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More "Plausibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the care with which he had concealed from me his change of name, and his intimacy at the very house to which I had frankly offered to present him; the familiarity which his creature had contrived to effect with Miss Trevanion's maid; the words that had passed between them,—plausibly accounted for, it is true, yet still suspicious; and, above all, my painful recollections of Vivian's reckless ambition and unprincipled sentiments,—nay, the effect that a few random words upon Fanny's fortune, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life follows the proper line of progress in order to be developed into a bird. This is mere dreaming, and reminds one only of the wonderful transformations effected by enchantment in an Arabian tale. We might just as plausibly suppose, that the reptile, after it became mature, was suddenly transformed into a bird, as that it underwent this change before it was hatched. All the evidence attainable goes to show, that the law of development is as immutable before as after birth, the several ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... without forthwith conceiving a mortal hatred against him. You wrong another, know yourself to have acted basely, and are enraged, not against yourself—for no one hates himself—but against the innocent cause of your baseness; reasoning very plausibly, "But for that fellow, I should never have been base; for had he not existed I could not have been so, at any rate against him;" and this hatred is all the more bitter when you reflect that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... a child belonging to the saloon-keeper testified that the satchel was much heavier on the first night than on the second. It has been conjectured, very plausibly, that the valise contained Pearl Bryan's head, on the ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... in accordance with which a baron or knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities, deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued— plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.—that this offering was a formal recognition ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... feebly tapping the earth with a kind of single-headed pick, and watching him, Moussa Isa saw that, in a quarter of an hour or so, he might plausibly and legitimately pass within a yard or two of this his enemy, as he went to and fro between the water-tap and the strip of flower-border that he was sprinkling.... Would they hang him if he killed the Brahmin, ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... application of the principle, constitute quite a different question, which may be discussed and entertained without any disparagement of the soundness of the policy, as best adapted to existing circumstances, of the system when first applied. The theory of free trade may be, in its entirety, as plausibly it is presented to us, founded on just principle; the abstract truth and perfection of which are just as unimpeachable as that of the social theory propounded by Rousseau in the Savoyard's profession of faith, or that of the "liberty, equality, and community of property" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... of religion has to defend the soul not only against the corruptions of the heart, but also against those doctrinal errors that are daily springing up in every direction, and which are plausibly preached by false teachers, who bring to their support the most specious arguments, couched in the most attractive language. To refute these errors often requires the most consummate skill and a profound knowledge of history ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... trembling in nervous apprehension upon his arm, from which, in her embarrassment, she forgot to remove it. But the artist did not fail her, and in answer to Mr. Burleigh's eager questions as to the cause of the accident, explained all so plausibly, and in such a matter-of-fact manner as left little more even to be surmised. His brief and prosaic history of the affair concluded with the following implied tribute to his companion, which still further relieved her from ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... subtle judges in this field of criticism are of opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet on which we live might be said to have assembled and opened ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... carry this letter to Mistress Fitzwalter, who is with thy cousin Robin Fitzooth in Barnesdale, Sir Knight," said Simeon, plausibly, "you will win the gratitude of the Sheriff's daughter, at the least; and she doth rule the roost here, as I can tell you. 'Tis but a letter from Master Fitzwalter ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... Calvinist Viceroy of India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... familiar, we venture to say, is the theory that declamation is sometimes the cause of stammering; or, rather, that stuttering impels a man to talkativeness, and the yielding to this tendency fixes the habit of stammering and makes it worse. Hence it might plausibly be argued that it is the rostrum, or the very emotion of speaking in public, which makes some orators become stammerers. At all events, in Paris an institution has been founded expressly to remedy stuttering; and M. Chervin, its director, not long ago presented before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... comparatively easy for the men who controlled it to evade personal, moral, and often legal, responsibility for their acts. Governed as the corporation was by a body of directors, those acts became collective and not individual; if one of the directors were assailed he could plausibly take refuge in the claim that he was merely one of a number of controllers; that he could not be held specifically responsible. Thus the culpability was shifted, until it rested on the corporation, which was a bloodless thing, not ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... Whereto:—"Why, dost not see?" returned the lady. "Troth do I," rejoined he, "and somewhat else have I seen that I would I had not." And so he questioned her of what had passed, and she, being mightily afraid, did after long parley confess that which she might not plausibly deny, to wit, her intimacy with Spinelloccio, and fell a beseeching him with tears to pardon her. "Lo, now, wife," quoth Zeppa, "thou hast done wrong, and, so thou wouldst have me pardon thee, have a care to do exactly as I shall bid thee; to wit, on this ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... life, who, practically at least, hold with Aaron Burr, that "law is that which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained," and that lawyers, like the Roman augurs of old, always smile when they meet one another on the street. The by no means exalted opinion of two men as to "our noble profession" will appear ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... appreciated chiefly either for their material and form, or for the values which they express. In some cases the actual object may be beautiful; sometimes the beauty may lie almost wholly in the image, emotion, or idea evoked. "Home, Sweet Home," for example, may be plausibly held to win admiration rather for the sentimental associations which it evokes in the singer or hearer than for its verbal or melodic beauty. The enjoyment which people without any musical gifts, out on a camping ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... best of everyone, her display of grief, and professions of regret, and general resolutions of prudence, were sufficient to soften his heart and make him really confide in her sincerity; but, as for myself, I am still unconvinced, and plausibly as her ladyship has now written, I cannot make up my mind till I better understand her real meaning in coming to us. You may guess, therefore, my dear madam, with what feelings I look forward to her arrival. She will have occasion ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... for the present impracticable, and there was no more talk for a long time of schemes which had been in favour two years before. The ground was changed, and a point was now brought forward on the Liberal side, for which a good deal might be plausibly said. This was the requirement of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles from young men at matriculation; and a strong pamphlet advocating its abolition, with the express purpose of admitting Dissenters, was published by Dr. Hampden, the Bampton Lecturer ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... coperation, had promoted) that ultimate desecration, which planted "the abomination of desolation" as a victorious crest of Paganism upon his own solitary altar? The institution of the Sabbath, again—what part of the Mosaic economy could it more plausibly have been expected that God should vindicate by some memorable interference, since of all the Jewish institutions it was that one which only and which frequently became the occasion of wholesale butchery ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... life. He vouchsafed to explain things to me to avoid a row, but he was desperately angry. She has never been out of the convent since she was three years old, and she is very nervous and shy. That was his story, and he told it plausibly enough. I could not get anything out of her, except an admission that what he ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the tribes which inhabit it. You know that these tribes once overran all Asia, and have twice conquered China. The means have always been the same—some accident which, for an instant, has united these tribes in submission to the will of one man. Now, says the writer, very plausibly, the Czar may bring this about, and do what has been done by Genghis Khan, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... of friends and parties to the plot. In such a case it is enough if we can imagine what the views probably were; and in such case too it must be very easy for a Gentleman of parts to raise contrary imaginations, and to argue plausibly from them. But the Gentleman has rightly observed, that if the resurrection be a fraud, there is an end to all pretensions, good or bad, that were to be supported by it: therefore I shall go on to prove this ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... Macdonald happened to be so opportunely present at the right moment? How had she happened to turn down that road, a road that was seldom used by people going to Baltimore? It was all very strange and had never been satisfactorily explained. Ruth had evaded the question most plausibly every time he had brought it up. Could it be that Wainwright had told her of a plot against him and she had reached out to help him? His heart leaped at the thought. Then at once he was sure that Wainwright had never told her, unless perhaps he had told some tale against him, ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... hearing this speech under the circumstances, we all either made for the door, or fell into violent hysterics, or went off in a general swoon. One of these three things was, I say, to be expected. Indeed each and all of these lines of conduct might have been very plausibly pursued. And, upon my word, I am at a loss to know how or why it was that we pursued neither the one nor the other. But, perhaps, the true reason is to be sought in the spirit of the age, which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... (e.g. F. Dummler, "Antisthenica," p. 29 foll.) maintain plausibly that the author is here glancing (as also Plato in the "Ion") at Antisthenes' own treatises against the Rhapsodists and on a more correct interpretation of Homer, {peri ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... publication of the plays, rights derived ultimately from the printers of the First Folio. Precisely when he decided to publish a revised octavo edition is not known, nor do we know when Rowe accepted the commission and began his work. McKerrow has plausibly suggested that Tonson may have been anxious to call attention to his rights in Shakespeare on the eve of the passage of the copyright law which went into effect in April, 1710.[2] Certainly Tonson must have felt ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... the plateau of Ghazni), Dadicae (suggested to be Tajiks), Aparytae (mountaineers, perhaps of Safed Koh, where lay the Paryetae of Ptolemy), Gandarii (in Lower Kabul basin) and Paktyes, on or near the Indus. In the last name it has been plausibly suggested that we have the Pukhtun, as the eastern Afghans pronounce their name. Indeed, Pusht, Pasht or Pakht would seem to be the oldest name of the country of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the language of the act of Congress, which provides that "The awarding of premiums, if any, shall be done and performed by said Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, subject to the approval of the Commission created by this act." Even if such construction could be accepted as plausibly tenable, which the Commission denies, it could only be so regarded by virtue of previous conformity to the rules providing for the nomination of jurors by the company and their approval by the Commission. To commit the Commission to the approval of the conclusions ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... anything and everything," Susanna answered, cheerfully ominous. "Besides," she plausibly admonished him, "you might do me the justice of supposing that I have changes aboard the Fiorimondo. My maid awaits me there with quite a dozen boxes. So—you see. Oh, and by the bye," she interjected, "Serafino also is coming with me. He'll act as courier—buy my tickets, register ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... time, but if I was not perpetually engaged in this rather exhausting pursuit I was, at any rate, intrigued. Pengard, who is also Sylvester, and yet is neither the one nor the other, may be too much for your saner moments of credulity. But Mr. STRAUS tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction. Indeed Mr. STRAUS'S adventure into fields hitherto strange to him has been so successful that I am inclined to ask ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... ghost-stories of Pliny, Plutarch, the Philopseudes of Lucian, and similar sources. But it will at once be perceived, and admitted even by candid men of science, that these spiritual phenomena of the classical period cannot plausibly, nor even possibly, be attributed to the agency of rats, when we recall the fact that the rat was an animal unknown to the ancients. As the learned M. Selys Longch observes in his Etudes de Micromammalogie (Paris, 1839, p. 59), 'the origin ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... first-rate salesman, had a good address, and was believed by him to possess business habits eminently conducive to success. The fact that he had once failed, was something of a drawback in his mind, but he had asked Jacob the reason of his ill-success, which was so plausibly explained, that he considered the young man as simply unfortunate in not having ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... to frustrate Wallenstein's scheme. They represented that he was a traitor, that he was plotting with the enemies of the empire, that he crowded his camp with Protestants, that he wanted to be king, and compassed the death of his master. Some of it was plausibly near the truth; and their suspicions were confirmed when the Duke of Weimar took Ratisbon. The Elector of Bavaria had sent full warning; the Aulic Council had sent positive orders. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Clarendon. There wanted not a just indignation at the return of this trumpet; and yet the answer being so much in that popular road, of saying something plausibly to the people, it was thought fit again to make an attempt, that at least the world might see, that they did, in plain English refuse to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... thought was passing through her mind, and plausibly overcoming any faint doubts and difficulties which she might still have left, she was startled by a sudden knocking at the street door; and, looking out of the window immediately, saw a man in livery standing in the street, anxiously peering up at the house to see if his knocking ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... of it," replied Buller with equal directness. "I'm pleased with what I hear of you, and I like a gentleman, but Bradley explains his puzzling conduct very plausibly: it is no use being factious and hindering business in the House, as he says. And it can't be denied that there's Tory members in the House as factious as any of them pestilent Radical chaps that get up strikes out of doors. I'm not saying that you would ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... under the beautiful walls of Notre Dame d'Anvers, through Grande Place and past the Hotel de Ville, the cab proceeded, dogged by what might plausibly be asserted the most persistent and infatuated soul that ever crossed the water; and so on into the Quai Van Dyck, turning to the left at the old Steen dungeon and, slowing to a walk, moving soberly ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... is quite easily conceivable that the psychic mechanism of the establishment of homosexuality has in some cases corresponded to the course described by Freud. It may also be admitted that, as psychoanalysts claim, the pronounced horror feminae occasionally found in male inverts may plausibly be regarded as the reversal of an early and disappointed feminine attraction. But it is impossible to regard this mechanism as invariable or even frequent. It is quite true, and I have found ample evidence of the fact, that inverts are often very closely attached to their mothers, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is said a friend reported it. He will inveigle you to naughtiness to get your good name into his clutches; he will be your pandar to have you on the hip for a whore-master, and make you drunk to shew you reeling. He passes the more plausibly because all men have a smatch of his humour, and it is thought freeness which is malice. If he can say nothing of a man, he will seem to speak riddles, as if he could tell strange stories if he would; and when he has racked ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the unfortunate Clara Mowbray. Of three persons present at the marriage, besides the parties, the clergyman was completely deceived. Solmes he conceived to be at his own exclusive devotion; and therefore, if by his means this Hannah Irwin could be removed from the scene, he argued plausibly, that all evidence to the treachery which he had practised would be effectually stifled. Hence his agent, Solmes, had received a commission, as the reader may remember, to effect her removal without loss of time, and had reported ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... would-be pupil in the art of taking tobacco that if he pleases to be a practitioner, he shall learn in a fortnight to "take it plausibly in any ordinary, theatre, or the Tiltyard, if need be, in the most popular assembly that is." The Tiltyard adjoined Whitehall Palace and was the frequent scene of sports in which Queen Elizabeth took the greatest delight. Here took place, not only tilting properly so called, but ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... schools, of equal advantages in other respects, which is best regulated and most easily governed? which has most of the fear of God in it, the deepest reverence for his word, that where the Bible is read or from which it is excluded? It is easy for ingenious men to reason plausibly, and tell us that such and such injurious effects must follow from making sacred things too familiar to the youthful mind; but who ever heard of such effects following from the use of the Bible as a school-book? ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... society, and of private life. Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire. It might be plausibly argued that, if many things would be worse in England or Ireland under an intelligent despotism, some things would be managed better; that the Roman Government was more enlightened under Augustus and Antoninus than ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... after the battle, it might have been at Alfred's Hall near Cirencester, especially if Hampton (Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire), which is only six miles from Oakley Wood, be the real site of the great and important battle, as was, a few years since, very plausibly argued by Mr. John Marks Moffatt, in a paper inserted, with the signature "J. M. M.," in Brayley's Graphic and Historical Illustrator, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... up from the ruck of things." Reason would have plausibly said, "it's by virtue of feverish toil that you have become what you are. Being endlessly industrious is the best road—for you—to the heights." And, self-reassured, they would then have had orgies of work; and thus, by devoted exertion, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... found among all savage peoples; the value they attach to beads and all colored things is well known to travelers and traders. It has been plausibly argued that the origin of clothing is to be found in the desire of each sex to make itself beautiful in the eyes of the other.[234] However that may be, the employment of leaves for headdresses and waistbands ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... least, "a good stroke in him," as Carlyle phrased it. This is the universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge and Goethe, and founded apparently on plain facts, and yet, I think, it is mistaken, demonstrably untrue. It might even be put more plausibly than any of its defenders has put it. One might point out that Shakespeare's men of action are nearly all to be found in the historical plays which he wrote in early manhood, while the portrait of the philosopher-poet is the favourite study of ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... try the patience of the English party to the last bit of strain it would bear by keeping my anchorage in Dutch waters on plea of distress, and at the same time I wished to be ready for instant departure the moment I saw that the plea of distress could no longer be plausibly held." ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... there is something very fascinating in infidelity—something which, if allowed to meet their gaze, would be sure to attract and convince them—than which nothing is farther from the truth—not only so, however, but many of the statements and most of the arguments which sound plausibly enough on the glib tongue of a popular speaker read very differently indeed, when put down in cold-blooded letter-press, and published in the pages of a book. I protest strongly against making a mystery of London infidelity. It has spread ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... than the three other methods, because it only requires that we should accurately note the circumstances of some one country, or state of society. Making allowance, thereupon, for the effect of all causes whose tendencies are known, the residue which those causes are inadequate to explain may plausibly be imputed to the remainder of the circumstances which are known to have existed in the case. Something similar to this is the method which Coleridge(275) describes himself as having followed in his political essays in the Morning Post. "On every great occurrence I endeavored to discover ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... pity of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for what we call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of his commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where everything moves in circles and all ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of speech which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined vocal complication ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... Sophocles' old age. It is said to have been produced after his death, though it may have been composed some years earlier. The tragedy of King Oedipus, in which the poet's art attained its maturity, is plausibly assigned to an early year of the Peloponnesian war (say 427 B.C.), the Trachiniae to about 420 B.C. The time of the Electra is doubtful; but Professor Jebb has shown that, on metrical grounds, it should be placed after, rather ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the case of space that quantity most plausibly appears to admit of a contrary. For men define the term 'above' as the contrary of 'below', when it is the region at the centre they mean by 'below'; and this is so, because nothing is farther from the extremities ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... canton of Berne, was about to be smuggled into their company by the cupidity of the former, contrary, not only to what was due to the feelings and rights of men of more creditable callings, but, as it was vehemently and plausibly insisted, to the very safety of those who were about to trust their fortunes to the ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... flattered himself he was as quick on the draw as the average. Besides, he knew better now than to trust himself alone with Lynch or any of the others on some outlying part of the range where a fatal accident could plausibly be laid to marauding greasers, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... from the inevitable ram's horn. Presently I was aware that the stranger's eye was directed on myself; and there ensued a conversation, some of which I could not help overhearing at the time, and the rest have pieced together more or less plausibly from the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of accession is secession; and, therefore, when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the Union, it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. If, in adopting the Constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary, in order to break it up, but to secede from the same compact. But the term is wholly out of place. Accession, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... came around to talk it over with you, eh?" Bill sneered. "Told you it was all on the square, did he? Explained it all very plausibly, I suppose. Probably suggested that you try smoothing me down, too. It would ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... than the effect now and here produced on us, we have, so far as the Greek world is concerned, lost and not gained. Compensations indeed there are; a vast experience has enlarged our horizon and deepened our emotion, and it would be absurd to say now, as was once truly and plausibly said, that Greek means culture. Yet even now we could ill do without it; nor does there seem any reason beyond the dulness of our imagination and the imperfection of our teaching why it should not be as true and as living a help ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... mythology of their Nahuatl visitors is not easily answered. That the circular temple in Mayapan, with four doors, specified by Landa as different from any other in Yucatan, was erected to Quetzalcoatl, by or because of the Aztec colony there, may plausibly be supposed when we recall how peculiarly this form was devoted to his worship. Again, one of the Maya chronicles—that translated by Pio Perez and published by Stephens in his Travels in Yucatan—opens with a distinct reference to Tula and Nonoal, names inseparable from the Quetzalcoatl ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... Inn as the "affidavit." In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and most sparkling is the Advertisement, but the grandest, ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear God, worship Mammon, revere big wigs right or ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... ges]—[Greek: ex ouranou]: against [Greek: choikos]—[Greek: ho Kyrios]. Remove [Greek: ho Kyrios], and some substitute for it must be invented as a counterpoise to [Greek: choikos]. Taking a hint from what is found in ver. 48, some one (plausibly enough,) suggested [Greek: epouranios]: and this gloss so effectually recommended itself to Western Christendom, that having been adopted by Ambrose[555], by Jerome[556] (and later by Augustine[557],) it established itself in the Vulgate[558], and is found in all the later ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... no sympathy whatever with those who seem to rake in to the credit of their own country every discovery and invention they possibly or plausibly can. We did much towards the commencement of steam navigation, but we did not begin it. We pushed considerably in advance of other nations in the invention of apparatus by which boats might be propelled by steam; ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... stages telescoped into their embryos, and the statement that the resemblance between certain characters in the embryos of higher animals and corresponding stages in the embryos of lower animals is most plausibly explained by the assumption that they have descended from the same ancestors, and that their common structures ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... Mortimer protested against the succession of Philip of Valois. Admitted that the exclusion of women from the monarchy was already established by two precedents, could it not be plausibly argued that a woman, incapable herself of reigning, might form "the bridge and plank"[1] (as a contemporary put it) by which her sons might step into the rights of their ancestors? Strange as such a conception seems to our ideas, it was not unfamiliar to the jurists of that day. It was ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five. With which suggestion, at least as considered in the light of a practical scheme, I need scarcely say that I nowise coincide. Nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, as young ladies (Maedchen) are, to mankind, precisely the most delightful in those years; so young gentlemen (Buebchen) do then attain their maximum of detestability. Such gawks (Gecken) are they; and foolish peacocks, and yet with such a vulturous ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... in hour...." He was figuring the maximum distance which could plausibly be accepted as a day's journeying by air. He surveyed the maps again. "The plateau of Cuyaba, at a guess. Hm.... Fleets of aircraft could practise there and never be seen. An army could be maneuvered ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... he still remained firm, they took other grounds, and plausibly argued that the troops and other officials needed aid as well as the poor; and, as by the words of his vow, he had bound himself to distribute the contents of the treasury to those who had claim to ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... It has been plausibly conjectured, that the fables of Elysium, the slow Cocytus, and the gloomy Hades, were either invented or allegorized from the names of Egyptian places. Diodorus assures us that by the vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead—were the temple and stream, both called ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... most people, are not able to do it; which makes the publication of such quibblings and refinements the more pernicious. I am no skillful casuist nor subtle disputant; and yet I would undertake to justify and qualify the profession of a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly, as to make many ignorant people embrace the profession, as an innocent, if not even a laudable one; and puzzle people of some degree of knowledge, to answer me point by point. I have seen a book, entitled 'Quidlibet ex Quolibet', or the art of making anything out of anything; which is not ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... life, and especially of those facts and deductions about biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power. One peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism, and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible and unreal abstraction of "race." ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... has discovered that a like obligation was imposed on the Irons, or Iron Miners, of the forests in the ancient Earldom of Namur. He very plausibly suggests that the appellation, "Verus," by which the Dean Forest Miners designate each other, is derived from ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls
