in find, came from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Compared with the MS. described by Mr. Thompson, they are only as straw to gold. I have seen with my eyes, I have touched with my fingers, an incontrovertible testimony to the existence of this document. But the document itself—what has become of it? Sir Thomas Raleigh went to end his days by the shores of the Lake of Como, whither he carried with him a part of his literary wealth. Where did ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... all the vicissitudes of life; an intellect developed along the lines of its greatest possibilities; and an occupation chosen in accordance with the tastes and talents of the individual; it becomes an incontrovertible fact that the education is the controlling factor in the physical life ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the incontrovertible proof of his loss, a catastrophe all the more agonizing since the logic of the situation obliged him to eliminate ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... inspiration, down to the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that the Japanese belong to the civilised nations—the nations that can live ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... treason," repeated Commines, finding some comfort and strength in the bald platitude: it was incontrovertible and at least gave him firm ground under his feet. "Nor can treason go unpunished, or how would the throne be safe for a day? But what the father cannot do, though a king, another can and must; and must," he reiterated, steeling himself with a rising emphasis for what was to follow. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... and a certificate are different things. The latter is, at the very best, only evidence of the former. The fact to be determined is the appointment; the certificate is produced as evidence; it may be controvertible or incontrovertible, as the law may have provided, but there is nothing in the nature of a certificate which forbids inquiry into its verity; it is not a revelation from above; it is a paper made by men, fallible always, and sometimes dishonest ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... did not resent this imputation of ignorance. He merely said, with the air of one who gives an incontrovertible answer: ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... a hotch-potch of new ideas and opinions; you have made a certain acquaintance with researches that are going on in various directions—researches that seem to you to upset a good many ideas that people have hitherto considered incontrovertible and unassailable. But all this has never gone any further than knowledge in your case, Miss West—a mere matter of the intellect. It has not got ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... think, miss, but that the rain was altogether too mastherful for ye? Ye know, me dear, we can't (even the best of us) conthrol the illimints!" This incontrovertible fact Mrs. Connolly gives forth with a truly noble air of resignation. "Come down now, and let me get ye that palthry cup ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... dead but of the living was an unanswerable denunciation of the Sadducean perversion of scripture; and with solemn finality the Lord added: "Ye therefore do greatly err." Certain of the scribes present were impressed by the incontrovertible demonstration of the truth, and exclaimed with approbation: "Master, thou hast well said." The proud Sadducees were confuted and silenced; "and after that they durst not ask him ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... atmospheric air, that explosion takes place inside and outside of the lamp; whereas, when the lamp has burnt sufficiently long to heat the wire gauze, no explosion takes place on the outside of the lamp. These experiments appear incontrovertible in support of his theory, which is, "that the wire gauze is merely the rapid receiver and the retainer of heat, and that it is the caloric in its meshes which prevents the flame of the lamp from being fed by the oxygen of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... the while it is to be admitted that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed, no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... historians record faithfully all that has been said and written from the commencement of time to the period in which they flourish, they will embalm the fact that at least one prose writer of the present day has enunciated that incontrovertible proposition. ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... find words which would fully express his feeling. He had come a long way these last hours in his ideas of life; he saw things naked and clear cut, without dubious shades. But he had to realize now that what his soul accepted as incontrovertible logic ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Brazil and Cuba, composed variously of Americans, French, English, Cuban, Brazilian and German investigators. Nothing has been added to our original findings; nothing has been contradicted of what we have reported, and to-day, after nearly thirteen years, the truths that we uncovered stand incontrovertible; besides, they have been the means of driving out yellow fever from Cuba, the United States (Laredo, Texas, 1903 and New Orleans, La., 1905), British Honduras and ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed appear to be incontrovertible. ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... we saw from time to time. Once I tramped up within thirty feet of a big fellow who was pursuing some studies behind a log. But again the incontrovertible-postmortem-evidence of their food habits was a surprise—the bulk of their sustenance now was berries, in one case this was mixed with the tail hairs—but no body hairs—of a Chipmunk. I suppose that Chipmunk escaped minus his tail. There was ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... which has lit up the flame; but more and more do the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties removable.' As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in the summer ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... motion with her hands, as if sweeping something away from before her. He had become pale and there was a light in his eyes. He felt angry at this girl who had shown herself ready to argue with him,—in her girlish fashion, of course,—and who, after listening to his incontrovertible arguments, fell back resolutely upon a platitude, and considered that she had got ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel's fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney's face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney's face, refined, sharpened, tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney's ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... fact of inner experience, which the poet thinks incontrovertible—the fact that man, every man, necessarily regards evil, whether natural or moral, as something to be annulled, were it only possible—is an immediate proof of the indwelling of that which is highest in man. On this basis, Browning is able to re-establish the optimism which, from ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... great truth in the Science of being, that the real man was, is, and ever shall be perfect, is incontrovertible; 200:18 for if man is the image, reflection, of God, he is neither inverted nor subverted, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... for these cardinal points—I myself am unmarried; Miss Primleigh is herself unmarried; the young lady students contemplating embarkation on this expedition are each and every one of them unmarried also. In view of these facts—which are incontrovertible and not to be gainsaid—do you deem it entirely proper that I, a member of the opposite sex, should be suffered to accompany them throughout the course of their sojourn on alien shores, far, far from home and the restraining influences ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... facts furnish incontrovertible proof of the patience and skill with which astronomy had been cultivated in Mesopotamia, and that, with very inadequate instrumental means, it had reached no inconsiderable perfection. These old ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... question of her portrait has its own vexed (and until now unrecognized) dilemmas. In fine there seems no point connected with our first professional authoress which did not call for the nicest investigation and the most incontrovertible proof before it could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather cumber our path with the trash of discredited Memoirs. Pearson's reprint (1871) is entirely ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... futile because it concerns that practically mythical being, the aboriginal man, about whose social and psychic life no one knows anything, and any theorizer can say what he chooses without fear of shipwreck on incontrovertible facts. Whether the lowest races known to-day are differentiated from the highest only by acquired social and psychic characteristics, or also by differences of psychic nature, may perhaps be an open question. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... views in regard to the country. The matter is hardly worth referring to were it not that these opinions, hastily arrived at and apparently as hurriedly rushed into print, have been accepted by some people as incontrovertible facts. Another class of work that I think a reader should be warned against is the book of the man who has lived in Japan for a time and seen life only from a certain standpoint. The book of a bishop or a missionary may ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... the county of Wilts, he discovered that a farmer near Calne had been infected with the smallpox after having had the cow-pox, and that the disease in each instance was so strongly characterized as to render the facts incontrovertible. The cow-pox, it seems, from the doctor's information, was communicated to the farmer from his cows at the time that they gave out an ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... treat seriously a movement founded upon such arguments as these. They are in the main incontrovertible. We seem to be breathing the very atmosphere of Wagner, and it would be scarcely too much to say that the humanist movement of the Bardi salon was in its intention the forerunner of the German movement dreamed ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... discussion when we were called upon to extend relief? He begged to state this was not the true question: it was whether they would found all the future proceedings upon error and misstatement, or upon incontrovertible facts. Another question was, would they be satisfied to patch up the wounds of the country for a short period or seek to remedy the disease in its spring and in its sources before it became still more alarming and incurable? The Duke ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... incontrovertible. They are not sought to be controverted, except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, the violation of Belgian territory as a first step ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... tempted from the comparatively secure ground of observations and the arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics. Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and no discussions profitable. Huxley, however, not only entered into metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers. His views are to be found scattered through very ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... this rent in a manner contrary to, and utterly inconsistent with, all law and order and the constitution of the country." No member of either House denied the accuracy of this description of the Association's proceedings. And if it were correct, it was incontrovertible that the denunciation of it as an utterly unconstitutional body was not too strong. Indeed, the fact of its "levying a tax" upon a portion of the King's subjects (to say nothing of the intimidation, amounting to compulsion, by which, as was notorious, it was in many ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Galilee, who, with his naked hands, convinced in thirty-five minutes nine larger men than himself of the incontrovertible fact that you cannot keep ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... so remarkable that, if narrated in a history, they would put a severe strain on belief. But the evidence for them is incontrovertible; for no man, writing to people about their own condition, invents a mythical description of their circumstances; and besides, Paul was writing to restrain rather than encourage these manifestations. They show with what mighty force, at its first entrance ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... to year, but from century to century; and for ten, twenty, and thirty years together;(1*) and that neither labour nor any other commodity can be an accurate measure of real value in exchange, is now considered as one of the most incontrovertible doctrines of political economy, and indeed follows, as a necessary consequence, from the very definition of value in exchange. But to allow that corn regulates the prices of all commodities, is at once to erect ...
— Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and of a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and General Wealth of the Country • Thomas Malthus
... as you have said, but the case appears to me one of the simplest. If my uncle wished the bitterest revenge on you, what could be more terrible than cause you to be the executioner of your own son? The vengeance, however, to be complete, depends on his being able to place before you incontrovertible proof that you were the father of the victim. Send, therefore, a messenger to him, one from Gudenfels, who knows nothing of what has happened in this castle of Schonburg, and who is therefore unable to disclose, even if forced to confess, that Wilhelm is alive. Let the ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... fickle, nor deem it unnatural for love so to perish. After learning what she had learned from absolute incontrovertible evidence (it is useless to enter into the circumstances, for no one is benefited by wallowing in unnecessary mire), that she, or any virtuous maiden, should continue to love this man, would have been a ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... States. Here again we are met with the theory that the Government of the United States does not rest upon the soil and territory of the country. We think that this theory is founded on an entire misconception of the nature and powers of that Government. We hold it to be an incontrovertible principle that the Government of the United States may, by means of physical force, exercised through its official agents, execute on every foot of American soil the powers and functions that belong to it. This necessarily involves the power to command ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... concerning their moral obligations in the work of education. It must also be admitted that the changes in school government have been favorable to learning and virtue. For, while it is not assumed that all schools are, or can be, controlled by moral means only, it is incontrovertible that a government of mild measures is superior to one of force. This superiority is as apparent in morals as in scholarly acquisitions. It is rare that a teacher now boasts of his success over his pupils in physical contests; but such claims were common a quarter of a century ago. The change ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... amused them all very much, and David expressed his entire concurrence with it, declaring it to be incontrovertible. Margaret ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... thought!—it must be that he loved her. As she so concluded, a delicate, throbbing fire fluttered in her side, and stole up to burn unreproved and undetected in her cheeks. Her reasoning was no reasoning, of course; but she knew nothing of knightly honour or the dramatic sense, so it seemed incontrovertible. At this discovery she was as full of shame as if she had done a sin. A sin indeed it seemed almost to be in her, that one so high should stoop to one so low, and she not die at once. Sacrilege—should not one die rather than suffer a sacrilege to ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... excellent company. The major was fond of argument, but extremely tenacious of his own opinions. Ellis handled the foils of discussion with just the requisite skill to draw out the major, permitting himself to be vanquished, not too easily, but, as it were, inevitably, by the major's incontrovertible arguments. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... clearer? It will not do to treat it lightly. It is a statement of what international law is on this point from an authority; and the reasons for the doctrine are clear and incontrovertible. Neutrality depends on the fact of war; when, for any cause, that fact no longer exists, neutrality ceases likewise, of course. It is only the application of a well-known maxim of law, that when the reason of a rule fails, the rule itself fails. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... uneasily; "it was fine, surely; but have no fear, Fra Teodoro is not incontrovertible, and the Servi have ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Machiavelli always refused to write either of men or of governments otherwise than as he found them, and he writes with such skill and insight that his work is of abiding value. But what invests "The Prince" with more than a merely artistic or historical interest is the incontrovertible truth that it deals with the great principles which still guide nations and rulers in their relationship with each other ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... great men, lofty as were their inquiries and blameless their lives, had not established any system, nor any theories which were incontrovertible. They had simply speculated, and the world ridiculed their speculations. Their ideas were one-sided, and when pushed out to their extreme logical sequence were antagonistic to one another; which had a tendency to produce doubt and scepticism. Men denied the existence ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... instance, and in the beginning of the reign of his successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This is not disputed; it is only disputed that the sea faade is earlier; of which, however, the proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea faade being ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... us is whether Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as incontrovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto to be the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of to-day. If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in Florence, finding himself bored by all the poets I have named, we can yet believe ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... opinion that consumption is incurable, there exists ample, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Its curability is established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Individuals have recovered in whom there was extensive destruction of pulmonary tissue, and, indeed, entire destruction of one lung. Numerous instances are on record in which persons ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... but discussed and thought over, and every slight allusion to the times was instantly applied. In the prevailing listlessness, the mere fact of increased mental activity was of importance. A spark of genius does much to raise a nation. It is in itself the incontrovertible proof that the race lives: a dead people does not produce men of genius. Whatever awakes one part of the intelligence reacts on all its parts. You cannot lift, any more than you can degrade, the heart of man ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the man who possesses his eyesight must behold a thousand evidences of a Creator denied to a blind man; and in the same way the man who knows most of the material world should see the most conclusive evidences of design and a Designer. The humblest blade of grass preaches an incontrovertible sermon. What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth? Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals? What a gap would it have ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... still alive, and his neighbors; he reflected their views, and the passions of the day. That it was, in view of the events then transpiring, the best policy to turn back the southern army, after the great battle, and not insist too closely on following up the advantage gained, seems now incontrovertible.—R. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... confident. I detailed the circumstances of the marriage of Violet Dalston, then only eighteen years of age, with a Mr. Grainger; the birth of a son; and subsequent disappearance of the husband; concluding by an assurance to the jury that I should prove, by incontrovertible evidence, that Grainger was no other person than the late Sir Harry Compton, baronet. This address by no means lessened the vague apprehensions of the other side. A counsel that, with such materials for ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Government in any act of double dealing. But they had the Emperor Alexander of Russia to deal with. He offered to act as intermediary between Great Britain and France in order to bring about an honourable peace. The British Government refused, and it is stated on incontrovertible authority that Alexander was furious, and upbraided the British with having used troops, which should have been sent to Russia's aid, to crush Denmark. The outrage of attacking a small State which was at peace and with which she had no quarrel was powerfully denounced by Alexander. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... arguments that are incontrovertible, but totally irrelevant; it busies itself with destroying claims which the Zionists have never made. A trio may be taken as representative. It is pointed out with cogency that Palestine is not capable of supporting the twelve million of Jews who ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... logical or argumentative as nature; they can offer no reason or "guess," but they exhibit the solemn and incontrovertible fact. If a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. Their silent and practical logic convinces the reason and the understanding at the same time. Of such sort is always the only pertinent question ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... their increase as property to their children forever.—Levit. xxv: 44, 45, 46. All these nations were made of one blood. Yet God ordained that some should be "chattel" slaves to others, and gave his special aid to effect it. In view of this incontrovertible fact, how can I believe this passage disproves the lawfulness of slavery in the sight of God? How can any sane man believe it, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... thought on the subject, I am obliged to repeat my assertion. Your own convictions in the matter, and your story of the shadow and the peaked cap may appeal to the public and assure you some sympathy, but for an entire reversal of its opinion you will need substantial and incontrovertible evidence. You must remember—you will pardon my frankness—that your husband's character failed to stand the test of inquiry. His principles were slack, his temper violent. You have suffered from both and must know. ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... middle of last summer, sir. Maria, the squaw, came to me with certain proof that made the evidence incontrovertible." ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... commercially, well and good. If not, it starves in a garret along with the artist. If the demand for modern tapestries was large enough, the art would flourish—perhaps. But it is not a large demand, for many reasons, chief among which is the incontrovertible one that the modern work is seldom pleasing. The whole world is occupied with science and commerce, and art does not create under their influence as in more ideal times. What can the trained eye and the cultivated taste do other than turn back to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... discerning public! In fact, Sir, I am reduced to this occasional humiliating employment, derogatory certainly to the dignity of literature, as averting the approach of famine. I write, for various adventurers, poetical panegyric, and illustrate each subject by incontrovertible facts, with appropriate incident and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... South are of two kinds, viz., male and female. Much as has been said of the jackass pro and con, I do not remember ever to have seen the above statement in print before, and yet it is as trite as it is incontrovertible. In the Rocky mountains we call this animal the burro. There he packs bacon, flour and salt to the miners. The miners eat the bacon and flour, and with the salt they are enabled successfully to ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... an incontrovertible fact that to hasten sanitary reform it is only necessary to hold out the helping hand; to encourage the ignorant citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... found it necessary to take notice in some manner of the cruel and incessant attacks made upon her as the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and to fortify herself against them by a published statement of incontrovertible facts. It was claimed on all sides that she had in her famous book made such ignorant or malicious misrepresentations that it was nothing short of a tissue of falsehoods, and to refute this she was compelled to write a "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which should appear the sources from which ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... have the top crust. There will be four hundred and seventy-five men and women present who can draw upon their training and deliver incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather, and cattle, and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent medicines, and dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and baby food, and warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and summer resorts, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... delineation of the theological opinions of the earlier periods of Grecian civilization. That the ancient Greeks believed in one Supreme God has been conclusively proved by Cudworth. The argument of his fourth chapter is incontrovertible.[391] However great the number of "generated gods" who crowded the Olympus, and composed the ghostly array of Greek mythology, they were all subordinate agents, "demiurges," employed in the framing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... one day," he said, mournfully, as if quietly accepting the incontrovertible fact. "I told you once, and I yet trust, that the day may dawn wherein my Lady's heart shall come home to ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... them in the face! Whether they look amongst the most highly civilized peoples or amongst the lowest savages; whether they look into the past history of mankind or into its present condition, there is the stupendous fact of sin, and there is the incontrovertible fact that everywhere men ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... whilst the author avoids every thing that is ridiculous or contemptible, he, at the same time, never rises to any thing that we can commend or admire. He says what is incontrovertible, and what has already been said over and over, with much gravity, but says nothing new, sprightly, or entertaining; travelling on in a plain, level, flat road, with great composure, almost through the whole long, and rather tedious volume, which is little ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... infant—which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates—and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... their temperance,—their "total abstinence" from all the intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which confuse the understanding and mislead the conscience. He could not borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were confined strictly to the exposition and defence of sound opinions on trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer them, only confirmed ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... (and that meant practically everybody) were freed of paying rent by a moratorium. Residents of Moscow and Petrograd are still obliged to pay rent and at a higher figure than in pre-war days. These two incontrovertible facts are evidence that an all-powerful Bolshevik in the Communist Government has in two years installed a lesser measure of Communism in actual practice than existed in the belligerent European countries during the war years. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... it will demolish an infamous privilege. She affirms that an institution which might have been excusable under a landgrave, with a few thousand acres of territory, is inconsistent with the dignity and, to quote continental phraseology, the mission of a first-class state. Here again the reasoning is incontrovertible. Of one other thing, moreover, we may feel perfectly sure, that Prussia having determined to suppress these centres and sources of corruption, they will gradually disappear from Europe. Concede to them ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... front, meet his accusers; while I was to proceed to Transit and Lionise, and having instructed them in the story we had planned, meet him at the place of skulls, fully prepared to establish, by the most incontrovertible and consistent evidence, that we were not the aggressors in the row. A little persuasion was necessary to convince both our friends that their presence would be essential to Echo's acquittal; they had too many just ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Nineteenth Century England became once more a 'nest of singing birds,' as was apparent from the stream of fresh and melodious strains issuing from, among other sources, 'The Bodley Head,'" was greeted with a ripple of girlish laughter from her hearers. It seemed that this incontrovertible statement of fact had somehow aroused reminiscences of another head which, if fresh, had not been precisely melodious on the ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... of the stars, not those produced by the parallaxes at which they are seen from the changing position of the spectator, but the true changes constantly going on in the regions of space, afford us incontrovertible evidence of the 'dominion of the laws of attraction' in the remotest regions of space, beyond the limits of our solar system. The existence of these laws is revealed to us by many phenomena, as, for instance, by the motion of double stars, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... having his revenge on Aunt Charlotte for the torrent of abuse she had poured upon him a few minutes previously. For a short time she sat quite still, the picture of perplexity and irritation. The facts as Austin stated them were incontrovertible, and yet—probably because she lacked the instinct of causality—she could not accept his explanation of them. There are some people in the world who are constituted like this. They create a mental atmosphere around ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... species—act powerfully to prevent this last fatal result, and instead the harassed individual seeks from others the aid which is lacking within himself. He may turn to the priest who seeks and often secures the final common path for faith in an over-ruling Providence, a faith which in many incontrovertible instances has proved sufficient in very truth to move mountains of lesser stimuli; or he turns to a physician, who too often treats the final outcome of the hyperactivity only. The physician who accepts the theory of the kinetic diseases, however, will not only ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... There has probably never existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... hundred yards from the shore, which were headlands of points running out into the sea within the remembrance of the inhabitants. The tops continue covered with trees or shrubs; but the sides are bare, abrupt, and perpendicular. The progress of insulation here is obvious and incontrovertible, and why may not larger islands, at a greater distance, have been formed in the revolution of ages by the same accidents? The probability is heightened by the direction of the islands Nias, Batu, Mantawei, Pagi, Mego, etc., the similarity of the rock, soil, and productions, and ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... "What is the weight of smoke?" He answered: "Subtract from the weight of the burnt wood the weight of the remaining ashes, and you will have the weight of the smoke." Thus he presumed it to be incontrovertible that even in fire the matter (substance) does not perish, but that only the form of it undergoes a change. In like manner was the saying: "From nothing comes nothing," only another inference from the principle or permanence, or ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... here introduce a vast amount of incontrovertible evidence to show that, if the attendance of all the children in any commonwealth could be secured at such improved common schools as we have been contemplating for ten months during the year, from the age of four to that of sixteen years, they would prove competent ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Guy Seton gave themselves up to the pleasures of the hunt, blissfully forgetful of the young brothers and sisters who were following on wheels; and, indeed, of everything and everyone but just their own two selves. There seemed always to be some incontrovertible reason why they should keep by themselves, a little apart from the rest of the field. Rowena's hunting experiences had been few, and her escort was too anxious about her safety to allow her to try any but the very simplest and smallest of jumps. This excess of precaution necessitated many ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... usual appeal for an additional sum of money—he gave her, formally, six thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion. Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that—no more than an additional lever for ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... taxed without his own consent." Even when its most zealous professed advocates had abandoned the intention of maintaining this proposition, even at the risk of loosing the friendship of his dearest political connections, he stood firm upon the solid basis of that incontrovertible principle, "equal justice and freedom to all." No pretended expediency, no crafty policy, although urged with the greatest force and zeal, by the most experienced and acute reasoners, neither flattery, bribes, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... practitioners should have fallen under the spell of this consummation of formalism and should have regarded the 'Canon' as an infallible oracle, the more so in that the logical construction was impeccable and the premises, in the light of contemporary conceptions, passed for incontrovertible axioms?"(13) ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... with a rueful face,—"questions my word, which is incontrovertible?" Here he clapped his hand upon a couteau-de-chasse lying near, but, appearing to think better of it, drew himself up, and, with a shower of nods flung at me, added, "I deny your accusation!" I ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... to deny it. He knew that words would weigh as nothing against this material, tangible, incontrovertible proof. Forty-seven cards had been fraudulently inserted among the others. Certainly not by him! But by whom? Still he, alone, had been the gainer ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... guilty man. The facts speak for themselves, and facts are incontrovertible. As surely as the sun shines, Carpenter killed your daughter. Why, then, continue this gossip, slander which besmirches Withers and is bound ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... man tried to find words which would fully express his feeling. He had come a long way these last hours in his ideas of life; he saw things naked and clear cut, without dubious shades. But he had to realize now that what his soul accepted as incontrovertible logic ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... no faith in medicine. He spoke of it as an art entirely conjectural, and his opinion on this subject was fired and incontrovertible. His vigorous mind rejected all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... PERSIA. Such facts furnish incontrovertible proof of the patience and skill with which astronomy had been cultivated in Mesopotamia, and that, with very inadequate instrumental means, it had reached no inconsiderable perfection. These old observers had ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... accidents are preventable; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old aoe, and that if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged far beyond the farthest ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... excusable under a landgrave, with a few thousand acres of territory, is inconsistent with the dignity and, to quote continental phraseology, the mission of a first-class state. Here again the reasoning is incontrovertible. Of one other thing, moreover, we may feel perfectly sure, that Prussia having determined to suppress these centres and sources of corruption, they will gradually disappear from Europe. Concede to them a temporary breathing-time at Monaco; the time left for even a nominally independent ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... said Malcolm, with the calm earnestness of one who is merely stating an incontrovertible fact, and for a moment his