... daughter endowed with a large portion of that vain gift called beauty. Her father and family are people of bad principle, without conscience or honesty, and, withal, utterly destitute of religion—not but that they carry themselves very plausibly to the world. Among such people, my Lord, it is not possible that this engaging damsel, who is now so youthful and innocent, could resist the evil influence of the principles that prevail in her family. Indeed, her abiding among them cannot be for her ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... and Latin, a Euripides, a Livy, and a magnificent Homer.[4] This Homer we have already referred to in an earlier chapter, when describing the work of Theodore of Tarsus. The signature has now been more plausibly explained, "The following note," writes Dr. James, "which I found in Dr. Masters's copy of Stanley's Catalogue, preserved in [Corpus Christi] College Library, suggests another origin for this Homer. I have been unable to identify the document to which reference is made. It should ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... evening with a party who were diverting themselves in front of the abbey, Lord Byron by accident pushed her into the basin which receives the cascades; and out of this little incident, as my informant very plausibly conjectures, the tale of his attempting to drown Lady ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... /n./ (also, more plausibly, spelled 'wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... agree with Canon Ronder. If he will allow me to say so, he has not been, as yet, long enough in the place to know how things really stand. I have nothing to say against Dennison, but he has obviously put his case very plausibly, but those who have known the School and its methods for many years have perhaps a prior right of judgment over Canon Ronder, who's known it for so ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... we may plausibly attribute a proposal which, on October 25, Knox submitted to Croft. {159} It was that England should lend 1000 men for the attack on the Regent in Leith. Peace with France need not be broken, for the men may come as private adventurers, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... Lovelace to Belford.— He makes such a fair representation to Tomlinson of the situation between him and the lady, behaves so plausibly, and makes an overture so generous, that she is all kindness and unreserved to him. Her affecting exultation on her amended prospects. His unusual sensibility upon it. Reflection on the good effects of education. Pride ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to attack the reigning family, yet considered the introduction of that family as, at best, only the least of two great evils, as a necessary but painful and humiliating preservative against Popery. The Minister might plausibly say that Pulteney and Carteret, in the hope of gratifying their own appetite for office and for revenge, did not scruple to serve the purposes of a faction hostile to the Protestant succession. The appearance of Frederick at the head of the Patriots silenced this reproach. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me when I was a girl, "You needn't read Barry Lyndon; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to like, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced. From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... complete set of golf clubs belonging to the Bronze period. In regard to length the clubs are very much the same as the average implements used at the present day, but the large size of the heads is remarkable, the niblick weighing nearly half a hundredweight. It is plausibly inferred that clubs of this pattern may also have been used as weapons, as the dwellers in this district in the Bronze period are known to have been of a warlike and tumultuous disposition. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... has done its bitterest against him, Hannibal not only dazzles the imagination, but takes captive the heart. He stands out as the incarnation of magnanimity and patriotism and self-sacrificing heroism, no less than of incomparable military genius. Napoleon, the only general who could plausibly challenge the Carthaginian's supremacy, had throughout the greater part of his career an immense superiority to his adversaries in the quality of the forces which he wielded. He had the enthusiasm of the Revolution behind him, and he was unhampered ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... with cream and cake at another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit and white blossoms on the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose and eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausibly deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in mid-March, enjoy the right to be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... do?" The lady murmured this much so far under her breath that the words might have been mistaken for anything else—most plausibly, perhaps, for, "Who cares if it is?"—nor further did she acknowledge John's profound inclination. Frigidity and complaint of ill-usage made a glamour in every fold of her expensive garments; she ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... has gotten the ear of Juvenalis or of Severus himself. It has been represented plausibly to the Prefect of the Praetorium, or perhaps even to the Emperor in person, that the courts here in Rome have fallen into a shocking state of disrepute on account of decisions in scandalous contravention of the evidence, brought about by favoritism ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... out. He looked like a corpse half-cold, as they carried him jerkily along a track that roughly followed the line of the wall. I don't suppose that anything ever looked more like an Arab funeral procession than we did. The absence of noisy mourners, and the unusual hour of night, were plausibly accounted for by the dreaded disease that Grim had invented for the occasion. My golf-suit was the only false note, but I kept in shadow as much as I could, with the unseemly burden ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... given as to the author of the document, nor do we know from what sources he derived his information. It has been plausibly suggested that it was an epitome of the history of their nations, which was learned by heart and handed down from master to disciple, and which served as a verbal key to the interpretation of the painted and sculptured records, ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... once a year, and let him drive them with his own down the long mountain road to Springtown, and it was understood than he did not inquire too curiously in the matter of commissions. The stores and fodder which Enoch delivered over to him in exchange, together with a plausibly varying amount of hard cash, seemed to Simon an ample return for the scrawny cattle he sent to market. And Enoch, for his part, was always willing to testify that Amberley was a pleasant man ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... he'll take his words back. I am waiting from hour to hour for him to come and abjure his evidence. I have come to like that Nikolay and am studying him in detail. And what do you think? He-he! He answered me very plausibly on some points, he obviously had collected some evidence and prepared himself cleverly. But on other points he is simply at sea, knows nothing and doesn't even suspect that he ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... my attention. He was shivering a good deal, and it was all I could do to resist my desire to get him into a comfortable bed at once. But I wanted to appear plausibly in this part of the world. I felt it would not do to turn up anywhere at dawn and rest, it would be altogether too conspicuous; we must rest until the day was well advanced, and then appear as road-stained pedestrians ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... THE ENGLISH ISLANDS, securing all the advantages, in the way of port charges and duties, of an American vessel in an American port and an English vessel in an English port! A few voyages successfully performed on this plan, he plausibly urged, would be productive of immense profit ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... patients, in scarcely broken succession; like their evil genius, the puerperal fever has seemed to stalk behind them wherever they went. Some have deemed it prudent to retire for a time from practice. In fine, that this fever may occur spontaneously, I admit; that its infectious nature may be plausibly disputed, I do not deny; but I add, considerately, that in my own family I had rather that those I esteemed the most should be delivered, unaided, in a stable, by the manger-side, than that they should receive the best help, in the fairest apartment, but exposed to the vapors of this pitiless ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... explanation, after which he goes on to say: "At this point plausibly comes in a suggestion that the internal part of the circuit be made very small and the external part very large. Why not (say) make the internal part 1 and the external 9, thus saving nine-tenths and losing only one-tenth? Unfortunately, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... for meeting their tension, meanwhile, was to interweave Mrs. Assingham as plausibly as possible with the undulations of their surface, to bring it about that she should join them, of an afternoon, when they drove together or if they went to look at things—looking at things being almost as much a feature of their life as if they were ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Washington, in the very first conference, he made clear his dependence upon them. "You are in truth, my advisers," he said, "for when I ask you for information I will have no way of checking it up, and must act upon it unquestioningly. We will be deluged with claims plausibly and convincingly presented. It will be your task to establish the truth or falsity of these claims out of your specialized knowledges, so that my positions may ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... the subject of the Art of the Greeks we come to what, more plausibly than any other, may be regarded as the central point of their scheme of life. We have already noticed, in dealing with other topics, how constantly the aesthetic point of view emerges and predominates in matters with which, in the modern way of looking at things, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... proceeded under threats of exposure to levy blackmail upon them. Mister Alec, however, was a dangerous man to play games of that sort with. It was a stroke of positive genius on his part to see in the burglary scare, which was convulsing the country side, an opportunity of plausibly getting rid of the man whom he feared. William was decoyed up and shot; and, had they only got the whole of the note, and paid a little more attention to detail in their accessories, it is very possible that suspicion might never ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Bannadonna, the chief-magistrate of the town, with an associate—both elderly men—followed what seemed the image up the tower. But, arrived at the belfry, they had little recompense. Plausibly entrenching himself behind the conceded mysteries of his art, the mechanician withheld present explanation. The magistrates glanced toward the cloaked object, which, to their surprise, seemed now to have ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Professor Denham, Ph. D., M. A., etc., isolated a metal that scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being able to smelt. Or it might start with his first experimental use of that metal with entirely impossible results. Or it might very plausibly begin with an interview between a celebrated leader of gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory assistant, who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid gold and very nervously explained, and finally managed to prove, where it ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... had been waiting in the dark at the top of the stairs, listening, was infinitely rejoiced that her project had been explained so plausibly, and yet in such perfect good faith, and she flew off to dress in high spirits. Had she mentioned it to her father, he would have doubted, taken it as her scheme, and perhaps put a stop to it: but ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... also we have a correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived the time of danger. One last example: syphilis has been plausibly credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans are, by all accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is not seriously to be argued that the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... assented, pleased that she had taken me into her confidence and deeply curious as to the Italian connoisseur. What she had told so frankly and plausibly did not, however, touch upon the matter of the interest shown by the American State Department in my aunt's arrival at Barton, which troubled me much more than the antics of the Italian who had followed the women across ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... own, addressed to Edward VI, and entitled Elpine. Puttenham and Meres in dealing with pastoral writers also mention one Challener, no doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the Mirror for Magistrates, and Nashe in his preface to Menaphon adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to Watson's Hecatompathia and various sententious fragments to England's Parnassus, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of Catullus which might almost be ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... adventures of Joan are, it must be admitted that they are very naturally worked out and very plausibly presented. Altogether this is an excellent story for ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... to Rome; he had observed that I had two mules, and if I would let him have one of them and would despatch with him a confidential servant to take charge of the relics, he would at once send them to me. This plausibly expressed proposition pleased me, and I made up my mind to test the value of the somewhat ambiguous promise at once;[22] so giving him the mule and money for his journey I ordered my notary Ratleig (who already desired to go to Rome to offer his devotions ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... writes, the employment of Brahmans for the performance of ceremonies appears to be a very recent reform for, as a rule, in sacrifices and funeral ceremonies, the worshipper's sister's son performs the functions of a priest. "Among the Pasis of Monghyr this ancient custom, which admits of being plausibly interpreted as a survival of female kinship, still prevails generally." The social status of the Pasis is low, but they are not regarded as impure. At their marriage festivals, Mr. Gayer notes, boys are dressed up as girls and made to dance in public, but they do not ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... its joint authors say: "We propose the question—Have Home's phenomena ever been plausibly explained as conjuring tricks, or in accordance with known laws of nature? And we answer—No; they have not been so explained, nor can we so explain them."