eyes, at once troubled and solemn, kept looking wistfully in hers, as if searching for a comfort too good to be found, then slowly sank and sought the floor at ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... opium-eaters, drunkards, or inveterate consumers of tobacco; while the extreme propriety of conduct which these ladies manifest, and the encouragement they receive from other medical men, make the convictions based upon their own personal sensations incontrovertible, and their position practically unassailable. I think I might fairly say that among the comfortable middle classes of society the views at present held on this question are so deplorable that a large proportion of children are never sober from the first ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... declaring that his master would take proper measures against such hostilities. The Scots affirmed that the natives of Darien were a free people, who the Spaniards had in vain attempted to subdue; that therefore they had an original and incontrovertible right to dispose of their own lands, part of which the company had purchased for a valuable consideration. But there was another cause more powerful than the remonstrances of the Spanish court to which this colony fell a sacrifice; and that was the jealousy ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... North rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its achievement. He figured briefly and to the point, and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... reason: it would endure so long as they endured; it would be a truth as indisputable as the light of the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, whose evidence, depending on our organization and relative situations, must remain acknowledged as satisfactory so long as man is man. It is an incontrovertible fact, the consideration of which ought to repress the hasty conclusions of credulity, or moderate its obstinacy in maintaining them, that, had the Jews not been a fanatical race of men, had even the resolution of Pontius Pilate been equal to his candour, the Christian religion ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... opinion, or public opinion, is not essentially a composite opinion, but a corrected opinion in which such accidents of locality cancel one another. The following justification of democracy, formulated by Matthew Arnold, lays bare its insistent and wholly incontrovertible motive: ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... materialistic enough, and on the plane of purely physical science, and we may therefore be assured that it is not the way in which the memory of the Logos acts; yet it is neatly worked out and absolutely incontrovertible, and as I have said before, it is not without its use, since it gives us a glimpse of some possibilities which otherwise might not occur ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... friend. It seemed to him that Harry Wethermill had gone out of his mind. Here he was corroborating the suspicions of the police by facts—damning and incontrovertible facts. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... of the education of Liubka's mind and soul was plain to him, as was plain and incontrovertible everything that he conceived; he wanted at the start to interest Liubka in chemistry ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... that he and Ygerne Bellaire had been born in the same generation. . . . Stern-minded men of science, whose creed is to doubt all things until they are proven in such wise as an objective brain can accept them as incontrovertible, see no miracle in the fact that a certain female moth, left alone upon a mountain top, will draw to herself a male mate from mountainous miles away. Even in the insect world there is a silent call which is a voice of destiny. Omnipotence is not above concerning ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... her prognostications was sublime, though not unusual. It has been within the compass of our experience to meet and know undaunted women who, day after day, could, with equal positiveness, announce their theories as incontrovertible facts, or flatly contradict the assertions of those whose very position enabled them to be well informed. When Mrs. Turner was confronted with the proof of her error, and gently upbraided by the placid captain for being so positive in her affirmation or denial, that pretty matron was ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... purpose, and is being employed as a temporary repository for the clothing sent for the poor, till the fine new storehouse shall have been built. This old Guest House has been selected by our local apparition as a place of visitation. It is affirmed, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Prophet and no inconsiderable following, that the spirit returns of an evening to the old house he built forty years ago, to wander through the familiar rooms. The villagers see lights there nightly; and though ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... to be incontrovertible are such for their age only, and must yield to others which, in their age, are equally so. There are only a few points that are always above the waves. Plain truths, like plain dishes, are commended by everybody, and everybody leaves them whole. If it were not even ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... are not expedient to say. Sink everything into Dewey-Aguinaldo cooeperation, that was on both sides honest even if it did not imply any actual arrangement, which, of course, Dewey himself could not make. That here you have the facts,—undenied—incontrovertible." [38] ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... is the orthodox theory of rent. The labourer gets less than he would if the products of the soil were equally distributed. Both wages and profits must fall as more is left to rent, and that this actually happens, he says, with unusual positiveness, is an 'incontrovertible truth.'[285] The fall enables the less fertile land to be cultivated, and gives an excess of produce on the more fertile. 'This excess is rent.'[286] He proceeds to expound his doctrine by comparing land to a set of machines for making corn.[287] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the important thing, to begin with, is not to define these relations, but to look through the words to the broad reality which is interpreted in them. What they tell us, and tell us on the basis of an incontrovertible experience, is that the forgiveness of sins is for the Christian mediated through the death of Christ. In one respect, therefore, there is nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins: it is in the same position as every other blessing ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... profitable commercially, well and good. If not, it starves in a garret along with the artist. If the demand for modern tapestries was large enough, the art would flourish—perhaps. But it is not a large demand, for many reasons, chief among which is the incontrovertible one that the modern work is seldom pleasing. The whole world is occupied with science and commerce, and art does not create under their influence as in more ideal times. What can the trained eye and the cultivated taste do other than turn back to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... corner. Hundreds of people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father himself, would have confirmed their story. My father, then, could understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people, but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at all, had been led to throw themselves ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... therefore, says a writer on government, assume it as an incontrovertible position, as a first principle, that the right of private opinion, which is, in fact, no other than the right of private judgment upon any subject presented to the mind, is a sacred right, with which society can, on ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... triple house that the Christmas story happened; and it was there where I picked up the incontrovertible facts from the gossip of many roomers and met ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... sceptical school, we see the first confession of incapacity to discover truth. Instead of certainties they offer probabilities sufficient to guide us through life; the only axiom which they assert as incontrovertible being the fact that we know nothing. Thus instead of proposing as the highest activity of man a life of speculative thought, they came to consider inactivity and impassibility [13] the chief attainable good. Their method of proof was a dialectic which strove to show the inconsistency ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... United States representatives, announced that it ran where no one had ever suggested it could run, north of two and south of two, thus dividing the land in dispute. The islands were of little importance even strategically, but the incontrovertible evidence that instead of a judicial finding a political compromise had been effected was held of much importance. After a time the storm died down, but it revealed one unmistakable fact: Canadian nationalism was growing fully as fast as ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... more a 'nest of singing birds,' as was apparent from the stream of fresh and melodious strains issuing from, among other sources, 'The Bodley Head,'" was greeted with a ripple of girlish laughter from her hearers. It seemed that this incontrovertible statement of fact had somehow aroused reminiscences of another head which, if fresh, had not been precisely melodious on the luncheon ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... Friday or not at all, for he best kept superstition out of the congregation by branding it as heresy. Perhaps the Auld Lichts were only ignorant of the grieve's lass's theory because they had not thought of it. Friday's claims, too, were incontrovertible; for the Saturday's being a slack day gave the couple an opportunity to put their but and ben in order, and on Sabbath they had a gay day of it, three times at the kirk. The honeymoon over, the racket of the loom began again ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... somewhat familiar to the champions of Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... experience is negative, direct incontrovertible evidence is extant to the effect that birds often meet their fate by blundering into the web, to be devoured by the nimble and gaily decorated owner. I have frequently seen karan-jamara disposing of hard-shelled beetles ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... legacies, and required only his father's estates, according to the legal will, which I produced; that is to say, the three lordships of Pakratz, Prestowacz, and Pleneritz, without chattels or personal effects. Nothing could be more just or incontrovertible than this claim. What was my astonishment, to be told, in open court, that Her Majesty had declared I must either wholly perform the articles of the will of Trenck, or be excluded the entire inheritance, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... of triflers is always short. Only he who feels that he has something to do in making the world wiser and better, and who, in a bold and manly way, tries persistently to do it, is always welcome; and this fact—an incontrovertible one—is a sufficient vindication of the popular lecture from all the aspersions that have been cast upon it by disappointed aspirants for its honors, and shallow observers of its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... should never marry, because they form no new connexions to strengthen the family interest, or raise its consequence. This doctrine her ladyship had repeated for years so often and so dogmatically, that she conceived it to be incontrovertible, and of as full force as any law of the land, or as any moral or religious obligation. She would as soon have suspected her niece of an intention of stealing her diamond necklace as of purloining Colambre's heart, or marrying this heir of ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... ill-timed or inapplicable to the case in hand, they were not infrequently deemed impracticable, or at cross purposes with the convictions of the generals whose duty it was to carry them into effect. The simple and incontrovertible fact is that General Butler's presence with that army was from the start embarrassing if not absolutely unnecessary. It interposed an intermediate commander between the generalissimo and two entire army corps, ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... and simple, and seems at first blush so luminous that it is no wonder if many careful naturalists regarded it as an incontrovertible truth. The warning voice of the more prudent men of science was silenced by the loud enthusiasm of the younger generation over the solution of the greatest of the world-problems: the genesis of living beings had been brought to light, and—a thing which admitted of no doubt—man as well ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... agreed that Echo should proceed forthwith to Golgotha, and there, with undaunted front, meet his accusers; while I was to proceed to Transit and Lionise, and having instructed them in the story we had planned, meet him at the place of skulls, fully prepared to establish, by the most incontrovertible and consistent evidence, that we were not the aggressors in the row. A little persuasion was necessary to convince both our friends that their presence would be essential to Echo's acquittal; they had too many just qualms, and fears, and prejudices of this inquisitorial court not to dread perhaps ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... low wages, the discouraging result of excessive fines, long hours, and unwholesome sanitary conditions, not only the physical system is injured, but—the result we most deplore, and of which we have incontrovertible proof—the tendency is to ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... bases or thinks that he bases his conduct—his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action—upon a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Society would turn their attention to the circumstance, and endeavour to find in the resources of science a means of preventing such untoward revelations, they might indeed be looked upon as benefactors to mankind. These opinions being equally incontrovertible with those he had already pronounced, he went on to inform us that Jamaica rum, though unquestionably an agreeable spirit of great richness and flavour, had the drawback of remaining constantly present to the taste ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... spell of this consummation of formalism and should have regarded the 'Canon' as an infallible oracle, the more so in that the logical construction was impeccable and the premises, in the light of contemporary conceptions, passed for incontrovertible axioms?"(13) ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... said, mournfully, as if quietly accepting the incontrovertible fact. "I told you once, and I yet trust, that the day may dawn wherein my Lady's heart shall come home ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... all the particulars of these voyages, and of the countries he and his brother had visited, on a map, which he brought with him to Venice, and which he hung up in his house as a sure pledge and incontestible proofs of the truth of his relations, and which still remained as an incontrovertible evidence in the time of Marcolini. Many have been inclined to reject the whole of this narrative because the names which it assigns to several of the countries are nowhere else to be found. After having carefully examined, and made a translation ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... science in order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! Is this not solemn and terrible, Lelia? Within the dried-up entrails of a human corpse the inquisitive glance of our century discovered the papyrus, that mysterious and sacred monument of man's eternal power—the still dark but incontrovertible witness of the imposing duration of creation. Our eager hand unrolls those perfumed bandages, those frail and indissoluble shrouds at which destruction stopt short. These bandages that once enfolded a corpse, these manuscripts that have rested under fleshless ribs in the place once ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... France takes sides with M. Corneille, and that there is not one, perhaps, of the judges with whom it is rumored that you have come to an agreement, who has not praised that which you desire him to condemn; so that, though your arguments were incontrovertible and your adversary should acquiesce therein, he would still have the wherewith to give himself glorious consolation for the loss of his case, and be able to tell you that it is something more to have delighted a whole kingdom than to have written a piece according ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... period a man or woman has spent in Japan the more pronounced his or her views in regard to the country. The matter is hardly worth referring to were it not that these opinions, hastily arrived at and apparently as hurriedly rushed into print, have been accepted by some people as incontrovertible facts. Another class of work that I think a reader should be warned against is the book of the man who has lived in Japan for a time and seen life only from a certain standpoint. The book of a bishop or a missionary may be and often is of undoubted value in reference to his work and matters ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... all, neither he nor his witnesses seem fairly to have hit upon what seem to this present writer the two incontrovertible arguments against tobacco; one being drawn from theory, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... be guilty of violating the law. The number of men and women consecrated to God by vows of chastity forms but an imperceptible fraction of the human family, their proportion in the United States, for instance, being only one individual to about every four thousand. Moreover, it is an incontrovertible fact that the population increases most in those countries in which the Catholic clergy exercise the strongest influence; for there married people are impressed with the idea that marriage was instituted not for the gratification of the flesh, but ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial. The murder of the Mayor of Senlis ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... the only rational procedure is to begin by determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that several copyists, independently ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... remarkable that, if narrated in a history, they would put a severe strain on belief. But the evidence for them is incontrovertible; for no man, writing to people about their own condition, invents a mythical description of their circumstances; and besides, Paul was writing to restrain rather than encourage these manifestations. They show with what mighty force, at its first entrance ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had been of equal amount ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... the business point of view, and calculate without bias or prejudice the respective advantages and disadvantages; and the more thorough the method of reasoning and logic applied to the canal problem the more emphatic and incontrovertible the conclusion that the Congress should decide in favor of a plan which will give us a navigable waterway across the Isthmus within a measurable distance of time and with a reasonable expenditure of money, as opposed to a visionary theory of an ideal ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... Devil's Mark, as it is indifferently called, is one of the most important points in the identification of a witch, as the infliction of it was often the final rite in the admission ceremonies. The fact that any person bore such a mark was taken as incontrovertible proof that the bearer ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... completely impenetrable defense against attack is still not possible, total defensive strength must include civil defense preparedness. Because we have incontrovertible evidence that Soviet Russia possesses atomic weapons, this kind of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... discussed and thought over, and every slight allusion to the times was instantly applied. In the prevailing listlessness, the mere fact of increased mental activity was of importance. A spark of genius does much to raise a nation. It is in itself the incontrovertible proof that the race lives: a dead people does not produce men of genius. Whatever awakes one part of the intelligence reacts on all its parts. You cannot lift, any more than you can degrade, the heart of man piecemeal. In this sense not literature only but also music helped, who ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... impatient), "Then X*** advises me to return?"—"We had foreseen that your Majesty would make inquiries on this point, and the following is literally his answer. You will tell his Majesty that I would not dare to decide so important a question, but that he may consider it as a positive and incontrovertible fact, that our present government has wholly lost the confidence of the people and of the army; that discontent has increased to the highest pitch, and that it is impossible to believe that the government can stand much longer against the universal dislike. ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... CLINCHER. An incontrovertible and smart reply; but sometimes the confirmation of a story by a lie, or by some still more improbable yarn: synonymous ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... nor deem it unnatural for love so to perish. After learning what she had learned from absolute incontrovertible evidence (it is useless to enter into the circumstances, for no one is benefited by wallowing in unnecessary mire), that she, or any virtuous maiden, should continue to love this man, would have been a thing still more ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... not follow up this statement, for its truth was incontrovertible, and showed that the father's ill-will was too tangible a thing to ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the brig Galilee, who, with his naked hands, convinced in thirty-five minutes nine larger men than himself of the incontrovertible fact that you cannot keep ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... undertaken this work for Zuleika, to restore happiness to her heart and light to her eyes, and he would not abandon the task, no matter how arduous it might be, until he had cleared Giovanni or obtained tangible, incontrovertible proof ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... comparatively ignorant of the sufferings of the slaves, and the barbarities inflicted upon them. Mr. Weld thought the state of the abolition cause demanded a work which would not only prove by argument that slavery and cruelty were inseparable, but which would contain a mass of incontrovertible facts, that would exhibit the horrid brutality of the system. Nearly all the papers, most of them of recent date, from which the extracts were taken, were deposited at the office of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, and all who thought the atrocities described ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... majority may be. In some cases this leads to a slight alteration of the Latin axiom, Salus populi est suprema lex, which may be read, "the will of the people is the supreme law." The American constitution is admirable in theory; it enunciates the incontrovertible principle, "All men are free and equal." But unfortunately, a serious disturbing element, and one which by its indirect effects threatens to bring the machinery of the Republic to a "dead lock," appears not to have entered into the calculations ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... teeming brain the vast conception of a "Naturalistic Comedy of Life." It was to be Balzac "naturalized," so to speak. The great cycle should run through the whole gamut of human passions, foibles, motives and interests. It should consist of human documents, of painstaking minuteness of detail and incontrovertible truth. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... ambitious Caesarian policy and find it difficult to effectively resist their courageous onslaught. Limited are our warlike resources, but we will continue this unjust, bloody, and unequal struggle, not for the love of war—which we abhor—but to defend our incontrovertible rights of Liberty and Independence (so dearly won in war with Spain) and our territory which is threatened by the ambitions of a party that ...
— True Version of the Philippine Revolution • Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy
... to convince her that she was Somebody; and the girl herself was so easily persuaded of it that she quite forgot that anybody had ever told her so, and took it for a fundamental, innate, primary, first-born, self- evident, necessary, and incontrovertible idea and principle that SHE WAS SOMEBODY. And far be it from me to deny it. I will even go so far as to assert that in this odd country there was a huge number of Somebodies. Indeed, it was one ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... The declaration that Jehovah is not the God of the dead but of the living was an unanswerable denunciation of the Sadducean perversion of scripture; and with solemn finality the Lord added: "Ye therefore do greatly err." Certain of the scribes present were impressed by the incontrovertible demonstration of the truth, and exclaimed with approbation: "Master, thou hast well said." The proud Sadducees were confuted and silenced; "and after that they durst not ask him any ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... in the diary of the Master of Ceremonies constitute an incontrovertible document, an irrefutable testimony against the charges of poisoning when taken in conjunction with the evidence of fact afforded by the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Dyer's phrenesis has come to a crisis; he is raging and furiously mad. I waited upon the heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... match for two Yankees," he has an inherent, continuous, unconditioned right to have this superiority recognized at the ballot-box. Indeed, the injustice of this is so monstrous, that the Johnson orators find it more convenient to decry all conditions of representation than to meet the incontrovertible reasons for exacting the condition which bases representation on voters. Not to make it a part of the Constitution would be, in Mr. Shellabarger's vivid illustration, to allow "that Lee's vote should have double the elective power of Grant's; Semmes's double that of Farragut's; Booth's—did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... person who introduced those readings, or serve as any indication of the period at which he did his work. But it must be confessed that the points enumerated present a very strong, and, when regarded by themselves, an apparently incontrovertible case against Mr. Collier and the genuineness of the folios and the manuscripts which he has brought to light. Combined with the evidence of his untrustworthiness, they compel, even from us who examine the question without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... expended this rent in a manner contrary to, and utterly inconsistent with, all law and order and the constitution of the country." No member of either House denied the accuracy of this description of the Association's proceedings. And if it were correct, it was incontrovertible that the denunciation of it as an utterly unconstitutional body was not too strong. Indeed, the fact of its "levying a tax" upon a portion of the King's subjects (to say nothing of the intimidation, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... its seasons came round to occur at the opposite sites of the terrestrial orbit, and the vernal hemisphere subsiding simultaneously into ice-bound rigour.[901] Thus a plausible explanation was offered of the anomalous alternations of glacial and semi-tropical periods, attested, on incontrovertible geological evidence, as having succeeded each other in times past over what are now temperate regions. They succeeded each other, it is true, with much less frequency and regularity than the theory ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... century to century; and for ten, twenty, and thirty years together;(1*) and that neither labour nor any other commodity can be an accurate measure of real value in exchange, is now considered as one of the most incontrovertible doctrines of political economy, and indeed follows, as a necessary consequence, from the very definition of value in exchange. But to allow that corn regulates the prices of all commodities, is at once to erect it into a ...
— Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and of a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and General Wealth of the Country • Thomas Malthus
... hands, as if sweeping something away from before her. He had become pale and there was a light in his eyes. He felt angry at this girl who had shown herself ready to argue with him,—in her girlish fashion, of course,—and who, after listening to his incontrovertible arguments, fell back resolutely upon a platitude, and considered that she had ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... process, at a conviction which his intellect could not give him. But here as elsewhere he was swayed by a species of timidity and caution. While on the one hand his intellect told him that there was no sure and incontrovertible standing-ground for the orthodoxy which he professed, yet, on the other hand, he could not bear to relinquish the chance that certainty might be found ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cause the same result on humans. I agree. Proven with full scientific rigor, no. In fact, at present, the contention is unprovable. Demonstrable as having a high likelihood's of being so, yes! So likely so as to be almost incontrovertible, yes! But provable to the most open-minded, scientific sort—probably not for a long time. However, the Life Extension Foundation is working hard to find some quantifiable method of gauging the aging process in humans without waiting for the inarguable indicator, ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which confuse the understanding and mislead the conscience. He could not borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were confined strictly to the exposition and defence of sound opinions on trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... correct. All the while it is to be admitted that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed, no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has brought ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... unsettle faith in the existing order than to settle it in any other; similarly, missionaries are more valuable as underminers of old faiths than as propagators of new. Miracles are not impossible; nothing is impossible till we have got an incontrovertible first premise. The question is not "Are the Christian miracles possible?" but "Are they convenient? Do they fit comfortably with our ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... public! In fact, Sir, I am reduced to this occasional humiliating employment, derogatory certainly to the dignity of literature, as averting the approach of famine. I write, for various adventurers, poetical panegyric, and illustrate each subject by incontrovertible facts, with ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... adhered to, must have something in them which appeals to the minds of men, we must assume that every error contains a kernel of truth, however small it be. No one of opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as entirely false. To discover the incontrovertible fact which lies at their basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree, and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent manifestations. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... extirpation of the Indians, and a dozen different things, not only taking no heed of any opinions that his audience of two might hold, but insisting on their accepting his opinions as the expression of absolute and incontrovertible truth. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... business-like, and confident. I detailed the circumstances of the marriage of Violet Dalston, then only eighteen years of age, with a Mr. Grainger; the birth of a son; and subsequent disappearance of the husband; concluding by an assurance to the jury that I should prove, by incontrovertible evidence, that Grainger was no other person than the late Sir Harry Compton, baronet. This address by no means lessened the vague apprehensions of the other side. A counsel that, with such materials for eloquence, disdained ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled him, at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... court whose "findings" are incontrovertible, and whose sessions are held in the chambers ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... was beautiful.... The Prince paid us two visits, but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such entire reliance on your faith, such confidence in your truth, that I ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... moment. So embarrassing if she had suddenly taken it into her head that she was Cesar Borgia or St. Elizabeth of Hungary. That sort of thing would make one unpleasantly conspicuous even at a private view. However, she merely meant to say that it was Wednesday, which at the moment was incontrovertible. Well, she's on quite a different tack to the Klopstock. She doesn't visit anywhere very extensively, and, of course, she's awfully keen for me to drag in an incident that occurred at one of the Beauwhistle garden-parties, when she says she accidentally hit the shins of a Serene ...
— Reginald • Saki
... would be better if he conformed to it at least by outward decency of language and decorum of demeanor. To this he assented, adding with a sigh, "But, you see, some people have a natural turn for religion; you have, for instance, I'm sure; but you see I have not." This appeared to me incontrovertible. Presently, after a pause, he asked me if I would write a sermon for him, which tribute to my talent for preaching, of which he had just undergone a sample, sent me into fits of laughter, though I replied with some indignation, "Certainly not; I am not a proper person to write sermons, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties removable.' As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... course and alas! for a youth between the ages of seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three, or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon, has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to buds, to the blossoming ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... defence of her father. She had too little evidence, and any unsupported charges hurled against Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her to work ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... increase as property to their children forever.—Levit. xxv: 44, 45, 46. All these nations were made of one blood. Yet God ordained that some should be "chattel" slaves to others, and gave his special aid to effect it. In view of this incontrovertible fact, how can I believe this passage disproves the lawfulness of slavery in the sight of God? How can any sane man believe ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced. The only natural passion is self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense. This selfishness is good in itself and in relation ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... most able lawyers of the kingdom, and their opinion unanimously was, that Lord Tullibardine had no more right to make his "niece heiress of Lovat than to put her in possession of the throne of Scotland: that the right of Thomas of Beaufort to those honours and estates was incontrovertible, and that the King himself would not deprive him of them, except for high treason." It appears that Lord Tullibardine was satisfied of the justice of the opinion as far as the title was concerned, but he still considered that the property of the last Lord ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... a vast amount of incontrovertible evidence to show that, if the attendance of all the children in any commonwealth could be secured at such improved common schools as we have been contemplating for ten months during the year, from the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... bungling methods—and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had been made—and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there was the letter! If he, Jimmie Dale, had ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed. But it may amuse you, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... composed variously of Americans, French, English, Cuban, Brazilian and German investigators. Nothing has been added to our original findings; nothing has been contradicted of what we have reported, and to-day, after nearly thirteen years, the truths that we uncovered stand incontrovertible; besides, they have been the means of driving out yellow fever from Cuba, the United States (Laredo, Texas, 1903 and New Orleans, La., 1905), British Honduras ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... additional sum of money—he gave her, formally, six thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion. Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that—no more than an additional lever for her ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sincerity. No writer of the present day, save perhaps Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon literary history. Every argument he brings forward is supported by an array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles the figures of a check list. And all ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... generous, and true as steel; the very soul of honour in fact. He had so much natural shrewdness, that his conversation was always worth listening to, although he was apt to start by assuming entirely false premisses, which he considered as incontrovertible as if they had been mathematically proved; but, given the correctness of his premisses, nobody could bring more natural wit and sense to bear upon the arguments ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the primordial Essence. But how shall we know this as a fact? How shall we prove it as an incontrovertible truth? ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... be was the question for Hamlet to settle. It is no longer our question, at least, not in the same sense. When it is a question of death, the fashionable young suicide declares that his self-destruction is the final proof of his own incontrovertible being. And as for not-being in our public life, we have achieved it as much as ever we want to, as much as is necessary. Whilst in private life there is a swing back to paltry selfishness as a creed. And in the war there is the position of neutralization and nothingness. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... sank into a chair; white as if life had issued with the secret of his life. Wonderful varying expressions had marked his features and the tones of his voice, while he was uttering that sharp, succinct confession; so that, strange as it sounded, every sentence fixed itself on her with incontrovertible force, and the meaning of the whole flashed through her mind. It struck her too awfully for speech. She held fast to his nerveless hand, and kneeling before him, listened for his long ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... apparatus; he had not been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been brought to bear upon it in vain—these things terrified him. The incontrovertible fact made him dizzy. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... whose writings are secure of veneration: yet it often happens that the general reception of a doctrine obscures the books in which it was delivered. When any tenet is generally received and adopted as an incontrovertible principle, we seldom look back to the arguments upon which it was first established, or can bear that tediousness of deduction, and multiplicity of evidence, by which its author was forced to reconcile it to prejudice, and fortify it in the weakness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... facts of history have believed that Joseph was a purely apocryphal infant, or, as some have suggested, merely an adopted child; but that Napoleon did upon this occasion content himself with second place is an incontrovertible fact. Nor is it entirely unaccountable. It is hardly to be supposed that a true military genius, such as Napoleon is universally conceded to have been, would plunge into the midst of a great battle without first having acquainted himself with the possibilities of the future. A reconnoitre ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... to write either of men or of governments otherwise than as he found them, and he writes with such skill and insight that his work is of abiding value. But what invests "The Prince" with more than a merely artistic or historical interest is the incontrovertible truth that it deals with the great principles which still guide nations and rulers in their relationship with ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... result from the application of lime, marl, salt potash, guano, or any special and highly concentrated substance as a fertilizer, to the neglect of organic manures. We lay down this fact as incontrovertible, that no soil, however fertile it may be made for the time being by any of these special manures, can remain permanently so, unless care is used to maintain a healthful supply of organic matter,—rich mould—good soil upon the land cultivated. If this is done, we never ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... Commines, finding some comfort and strength in the bald platitude: it was incontrovertible and at least gave him firm ground under his feet. "Nor can treason go unpunished, or how would the throne be safe for a day? But what the father cannot do, though a king, another can and must; and must," he reiterated, steeling himself with a rising emphasis for what was to ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... is interested. Indeed, it may be said that, more or less, every human being is concerned in it. The problem is of universal importance, and its solution can alone be found in the general adoption of a system grounded on principles recognized as incontrovertible. ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... Dr. Lindley combats very eagerly the doctrine that varieties of the apple and pear, or indeed of any tree, die naturally of old age; but the only incontrovertible fact which he adduces in support of his argument, is the existence of the French White Beurre pear, which has flourished from time immemorial. His denial of the decay of the Golden Pippin, the Golden {437} Harvey, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:— ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... "second man," the man of facts and method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... coarse gray coat, well worn, but in excellent repair; his under garments were durably constructed of leather, and fitted tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped limbs; his stockings of blue yarn were the incontrovertible work of a mother or a sister; and on his head was a three-cornered hat, which in its better days had perhaps sheltered the graver brow of the lad's father. Under his left arm was a heavy cudgel formed of an oak sapling, and retaining a part of the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its faults a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we are accustomed to say that modern civilization develops itself in America more freely than in Europe, for in the former country it has not ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... in the sexuality of plants had become established as an incontrovertible piece of knowledge, a weight of misconception remained, weighing down any rational view of the subject. Camerarius (Sachs, 'Geschichte,' page 419.) believed (naturally enough in his day) that hermaphrodite flowers ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... undeviating; stable, durable; perennial &c (diuturnal) 110 [Obs.]. fixed, steadfast, firm, fast, steady, balanced; confirmed, valid; fiducial^; immovable, irremovable, riveted, rooted; settled, established &c v.; vested; incontrovertible, stereotyped, indeclinable. tethered, anchored, moored, at anchor, on a rock, rock solid, firm as a rock; firmly seated, firmly established &c v.; deep-rooted, ineradicable; inveterate; obstinate &c 606. transfixed, stuck fast, aground, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... contagion which has given rise to it, so, therefore, must the breath of the affected have been poisonous in this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible, that owing to the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and houses, but whole cities were infected, which, moreover, in the Middle Ages, were, with few exceptions, narrowly ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... cruel; it was ungenerous in the extreme, I own it—and yet, believe me, dear Clara, I did not doubt you lightly; proofs, that to my short-sightedness appeared incontrovertible, were brought against you; the letters I wrote, entreating you if but by a line or message to relieve, my anxiety, remaining unanswered—letters which I was assured you had received—your sudden intimacy with ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... acknowledge the minor to be Scripture. You have not found four terms in my premises, nor charged my major or minor with the least fault in matter or form, and yet, forsooth, you deny the conclusion, and do not admit that incontrovertible maxim in logic, Ex veris nil nisi verum; or, as Kekerman hath it, Ex veris praeemissis falsam conclusionem colligi est impossibile,(1357)—It is impossible that a false conclusion should be gathered from true premises. Now let us hear what he would say against my conclusion;—it is concerning ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... viewing the best Cezannes, Gauguins, and Van Goghs. I did not see the exhibition several years ago at the Armory, which was none the less an eye-opener. But I have been told by those whose opinion and knowledge are incontrovertible that this trinity of the modern movement was inadequately represented; furthermore, Henri Matisse, a painter of indubitable skill and originality, did not get a fair showing. It would be a superfluous ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... then rose, and spoke as follows:—Sir, I am very far from thinking the authority of these learned gentlemen, whose letters are produced, incontrovertible proof of the justness of an interpretation of an act of the senate, where that interpretation is not in itself warranted by reason, nor consistent with the preservation or enjoyment of property. Much less shall I agree to support their interpretation by a new law; or establish, by an act ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... such manner as their Legislatures have directed, but an appointment and a certificate are different things. The latter is, at the very best, only evidence of the former. The fact to be determined is the appointment; the certificate is produced as evidence; it may be controvertible or incontrovertible, as the law may have provided, but there is nothing in the nature of a certificate which forbids inquiry into its verity; it is not a revelation from above; it is a paper made by men, fallible always, and sometimes dishonest as well as fallible; and, if honest, often deceived. ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... meant the word in no offensive sense—had asked, would he enter into a political discussion when we were called upon to extend relief? He begged to state this was not the true question: it was whether they would found all the future proceedings upon error and misstatement, or upon incontrovertible facts. Another question was, would they be satisfied to patch up the wounds of the country for a short period or seek to remedy the disease in its spring and in its sources before it became still more alarming and incurable? The Duke of Kent said he had offered the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... that "no Englishman should be taxed without his own consent." Even when its most zealous professed advocates had abandoned the intention of maintaining this proposition, even at the risk of loosing the friendship of his dearest political connections, he stood firm upon the solid basis of that incontrovertible principle, "equal justice and freedom to all." No pretended expediency, no crafty policy, although urged with the greatest force and zeal, by the most experienced and acute reasoners, neither flattery, bribes, nor threats, could ever, for one moment, shake his determination ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Demoniacs were madmen. Dr. Farmer's essay upon the Learning of Shakespeare is, in respect to the materials, arguments, and conclusions—what the late Bishop of Salisbury's [Douglas] was upon Miracles—original, powerful, and incontrovertible. Never was there an octavo volume, like Farmer's upon Shakespeare—which embraced so many, and such curious, points, and which displayed such research, ingenuity, and acuteness—put forth with so little pomp, parade, or pedantry. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... separated from them. They agree exactly in character, and also in the materials of which they are composed; and I believe that some unaccountable gorge of waters has swept away the intervening earth, leaving these solitary and isolated, though incontrovertible evidences, that the summit level of all this great valley, has at one time been where the level surface of these hills now is, two or three hundred feet above what is now denominated the summit level."—Catlin's American Indians, Vol. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... directing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in principle identical with incontrovertible logic. In giving the views of the dissenting minority on the action ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... believed; but common sense rejected these vain ideas as inconsistent, if not with possibility, at least with the general rules by which the universe is governed,—a deviation from which, as Butler well argued with himself, ought not to be admitted as probable, upon any but the plainest and most incontrovertible evidence. An earthly lover, however, or a young man, who, from whatever cause, had the right of exercising such summary and unceremonious authority over the object of his long-settled, and apparently sincerely returned affection, was an object ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... find in the prophet some plain and incontrovertible proofs of the Messiahship of Christ, to use against Moslems and Jews. While thus searching, I found various passages that would bear an explanation according to my views, and read on till I came to the fifty-second chapter, and fourteenth verse, and ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... and Henry George in front of him. Pelle knew something about this subject too, but this was nevertheless like drawing up a net from the deep; a brilliant world of wonders came up with it. There were incontrovertible logical proofs that he had a right apprehension, though it had been arrived at blindly. The land of fortune was big enough for all; the greater the number that entered it, the larger did it become. He felt a desire to hit out again and strike a fresh ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... seek war except for the defence of her rights, her obligations, or her necessary interests. In that sense our policy may always be defensive only, although it may compel us at times to steps justified rather by expediency—the choice of the lesser evil—than by incontrovertible right. But if we have interests beyond sea which a navy may have to protect, it plainly follows that the navy has more to do, even in war, than to defend the coast; and it must be added as a received military axiom that war, however defensive in moral character, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the Emperor Alexander of Russia to deal with. He offered to act as intermediary between Great Britain and France in order to bring about an honourable peace. The British Government refused, and it is stated on incontrovertible authority that Alexander was furious, and upbraided the British with having used troops, which should have been sent to Russia's aid, to crush Denmark. The outrage of attacking a small State which was at peace and with which she had no quarrel was powerfully denounced by Alexander. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... best harmonises with human nature. It may be, of course, that even when we have such a criterion we may, for want of "light" or of logic, fail to solve this problem of the best legislation. Errare humanum est, but it seems incontrovertible that this problem can be solved, that we can, by taking our stand upon an exact knowledge of human nature, find a perfect ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... thee, Binks, that the proposition is incontrovertible; any thing that is worth doing is worth being ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... paragraph we have seen that it is now an incontrovertible fact that, in considering the animal scale in a sense the inverse of that of nature, we find that there exists in the groups composing this scale a continuous but irregular modification (degradation) in the organization of animals which they comprise, an increasing simplification in the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... prevailing opinion that consumption is incurable, there exists ample, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Its curability is established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Individuals have recovered in whom there was extensive destruction of pulmonary tissue, and, indeed, entire destruction of one lung. Numerous instances are on record in which persons have suffered from ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... be counted" are the words. Thus, when in 1876 it was doubtful whether Tilden or Hayes had been chosen President, a fierce controversy arose as to who should count the votes, the President of the Senate or Congress. While many regretted the absence of an incontrovertible provision, it was fortunate for the country that the Constitution did not provide that the vote should be counted by the President of the Senate, who, the Vice President having died in office, was in 1877 a creature of the partisan majority. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Mathematical investigations of incontrovertible evidence, show us that were the earth of equal density throughout, the flattening at the poles would be 1/234 of the equatorial diameter; that in the hypothetical case of infinite density at the centre, and infinite rarity at the surface, the flattening would be no more ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling. But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds. Not even at ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... only such portions of an harangue as may be in accordance with his political bias; or should there be nothing uttered by any speaker that may suit his purpose, these ear-trumpets will change the sounds of words and the construction of sentences in such a way as to be incontrovertible, although every syllable should be diverted from its original meaning and intention. They have also the power of larding a speech with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... him impishly. "Now watch the brain of a Bellamy perform. Get into high gear, brain.... I wish I knew something about biochemical embryology; but I read somewhere that ova are sterile, so our galaxy is an ovum. Therefore our super-galooper is a gal—which incontrovertible fact accounts for and explains rigorously the long-known truth that women always have been, are now, and always will be vastly superior to men ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
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