[25] In commenting on the Joint Report, by Professor Barrett ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... first attempt of Lord Byron at reviewing is remarkable only as showing how plausibly he could assume the established tone and phraseology of these minor judgment-seats of criticism. If Mr. Wordsworth ever chanced to cast his eye over this article, how little could he have expected that under that dull prosaic mask ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... privy-council, he was committed to a kind of honorable custody, in which he appears to have remained till his death, which took place a few months afterwards. These punishments were slight compared with the customary severity of the age; and it has plausibly been conjectured that the anger of Elizabeth on this occasion was rather feigned than real, and that although she thought proper openly to resent any attempt injurious to the title of the queen of Scots, she was secretly not displeased ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it involves none ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... biology became, as it were, filtered; it got rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even in Herbert Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect something of that sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously directing life, which forms the very essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations were precisely calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... of democracy is so universal among British Socialists that Belloc, Chesterton and other Liberals accuse them plausibly, but unjustly, of actually representing an aristocratic standpoint. In an article entitled "Why I Am Not A Socialist," Mr. Chesterton expresses a belief, which he says is almost unknown among the Socialists of England, namely, a belief "in the masses of the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... name of Lotanu or Rotanu has been assigned by Brugsch to the Assyrians, but subsequently, by connecting it, more ingeniously than plausibly, with the Assyrian iltanu, he extended it to all the peoples of the north; we now know that in the texts it denotes the whole of Syria, and, more generally, all the peoples dwelling in the basins of the Orontes and the Euphrates. The attempt to connect the name Rotanu ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... struggling poverty. Virgil's health was always feeble, and his temper seems to have been rather melancholy; he had had little experience of life except in his remote country town, and would, we may plausibly conjecture, have succumbed in a contest from which the more worldly-wise Horace emerged ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... parts or periods is fundamentally fallacious: for example, inasmuch as the present generation owes to the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ many of its artistic models and philosophical ideas and very few of its political theories, the former might plausibly be embraced in the field of modern history, the latter excluded therefrom. But the problem before us is not so difficult as may seem on first thought. To all intents and purposes the development of the six characteristics that have been noted has taken place within five hundred years. The sixteenth ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the common forms in the first case alluded to by Foster (viz., the trial of Berkeley, Maltravers, &c., for treason, in the murder of Edward II.[16]) might be more plausibly attacked, because they were tried, though in Parliament, by a jury of freeholders: which circumstance might have given occasion to justify a nearer approach to the forms of indictments below. But no such forms were observed, nor ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of local roads to the extent of eight millions, without ever having to pay a cent of the interest; and though New York's experience had been more chequered, the successes were stressed and the failures were plausibly explained away. ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... philosophers he retains nothing but their selfishness; of the intellectual influence of the Gooroo pontiffs he covets nothing but their dissimulation. He has taught his gaping disciples that a skilfully compounded and plausibly administered lie is a goodly thing,— except it be told against the cause of a Brahmin, in which case no oxyhydrogeneralities of earthly combustion can afford an idea of the particular hotness of the hell devised for such a liar. He has solemnly impressed them with the mysterious sacredness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... discussed in camp, indeed speeches were made in the interest of the cut-off route which was to be so much shorter. A clergyman, the Rev. J.W. Brier, was very enthusiastic about this matter and discoursed learnedly and plausibly about it. The more the matter was talked about the more there were who were converted to the belief that the short road would be the best. The map showed every camp on the road and showed where there was water and grass, and as to obstacles to the wagons it ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... brought into that country and kept by the victorious generals of Alexander. Some of the works of art unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Mykenae are either Persian or Assyrian in character, and are like those found on the Oxus. Professor Forchhammer very plausibly supposes that they were spoils from the Persian camp which had been awarded to Mykenae as her share after ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... the writer's pay, and aids the deception by leading the reader off on false scents. Be that as it may, the professional sleuth is in nine cases out of ten a dummy by malice prepense; and it might be plausibly argued that, in the interests of pure art, that is what he ought to be. But genius always finds a way that is better than the rules, and I think it will be found that the very best riddle stories contrive to drive character and riddle side by side, and to make each somehow enhance the effect ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... of all the business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said: ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... mankind was engaged in the study of dreaming. The wise man among the ancients was preeminently the interpreter of dreams. The ability to interpret successfully or plausibly was the quickest road to royal favor, as Joseph and Daniel found it to be; failure to give satisfaction in this respect led to banishment from court or death. When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... feeble of him, but he was powerfully impelled to relieve himself by confiding his wretchedness to Steve. He need not say much, he told himself plausibly—only just enough to lighten the ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... members of the league, and also that many honorable and patriotic men do not feel as I do on this subject, I am personally unwilling to take part in an agitation which may have some tendency to cause a public enemy to persist in armed resistance, or may be, at least, plausibly represented as having this tendency. There can be no doubt that, as a matter of fact, the country is at war with Aguinaldo and his followers. I profoundly regret this fact;... but it is a fact, nevertheless, and, as such, must weigh ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... from his hand, so freedom of speech admits of dexterity and politeness, provided that a pleasant way of putting it does not destroy the power of the rebuke, for impudence and coarseness and insolence, if added to freedom of speech, entirely mar and ruin the effect. And so the harper plausibly and elegantly silenced Philip, who ventured to dispute with him about proper playing on the harp, by answering him, "God forbid that you should be so unfortunate, O king, as to understand harping better than me." But that was not a right answer of Epicharmus, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... afraid to touch cards, as though in the very cardboard there had been something unrighteous and perilous. But the respectability of a luxurious private hotel makes proper every act that passes within its walls. And Constance plausibly argued that no harm could come from a game which you played by yourself. She acquired with some aptitude several varieties of Patience. She said: "I think I could enjoy that, if I kept at it. But it does ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... just that those should receive most whose needs are greatest; while others hold that those who work harder, or who produce more, or whose services are more valuable to the community, may justly claim a larger quota in the division of the produce. And the sense of natural justice may be plausibly appealed to in behalf of every one ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... its implied reference to Japan, as at one time it might have applied to Russia. Fear of Japan's aims in China is not confined to China; the fear is widespread. An international economic arrangement may therefore be plausibly presented as the easiest and most direct method of relieving China of the Japanese menace. For Japan to stay out would be to give herself away; if she came in, it would subject Japanese activities to constant ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... thinking deeply, and he turned his eyes wistfully to the upland slopes of his farm. Mr. Weeks had talked plausibly, and if all had been as he represented, the plan would not have been a bad one. But the widower did not yearn for the widow. He did not know much about her, but had very unfavorable impressions. Mrs. Holcroft had not been given to speaking ill of anyone, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... There are exceptions to this rule; some snakes eat monkeys (thanking Providence), and the elephant is content with foliage; but compare cats and wolves with the ungulates that make a first concoction of herbs for their sake. It is true that our monkey kin are chiefly frugivorous; for it may be plausibly argued that man was first differentiated by becoming definitely carnivorous, a sociable hunter, as it were, a wolf-ape. Hence the advantage of longer legs, the use of weapons, the upright gait and defter hands to use and make weapons, more strategic brains, ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... informed of the disaster at Ridgeway by parties who had arrived from the battle-field. Why, then, did he not push on in search of the enemy, instead of remaining at New Germany until 5.30 p.m.? is another question. Excuses are easily framed and plausibly given in reports, but the country generally, and his soldiers particularly, have always thought that he might have managed to have got into a conflict with the enemy in some way. Col. Peacocke was a very fine gentleman, and had the ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l'ame. When we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch. We often cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we most of us know enough of human nature to ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... known. He was surprised at the knowledge they displayed of the English language. He overheard words exchanged between them which were as easy to understand as much of Teddy's talk. They must be, therefore, in frequent communication with white men. Their location was so far north that, as Richter plausibly inferred, they were extensive dealers in furs and peltries, which must be disposed of to traders and the agents of the American Fur and Hudson Bay Companies. The Selkirk or Red river settlement also, must be at ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... first she did not comprehend his reference to beginning the New Year. Then his meaning revealed itself. That story to her mother about having been attacked by ruffians at the bottom of King Street had been an invention, a ruse to account plausibly for his presence on her mother's doorstep! And she had never suspected that the story was not true. In spite of her experience of his lying, she had never suspected that that particular statement was a lie. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... certainly doomed. But when she dies, and Densher is free for Kate again, who will be the worse for the fraud? Milly will have had what she wants, her two friends will have helped themselves in helping her. So Kate argues plausibly; but it all depends on keeping poor exquisite Milly safely in the dark. If she should discover that Kate and Densher are in league to profit by her, it would be a sharper stroke than the discovery of her malady. And by this autumn evening, when Susan Stringham ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... had become a mere vehicle for virtuosity; when they sang their tours de force, the people applauded and waved their handkerchiefs, as they did also when the preaching pleased them. The pagans pointed the finger of scorn at the Christians, as being mere renegades from the old religion, and said, plausibly enough, that their worship was merely another form of the Dionysus tragedy. There was the same altar, the same chorus, the priest who sang and was answered by the chorus; and the resemblance had grown to such an extent that St. Chrysostom (350 A.D.) complained that the church ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... amiable in spirit. He enjoyed a wonderful natural talent and had been scrupulously trained in every kind of education, which always enabled him (not unnaturally) to comprehend everything that was needed with the greatest keenness, to interpret the need most plausibly, and to arrange and administer matters most prudently. No shifting of a favorable situation could come upon him so suddenly as to catch him off his guard, nor did a secret delay, no matter how long the postponement, escape his notice. He decided always with regard to every crisis before he came ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... man was in his integrity, because he was a spirit fallen from his first glorious perfection, and therefore must appear in such shape which might argue his imperfection and abasement, which was the shape of a beast; otherwise [he plausibly contends] no reason can be given why he should not rather have appeared to Eve in the shape of a woman than of a serpent. But since the fall of man the case is altered; now we know he can take upon him the shape of a man. He appears in the shape of man's imperfection ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the listening youth he seemed to speak plausibly. Certainly many of the chiefs thought so, as more than once they nodded and murmured their approval. Timmendiquas replied, and several of the younger chiefs supported him, but Henry believed that the burden of opinion was shifting the other ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... other things which I will not here write down. She spoke pleasantly and plausibly, too, until for a moment I forgot who she was, and thought her to be truly a lovable and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... very plausibly, very seductively, to John Porter. Porter almost unreasonably scented charity in Crane's proposal. He believed that the bet was a myth; Crane was trying to present him with this sum as a compensation for having lost Diablo. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... ghost can suffer no inconvenience from hornets I take to be indisputable: but as a defence of Jaggard the above hardly seems convincing. One might as plausibly justify a forger on the ground that, had he foreseen the indignation of the prosecuting counsel, he would doubtless have saved his reputation by forbearing to forge. But before constructing a better defence, let us hear the whole tale of the alleged misdeeds. Of the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... various Indian nations, was struck by the appearance of their features, which were those of the Blackfeet, although they wore none of the distinctive ornaments of that tribe, and introduced themselves as Peagons, whose territory lies to the southward. Their chief, a plausibly mannered man, stated that they had been induced to come to Fort Duncan by hearing that better value was given for peltries there than was to be obtained from the Long Knives. They seemed, however, in no hurry to begin business, and begged that ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... conservatism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching. They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike both, that man is "the hardest of all animals to govern." Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being "the Tories of speculation," have commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according to that doctrine to have been a Liberal if any one ever ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... him, and believed all except this matter of the sixty-thousand-dollar check. When it came to that he explained it all plausibly enough. When he had gone to see Stener those several last days, he had not fancied that he was really going to fail. He had asked Stener for some money, it is true—not so very much, all things considered—one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; but, as Stener should have testified, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... HIS explanation, after which he goes on to say: "At this point plausibly comes in a suggestion that the internal part of the circuit be made very small and the external part very large. Why not (say) make the internal part 1 and the external 9, thus saving nine-tenths and losing only one-tenth? Unfortunately, the suggestion is not practical; ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... success their superiority in horseflesh, their habit of isolated movement, their knowledge of the country, and the friendliness of the inhabitants, greatly contributed. The student of naval history will easily recognise in these methods an analogy to the battle tactics plausibly ascribed to the French by Clerk in his celebrated treatise. It was often successful on the ground, but it did not win campaigns. The mastery of the sea remained with the British, whose blindly headlong attacks with their ships resembled in much the free and often foolish ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... one might support as plausibly—and as falsely—the theory of a Woman-made World as the popular one of a Man-made World. There has been many a teacher and philosopher who has sustained some form of this former thesis, disclaiming against the excessive power ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... adult stages telescoped into their embryos, and the statement that the resemblance between certain characters in the embryos of higher animals and corresponding stages in the embryos of lower animals is most plausibly explained by the assumption that they have descended from the same ancestors, and that their common structures are ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys; and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one perished by falling from a precipice, (and, as I have heard, through mere absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her hand,) ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... terminating in a bud, with two branching twigs growing from it, and a harmless nondescript fly or butterfly perched on the back of it. The combination of a familiar sight and a threatening sound would very plausibly result in cautious immobility. As for its instantaneous assumption of the pose, to move instantaneously is the next best thing to not moving at all. It is less likely to startle than a slow movement. Twigs which have ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... surprised at the knowledge they displayed of the English language. He overheard words exchanged between them which were as easy to understand as much of Teddy's talk. They must be, therefore, in frequent communication with white men. Their location was so far north that, as Richter plausibly inferred, they were extensive dealers in furs and peltries, which must be disposed of to traders and the agents of the American Fur and Hudson Bay Companies. The Selkirk or Red river settlement also, must be at ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... idealistic systems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealists find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his position plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects, really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by assuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes them equally impatient of systematic despotism ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... opinion which has now become universal. But it was quite another thing to argue that what the Constitution had come to mean was what it meant when it was adopted. The identity of meaning at these two periods was the proposition which Mr. Webster undertook to maintain, and he upheld it as well and as plausibly as the nature of the case admitted. His reasoning was close and vigorous; but he could not destroy the theory of the Constitution as held by leaders and people in 1789, or reconcile the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions or the Hartford Convention with the fundamental-law ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... not too hasty in believing this stranger to be the Sunchild? People are continually thinking that such and such another is the Sunchild come down again from the sun's palace and going to and fro among us. How many such stories, sometimes very plausibly told, have we not had during the last twenty years? They never take root, and die out of themselves as suddenly as they spring up. That the man is a poacher can hardly be doubted; I thought so the moment I saw him; ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... more reason why you should make no secret of it," he argued plausibly. "Come! Out with it! Who ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... that "The awarding of premiums, if any, shall be done and performed by said Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, subject to the approval of the Commission created by this act." Even if such construction could be accepted as plausibly tenable, which the Commission denies, it could only be so regarded by virtue of previous conformity to the rules providing for the nomination of jurors by the company and their approval by the Commission. To commit the Commission to the approval of the conclusions reached by jurors, with whose ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... only venturing to laugh at men, who, denying any such information, affect to speak with any confidence on the solution of this prodigious problem, the data for solving which I contend we have not: while those we have, apart from the direct assurance of supposed inspiration, more plausibly point to an opposite conclusion. The conclusion which would more naturally suggest itself from the history of the past would be that of perpetual advance and perpetual retrogression, contemporaneously going on in different portions of the race,— perpetual flux and reflux ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... base manner towards another, without forthwith conceiving a mortal hatred against him. You wrong another, know yourself to have acted basely, and are enraged, not against yourself—for no one hates himself—but against the innocent cause of your baseness; reasoning very plausibly, 'But for that fellow, I should never have been base; for had he not existed I could not have been so, at any rate against him;' and this hatred is all the more bitter, when you reflect that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... for ethical material. At present we cannot use him for such purposes, nor say whether he is selfish or self-sacrificing, possessed of moral standards and accountable, or driven by subtle yet automatic reflexes. The obvious facts of him may be interpreted plausibly in either way, and he cannot speak. Till he can give us a clearer account of this central fact of his being, we shall not know whether he is a poor relation of ours or is rather akin to rocks, and clouds, and trees. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... by him to possess business habits eminently conducive to success. The fact that he had once failed was something of a drawback in his mind, but he had asked Jacob the reason of his ill-success, which was so plausibly explained, that he considered the young man as simply unfortunate in not having capital, and ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... scheme. They represented that he was a traitor, that he was plotting with the enemies of the empire, that he crowded his camp with Protestants, that he wanted to be king, and compassed the death of his master. Some of it was plausibly near the truth; and their suspicions were confirmed when the Duke of Weimar took Ratisbon. The Elector of Bavaria had sent full warning; the Aulic Council had sent positive orders. But ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... raised to the groined roof, and shook his head sadly. If Saint Denis did not whisper inspiration he at least spun out the time for thought. Commines' request was reasonable, and he was at a loss how plausibly to ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... thro a Governours Yard. The Method they used to prevent his Suspition of them. Their danger by reason of the Wayes they were to pass. They still remain at the Governors to prevent suspition. An Accident that now created them great fear: But got fairly rid of it. Get away plausibly from the Governor. In their way, they meet with a River, which they found for their purpose. They come safely to Anarodgburro: This Place described. The People stand amazed at them. They are examined by the Governor of the Place. Provide things necessary for their Flight. They find it ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... Belford.— He makes such a fair representation to Tomlinson of the situation between him and the lady, behaves so plausibly, and makes an overture so generous, that she is all kindness and unreserved to him. Her affecting exultation on her amended prospects. His unusual sensibility upon it. Reflection on the good effects of education. Pride an excellent ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... offices should be required to swear fealty to the King and Queen on pain of deprivation. None could say what might be the effect of a law enjoining all the members of a great, a powerful, a sacred profession to make, under the most solemn sanction of religion, a declaration which might be plausibly represented as a formal recantation of all that they had been writing and preaching during many years. The Primate and some of the most eminent Bishops had already absented themselves from Parliament, and would doubtless relinquish their palaces ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... responsible. It is great on the intellectual side, in its science and philosophy, its art and general culture; and that greatness, too, has been won independently of, or in defiance of, the clergy. On the moral side only it may plausibly be connected with its established religion, and here precisely it fails and approaches barbarism. I do not wonder that the Churches are troubled, and do not wonder greatly that they ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... searching, eager, harassed, and harassing unquiet of the figure here given a more acceptable rendering of Leonardo's character and appearance than any among the likenesses of himself which are more or less plausibly ascribed to him. The question is one of so much interest that I must defer its fuller treatment for another work, in which I hope to deal with the portraits of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, and with Holbein's "Danse des Paysans." I have, however, given above the greater part ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... But whatever Blucher said—how plausibly soever he tried to represent to his troops that they were not retreating, but advancing—it was unfortunately but too true that the battle of Bautzen was lost, and that the Prussians and Russians were obliged ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... through which it multiplied in a limited space, and from that evident parsimony of land which drove tombs and monuments to the rocks, and cities to the edge of the desert. Calculations based on the number of cities, and on the number of men of military age, have plausibly placed the sum at ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... But the name of that family, Davie, boy, is the name you bear—Balfours of Shaws: an ancient, honest, reputable house, peradventure in these latter days decayed. Your father, too, was a man of learning as befitted his position; no man more plausibly conducted school; nor had he the manner or the speech of a common dominie; but (as ye will yourself remember) I took aye a pleasure to have him to the manse to meet the gentry; and those of my own house, Campbell of Kilrennet, Campbell of Dunswire, Campbell of Minch, and others, all ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vouchsafed to explain things to me to avoid a row, but he was desperately angry. She has never been out of the convent since she was three years old, and she is very nervous and shy. That was his story, and he told it plausibly enough. I could not get anything out of her, except an admission that what he said ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... day of July, 1862. Shortly after the beginning of the War of the Rebellion it was made to appear to the country that a transcontinental road was a national necessity; that without it we could not hope to retain long the Pacific Coast. It was also very plausibly argued that the political benefits to be derived by the country from the construction of such a road, as well as its great length and extraordinary cost, made it the duty of the nation to aid liberally its enterprising and patriotic promoters in the prosecution of their gigantic task. ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... that day. Let work be planned for seven days of the week. Let the hum of the mills and the roar of commerce go on. Take no note of the Sabbath day, either in business or recreation or worship, and conditions will soon be upon us, such that we may urge as plausibly, that the Sabbath is effete, possible to our slow going fathers but inconsistent with the ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... that there is not a truthful Indian in Labrador. In fact it is considered an accomplishment to lie cheerfully and well. They are like the Crees of James Bay and the westward in this respect, and will lie most plausibly when it will serve their purpose better than truth, and I verily believe these Indians sometimes lie for the mere pleasure of it when it might be to their advantage ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... lawyer he relies on states plausibly this entire willingness to such a relief, and requests the Court to appoint a successor to the distinguished trustee. Hardin feels that he has now covered his past with a solid barrier. Safe at last. No living man can roll away the huge rock from the "tomb of the dead past." It would ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia, and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might he traced to the following circumstance:—The natives were a pastoral people, and would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute a sacrifice to obtain deliverance from this pest, and ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... some more; three times did I fill the bowl for him, and three times did he drain it without thought or heed; then, when I saw that the wine had got into his head, I said to him as plausibly as I could: 'Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... and here also we have a correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived the time of danger. One last example: syphilis has been plausibly credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans are, by all accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is not seriously to be argued that the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... critics (e.g. F. Dummler, "Antisthenica," p. 29 foll.) maintain plausibly that the author is here glancing (as also Plato in the "Ion") at Antisthenes' own treatises against the Rhapsodists and on a more correct interpretation of Homer, {peri exegeton} ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... misdeeds of the Goblin Page. Even the Book supplies no real or necessary nexus. But the romance proper has never required elaborate construction, and has very rarely, if ever, received it. A succession of engaging or exciting episodes, each plausibly joined to each, contents its easy wants; and such a succession is liberally provided here. So, too, it does not require strict character-drawing—a gift with which Scott was indeed amply provided, but which he did not exhibit, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... waiting in the dark at the top of the stairs, listening, was infinitely rejoiced that her project had been explained so plausibly, and yet in such perfect good faith, and she flew off to dress in high spirits. Had she mentioned it to her father, he would have doubted, taken it as her scheme, and perhaps put a stop to it: but hearing of it from Frederick, whose pleasures were so often thwarted, ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ariadne, widow of Zeno, gave her hand in marriage. The rights and duties which pertained to the compact between Theodoric and Zeno were perhaps considered as of only personal obligation. It might plausibly be contended by the Emperor's successor that he was not bound to recognise the new royalty of his predecessor's, "filius in arma", and by Theodoric that the conditional estate in Italy granted to him to hold "till Zeno should himself arrive" became absolute, now that by the death of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... was any violence, any superstition, any immorality, any blasphemy during them. And so as to the state of countries which have long had the light of Catholic truth, and have degenerated. I might have admitted nothing against them, and explained away everything which plausibly told to their disadvantage. I did nothing of the kind; and what effect has this had upon this estimable critic? "Dr. Newman takes a seeming pleasure," he says, "in detailing instances of dishonesty on the part of Catholics."—p. 34. Blot ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... against such a proclamation—also threatening an immediate rupture of friendly relations,—for the whole populace was claiming that an act of treason had been committed, plausibly asserting that the announcement of the Commission applied for by Admiral Dewey was a ruse, and that what General Otis was scheming for was to keep us quiet while he brought reinforcement after reinforcement from the United States for the ...
— True Version of the Philippine Revolution • Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy
... passing through the Darwinian biology became, as it were, filtered; it got rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even in Herbert Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect something of that sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously directing life, which forms the very essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations were precisely calculated to ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Mr. Alec, however, was a dangerous man to play games of that sort with. It was a stroke of positive genius on his part to see in the burglary scare which was convulsing the country side an opportunity of plausibly getting rid of the man whom he feared. William was decoyed up and shot, and had they only got the whole of the note and paid a little more attention to detail in the accessories, it is very possible that suspicion might ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... painfully to determine how far this or that story concerning it is literally true, or what has to be allowed in candor, or what is improbable, or what cuts two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be plausibly defended; a religion such that men look at a convert to it with a feeling which no other denomination raises except Judaism, socialism, or Mormonism—namely, with curiosity, suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be, as if something ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... property which Fenimore Cooper, by some slip, described as being at the southeast corner. Some of the earlier charts of Cooperstown were drawn with the lake front at the bottom of the map, for convenience of reference, thus reversing the north and south of the usual cartography. It may plausibly be conjectured that Cooper had one of these maps before him as he wrote, and unthinkingly recorded, in this instance, its transposed points of the compass. This labored exposition of a small matter would be an inexcusable pedantry, except ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... events to which they relate, and the motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches, his version of this or that historical transaction—to tell us, with the authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the parties boldly took their confiscated horses into Leavenworth, while others rode them to their homes. This action may look to the reader like horse-stealing, and some people might not hesitate to call it by that name; but Chandler plausibly maintained that we were only getting back our own, or the equivalent, from the Missourians, and as the government was waging war against the South, it was perfectly square and honest, and we had a good ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... cause of the Church and the landed interest, and who, if they were not inclined to attack the reigning family, yet considered the introduction of that family as, at best, only the least of two great evils, as a necessary but painful and humiliating preservative against Popery. The Minister might plausibly say that Pulteney and Carteret, in the hope of gratifying their own appetite for office and for revenge, did not scruple to serve the purposes of a faction hostile to the Protestant succession. The appearance of Frederick ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fifty years ago no newspaper could plausibly have made that statement, and, if it had, its office would probably have been wrecked by a mob of insulted citizens; but the Clothing Industry knew us better than Dr. Jaeger, better even than we knew ourselves. ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... (also, more plausibly, spelled 'wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of this term differ sharply ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... like the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition; and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system, such, for ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... with many other things which I will not here write down. She spoke pleasantly and plausibly, too, until for a moment I forgot who she was, and thought her to be truly a lovable and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... Germany about 11 o'clock. Before reaching there he was informed of the disaster at Ridgeway by parties who had arrived from the battle-field. Why, then, did he not push on in search of the enemy, instead of remaining at New Germany until 5.30 p.m.? is another question. Excuses are easily framed and plausibly given in reports, but the country generally, and his soldiers particularly, have always thought that he might have managed to have got into a conflict with the enemy in some way. Col. Peacocke was a very fine gentleman, and had the reputation of being a skilful military officer, ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... Carrick, finding himself in the like predicament, might plausibly have contrived a failure. Nothing easier than to tell Mr. Newman that nerves, a mental burden, or what not, stood in the way of the adventure. Mr. Carrick got to ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the chief-magistrate of the town, with an associate—both elderly men—followed what seemed the image up the tower. But, arrived at the belfry, they had little recompense. Plausibly entrenching himself behind the conceded mysteries of his art, the mechanician withheld present explanation. The magistrates glanced toward the cloaked object, which, to their surprise, seemed now to have changed its attitude, or else had before been more perplexingly concealed ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... jest—Nancy's telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise of the train did no more than confuse the words so that ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... an opinion like this? If the sentiments corresponded not with the voice that was heard, the evidence was deficient; but this want of correspondence would have been supposed by me if I had been the auditor and Pleyel the criminal. But mimicry might still more plausibly have been employed to explain the scene. Alas! it is the fate of Clara Wieland to fall into the hands of a ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Smirke has discovered that a like obligation was imposed on the Irons, or Iron Miners, of the forests in the ancient Earldom of Namur. He very plausibly suggests that the appellation, "Verus," by which the Dean Forest Miners designate each other, is derived from the ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls
... You know that these tribes once overran all Asia, and have twice conquered China. The means have always been the same—some accident which, for an instant, has united these tribes in submission to the will of one man. Now, says the writer, very plausibly, the Czar may bring this about, and do what has been done by Genghis ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks, geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets; and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... out? Wait a bit, he'll take his words back. I am waiting from hour to hour for him to come and abjure his evidence. I have come to like that Nikolay and am studying him in detail. And what do you think? He-he! He answered me very plausibly on some points, he obviously had collected some evidence and prepared himself cleverly. But on other points he is simply at sea, knows nothing and doesn't even suspect that ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... theirs,—but the sense for style which English poetry shows is something finer than we could well have got from a people so positive and so little poetical as the Normans; and it seems to me we may much more plausibly derive it from a root of the poetical ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... and interesting in this part of his book. It seems to be proved that the world must be endless in space and without a beginning or end in time, and just as plausibly proved that it cannot be either. It seems to be proved that finite spaces and times are infinitely divisible, and at the same time that they cannot be infinitely divisible. The situation is an amusing one, and rendered not the less ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... content a dramatist clever enough to have invented Jurgen. No, it is just as I said to the brown man: I cannot believe in the annihilation of Jurgen by any really thrifty overlords; so I shall see to it that Jurgen does nothing which he cannot more or less plausibly excuse, in case of supernal ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... honorable and patriotic men do not feel as I do on this subject, I am personally unwilling to take part in an agitation which may have some tendency to cause a public enemy to persist in armed resistance, or may be, at least, plausibly represented as having this tendency. There can be no doubt that, as a matter of fact, the country is at war with Aguinaldo and his followers. I profoundly regret this fact;... but it is a fact, nevertheless, and, as ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... comme une caractere suspicieuse!" Mr. Sheridan exhorted Miss Ogle to this intent with more of earnestness than linguistic perfection; and he rejoiced to see that instantly she caught at her one chance of plausibly accounting for her presence at Bemerside, and of effecting a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... then one of the tribunes of the people, began his tactics by plausibly urging that it would be only fair that Pompey, who was not far from the city at the head of an army, should also give up his authority at the same time before entering the city. Pompey had no intention ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as I could, in my Psychology, and talked truly (as I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Botzen and Strassburg the oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely August afternoon in the Roman arena—a ruin in which repair and restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers inclined in solid monotony ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... not by any means the whole of the mischief which, from the religious point of view, is thus perpetrated. It might, on a priori grounds, be plausibly argued that even if there is among healthy young children a certain amount of indifference or even repugnance to religious instruction, that is of very little consequence: they cannot be too early grounded in the principles of the faith they will later be called on to profess; and however ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... glibly and plausibly explained away every sinister aspect of the note he had written to Nita Selim that day, Special Investigator Dundee was recalling with verbatim vividness his argument with Captain Strawn of the ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... tricks by which wit is counterfeited. He lays trains for a quibble; he contrives blunders for his footman; he adapts old stories to present characters; he mistakes the question, that he may return a smart answer; he anticipates the argument, that he may plausibly object; when he has nothing to reply, he repeats the last words of his antagonist, then says, "your humble servant," and concludes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... which it exhibits, can only follow certain laws; and the development of the Church of Rome has steadily followed a direction opposite to that which the Modernists demand that it shall take. Newman might plausibly claim that the doctrines of purgatory and of the papal supremacy are logically involved in the early claims of the Roman Church. The claim is true at least in this sense, that, given a political Church organised as an autocracy, these useful doctrines were sure, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... open to him. There was no longer any reason to dread a public trial and conviction for the crime he had committed so many years ago. It was quite practicable to return to England, account plausibly for his disappearance and the mistake as to identity which had caused a stranger to be buried in his name, and take up his life again as Roland Sefton. It was improbable that any searching investigation ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... that he could be the first to leave the table plausibly. He intended that the apparent misunderstanding about the wicker chair should have been but a thing of the moment, quickly ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... third reading, Mr. Gladstone made another attempt to oppose its progress by moving that it be suspended until the opinion of the colonies could be taken as to its provisions. This motion was plausible, and this time the obstructor spoke plausibly, concealing the temper which really pervaded his opposition. Mr. Roebuck seconded it, although his motives and policy were utterly opposite to those of the mover. The majority was large which rejected the postponement. Other modes of obstruction ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... belonging to the saloon-keeper testified that the satchel was much heavier on the first night than on the second. It has been conjectured, very plausibly, that the valise contained Pearl Bryan's ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... from all mythological considerations, Sarama in Sanskrit is the same word as Helena in Greek." Op. cit. p. 490. The names correspond phonetically letter for letter, as, Surya corresponds to Helios, Sarameyas to Hermeias, and Aharyu to Achilleus. Muller has plausibly suggested that Paris similarly answers ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... everywhere for the print of horses' hoofs. At ten o'clock he had sent to Devers for some intelligent non-commissioned officer who could point out about where they had last seen Davies as he crossed the ridge returning to his men at sundown, but Devers very plausibly responded that while it might not be difficult to do so from where they parted, "just over on the west side," it couldn't be reliably done from so far to the east. The reply must at least serve to delay matters awhile, and every moment was of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... even politely, with that. He hoped it hadn't been ruinously bad. One thing, Leslie wasn't trying to pass the buck, and considering how Ham O'Brien had mishandled his end of it, he could have done so quite plausibly. ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... of this man—the only one for which his friends could not always account plausibly—was his habit of dropping out for a day or a week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced. While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the local notes of the Gaston Clarion as business trips, object and objective point unknown ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... after all Ben's first wife wasn't a wife at all, finds her way back to Nobody's Island. Now that does seem to be rather overdoing it. But I hasten to credit the writer with a very happy gift of description, which brings the Papuan forests and mountains (or something plausibly like them) vividly before the reader, while the characters, including a boy villain ingenuously bizarre, are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... adjust them tentatively, with various hypotheses as to the precise manner in which they thus went together. Meantime they have figured plausibly as representative of Attic sculpture at the end of its first period, still immature indeed, but with a just claim to take breath, so to speak, having now accomplished some stades of the journey. Those young ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... formation; it may, in fact, be termed its complement. For it involves the idea that the sun's materials, once enormously diffused, gradually condensed to their present volume with development of heat and light, and, it may plausibly be added, with the separation of dependent globes. The data furnished by spectrum analysis, too, favour the supposition of a common origin for sun and planets by showing their community of substance; while gaseous nebulae present examples of vast masses of tenuous vapour, such as our system ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... plausibly said. But one has to consider what sort of wife and daughter yours are, and what part of your life will have to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... with the exception of such physical and moral facts as no one can now throw doubt upon, all else is matter of opinion and argument; and we know well that there is hardly an argument to be found anywhere, against which another argument cannot plausibly be adduced. Hence, though it is plain that the various opinions of men differ greatly in probability and in the weight which should be attached to them, it seems to me that we are wrong when we blame ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... I cannot agree with Canon Ronder. If he will allow me to say so, he has not been, as yet, long enough in the place to know how things really stand. I have nothing to say against Dennison, but he has obviously put his case very plausibly, but those who have known the School and its methods for many years have perhaps a prior right of judgment over Canon Ronder, who's known it for ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... England, "to try the patience of the English party to the last bit of strain it would bear by keeping my anchorage in Dutch waters on plea of distress, and at the same time I wished to be ready for instant departure the moment I saw that the plea of distress could no longer be plausibly held." ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... the merit or demerit of each separate action depends on that action's separate consequences, need seldom be at a loss for a pretext for committing the most heinous of crimes. A husband who, hating his wife, had his hate returned, and loving another woman, had his love returned, might plausibly reason thus within himself: The prescribed objects of life are the multiplication of happiness and the diminution of misery; here are three of us, all doomed to be miserable as long as we all three live; but the wretchedness of two of us might be at once converted into happiness, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... originally productive scholar, as that he would have produced anything of high substantive and permanent value. It is true that many great writers had not at his age done such good work; but then it must be remembered that they had also produced little or nothing in point of bulk. It may be plausibly argued that, good as what Randolph's first thirty years gave is, it ought to have been better still if it was ever going to be of the best. Hut these excursions into possibilities are not very profitable, and the chief excuse for indulging in them is that ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... decency is not a very considerable check on the abuse of power, he has never had his attention called to the conduct of those who do not feel under the necessity of observing that restraint. Publicity is inappreciable, even when it does no more than prevent that which can by no possibility be plausibly defended—than compel deliberation, and force every one to determine, before he acts, what he shall say if called to account ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... no one ever yet behaved in a base manner towards another without forthwith conceiving a mortal hatred against him. You wrong another, know yourself to have acted basely, and are enraged, not against yourself—for no one hates himself—but against the innocent cause of your baseness; reasoning very plausibly, "But for that fellow, I should never have been base; for had he not existed I could not have been so, at any rate against him;" and this hatred is all the more bitter when you reflect that you ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... talk it over with you, eh?" Bill sneered. "Told you it was all on the square, did he? Explained it all very plausibly, I suppose. Probably suggested that you try smoothing me down, too. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... even Shakespeare escapes altogether from the ill effects of this Italianisation of all the externalities of the drama. It might plausibly be urged that by pushing unreality to its extreme you get idealisation. A still more forcible objection is that the only English play of Shakespeare's, apart from his histories, is the one that leaves the least vivid impression on us, The Merry ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... as a materialist because of his worship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink his wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly be called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of sense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort of ideal vision. They follow success rather than money; they follow money rather than meat and drink. If their ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Ph. D., M. A., etc., isolated a metal that scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being able to smelt. Or it might start with his first experimental use of that metal with entirely impossible results. Or it might very plausibly begin with an interview between a celebrated leader of gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory assistant, who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid gold and very nervously explained, and finally managed to prove, where ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... and more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and the azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... submission to nature; absolute naivete thus becoming only theoretically possible. Constable, with all his independence, dared not throw over all received canons of art. And Gericault, while daring to paint a modern theme, daring still more to embody it in forms plausibly like average humanity, and refusing to place on a raft in mid-ocean a carefully chosen assortment of antique statues, still did not think, apparently, that the heavily marked shadows prevalent throughout his picture were never seen under the far-reaching arch of the sky, but fell from a studio ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... must have had, at least, "a good stroke in him," as Carlyle phrased it. This is the universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge and Goethe, and founded apparently on plain facts, and yet, I think, it is mistaken, demonstrably untrue. It might even be put more plausibly than any of its defenders has put it. One might point out that Shakespeare's men of action are nearly all to be found in the historical plays which he wrote in early manhood, while the portrait of the philosopher-poet is the favourite study of his riper years. It would then be possible ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of science may be plausibly attributed to a process of Natural Selection; hypotheses are produced in abundance and variety, and those unfit to bear verification are destroyed, until only the fittest survive. Wallace, a practical naturalist, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... So plausibly did Avendano tell this fib that the landlord was quite taken in by it. "Very well, friend," said he, "you may stop here ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... SWINDLE. A still more enticing, and hence more dangerous, device for swindling unfortunate sufferers, is the widely advertised "Vacuum Treatment" or "appliance" so loudly and plausibly recommended for "Developing weak and wasted organs." A simple, little, brass air pump, connected with a glass tube, or cylinder, fitted with a valve at one end, which costs not to exceed one dollar and a half, is the worthless device palmed off on the confiding ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of his own life has, at least, the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth; and though it may be plausibly objected that his temptations to disguise it are equal to his opportunities of knowing it, yet I cannot but think that impartiality may be expected with equal confidence from him that relates the passages of his own life, as from him that delivers ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... may plausibly be maintained that the desires of the self are many and various, and that the satisfaction of an altruistic impulse may imply the sacrifice of so many of them that the self may very doubtfully be said to attain ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... proceeds upon the common supposition, that the comparative degree of a quality, ascribed to any object, must needs be contrasted with the positive in some other, or with the positive in the same at an other time. This idea may be plausibly maintained, though it is certain that the positive term referred to, is seldom, if ever, allowed to appear. Besides, the comparative or the superlative may appear, and in such a manner as to be, or seem to be, in the point of contrast. Thus: "Objects ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... comprehend his reference to beginning the New Year. Then his meaning revealed itself. That story to her mother about having been attacked by ruffians at the bottom of King Street had been an invention, a ruse to account plausibly for his presence on her mother's doorstep! And she had never suspected that the story was not true. In spite of her experience of his lying, she had never suspected that that particular statement was a lie. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... He considered that he was doing very well. And after all, why not go to America—not on Monday, for he was quite aware that no boat left on Monday—but in a few days, after he had received the whole sum that Thomas Batchgrew held for him. He could quite plausibly depart on urgent business connected with new capitalistic projects. He could quite plausibly remain in America as long as convenient. America beckoned to him. He remembered all the appetizing accounts that he had ever heard from American commercial travellers ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... of returning to Rome; he had observed that I had two mules, and if I would let him have one of them and would despatch with him a confidential servant to take charge of the relics, he would at once send them to me. This plausibly expressed proposition pleased me, and I made up my mind to test the value of the somewhat ambiguous promise at once;[22] so giving him the mule and money for his journey I ordered my notary Ratleig (who already desired ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Nirgranthas (Jains) are never referred to by the Buddhists as being a new sect, nor is their reputed founder, N[a]taputta, spoken of as their founder; whence Jacobi plausibly argues that their real founder was older than Mah[a]v[i]ra, and that the sect preceded that of Buddha. Lassen and Weber have claimed, on the contrary, that Jainism is a revolt against Buddhism. The identification of N[a]taputta (Jn[a]triputra) with Mah[a]v[i]ra ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the original there was a lefthand or opening single quote mark just after the letter "t" and the whole word including the single quote mark was enclosed in double quote marks. The opening single quote mark is more plausibly a comma which printer has placed upside down. Changed to comma. (we are told he is ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... policy of simple permeation of the Liberal Party may be said to have come to an end. The "Daily Chronicle," under the influence of Mr. Massingham, became bitterly hostile to the Fabians. They could no longer plausibly pretend that they looked for the realisation of their immediate aims through Liberalism. They still permeated, of course, since they made no attempt to form a party of their own, and they believed that only through existing organisations, Trade Unions on one side, the political parties ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray sent such a bombshell among his accomplices; and the dates of his return and arrest remain undiscoverable. M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils. We may suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we may suppose him competed for between lay and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proofs of hyper-dimensionality have been found in nature, there are equally no contradictions of it, and by using a method not inductive, but deductive, the Higher Space Hypothesis is plausibly confirmed. Nature affords a sufficient number of representations of four-dimensional forms and movements ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... sincerity; of the enlightened simplicity of the anchoret philosophers he retains nothing but their selfishness; of the intellectual influence of the Gooroo pontiffs he covets nothing but their dissimulation. He has taught his gaping disciples that a skilfully compounded and plausibly administered lie is a goodly thing,— except it be told against the cause of a Brahmin, in which case no oxyhydrogeneralities of earthly combustion can afford an idea of the particular hotness of the hell devised for such a liar. He has solemnly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... British fleet could go forth only to victory. But the succession of courts-martial cleared up nothing except the characters of the two admirals. Palliser was enabled to show that his ship had suffered so much from the enemy's fire as to be at least (plausibly) unfit for close action, and the whole dispute on land closed, like the naval conflict, in a drawn battle. Jervis was the chief witness for Keppel, as serving next his ship; and his testimony was of the highest order to the gallantry, skill, and perseverance of the admiral. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... began to read it with a scientific purpose, and so he has learnt what poetry is before making up his mind what it ought to be. It is a common fault of writers upon prosody that they set out to discover the laws of music without ever training their ears to apprehend music. They theorise very plausibly at large, but they betray their incapacity so soon as they proceed to scan a difficult line. Professor Saintsbury never fails in this way. He knows a good line from a bad one, and he knows how a good line ought to be read, even though he may sometimes be doubtful how it ought to be scanned. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the Art of the Greeks we come to what, more plausibly than any other, may be regarded as the central point of their scheme of life. We have already noticed, in dealing with other topics, how constantly the aesthetic point of view emerges and predominates in matters with which, in the modern way of looking at things, it ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... ouranou]: against [Greek: choikos]—[Greek: ho Kyrios]. Remove [Greek: ho Kyrios], and some substitute for it must be invented as a counterpoise to [Greek: choikos]. Taking a hint from what is found in ver. 48, some one (plausibly enough,) suggested [Greek: epouranios]: and this gloss so effectually recommended itself to Western Christendom, that having been adopted by Ambrose[555], by Jerome[556] (and later by Augustine[557],) it established itself in the Vulgate[558], and is found in all the later ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... knowledge into competition with theirs. They so overwhelm you with their familiarity with detail that you cannot discover wherein their scheme lies. They suggest the change of an innocent fraction in a particular schedule and explain it to you so plausibly that you cannot see that it means millions of dollars additional from the consumers of this country. They propose, for example, to put the carbon for electric lights in two-foot pieces instead of one-foot pieces,—and you do not see where you are getting ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... necessities of the case, he brought into his perilous profession some brilliant qualities— intrepidity, address, promptitude of decision; and, if to these he added courtesy, and a spirit (native or adopted) of forbearing generosity, he seemed almost a man that merited public encouragement; since very plausibly it might be argued that his profession was sure to exist; that, if he were removed, a successor would inevitably arise, and that successor might or might not carry the same liberal and humanizing temper into his practice. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... by-laws of the literature class (as generally conducted) that the teachers cannot and must not respect their pupils. They cannot afford to. It costs more than most pupils are mentally worth, it is plausibly contended, to furnish students in college with the conditions of life and the conditions in their own minds that will give masterpieces a fair chance at them. Ergo, inasmuch as the average pupil cannot be taught a classic he must be ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... "affidavit." In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and most sparkling is the Advertisement, but the grandest, ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear God, worship Mammon, revere big wigs right or wrong, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... transitions are actually known in nature, it may be well to discuss here an objection which the customary way of thinking might plausibly advance against our whole method. It could be said that to assume a continuation of the sequence of the three ponderable conditions in the manner suggested is justified only if, as solids can be turned into liquids and these into gases, so gases ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Plato had his Dialogues to compose among us, he would give his whole strength to working up our own resources, and not trouble himself with Greek. The popular dictum—multum non multa, doing one thing well—may be plausibly adduced in behalf of parsimony in the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... onlookers, turned to scan the crowd for the beaming faces of the happy parents. In a side-road which led to the railway station he saw a cab; entering the cab with every appearance of furtive haste were the dark-visaged couple who had been so plausibly eager for the "pretty idea." The sharpened instinct of cowardice lit up the situation to him in one swift flash. The blood roared and surged to his head as though thousands of floodgates had been opened ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown. There was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... sparse pines and covered, in patches, with growths of wild grape, the fruit half ripened. Within the amphitheatre, at various levels, rose grimly a few stumps and shreds of cedars long dead and long indifferent to the future ravages of the enemy. The whole scene was, to-day, plausibly gentle and inert. It was indeed a bridal of earth and sky, with the self-contained approval of the blue deep and no counter-assertion from any ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... that these words of God did not sound from heaven, but were spoken to Noah through the ministry of man. Although I would not deny that these revelations may have been made by an angel, or by the Holy Spirit himself, yet where it can plausibly be said that God spoke through men, there the ministry must be honored. We have shown above that many of God's words according to Moses, were spoken through Adam; for the Word of God, even when spoken by man, is truly ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... any bodily exercise. 'Tis a folly to make an election out of the ordinary course upon the credit of these divinations wherein we are so often deceived. If the ordinary rule of descent were to be violated, and the destinies corrected in the choice they have made of our heirs, one might more plausibly do it upon the account of some remarkable and enormous personal deformity, a permanent and incorrigible defect, and in the opinion of us French, who are great admirers of beauty, an ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... that the detective appears to be in the writer's pay, and aids the deception by leading the reader off on false scents. Be that as it may, the professional sleuth is in nine cases out of ten a dummy by malice prepense; and it might be plausibly argued that, in the interests of pure art, that is what he ought to be. But genius always finds a way that is better than the rules, and I think it will be found that the very best riddle stories contrive to drive character and riddle side ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... really or directly unselfish. The analysis, indeed, is so defective that it can hardly be applied intelligibly. Hume observes that no man would rest his foot indifferently upon a stool or a gouty toe. The action itself of giving pain would be painful, and cannot be plausibly resolved into an anticipation of an 'end.' This, again, is conspicuously true of all the truly social emotions. Not only the conscience, but the sense of shame or honour, or pride and vanity act powerfully and instantaneously ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the same conclusion, was in a very different style. It certainly was an able production, well expressed and plausibly argued, with temper and moderation. He owned that much was to be said on the side of the question which he does not espouse, but the reasons by which he says he is mainly governed are these: that it is of vital importance ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... commercial and maritime interests on which its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in 1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III, who possessed the ability, made himself impossible ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... Cristobal and Miguel, each of whom had been veinticuatro of Granada at some date previous to April 15, 1572.[17] On January 29, 1544, Luis de Leon was formally professed in the Augustinian order.[18] In his monastery we may plausibly conjecture that he led a solitary and bookish existence, poring over his texts and attending lectures assiduously. As early as 1546-1547 his name appears on the list of students of theology at Salamanca; the registers of theological students covering the years ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... by the discovery of Uranus, found his place as a fixed star among the world's great astronomers. Years before this, William and Caroline had figured it out that there must be another planet in our system in order to account plausibly for the peculiar ellipses of the others. That is to say, they felt the influence of this seventh planet; its attractive force was realized, but where it was they could not tell. Its discovery by Herschel was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... became acquainted with Michael Blount of Maple, Durham, near Reading; whose two sisters, Martha and Teresa, he has commemorated in various verses. On his connexion with these ladies, some mystery rests. Bowles has strongly and plausibly urged that it was not of the purest or most creditable order. Others have contended that it did not go further than the manners of the age sanctioned; and they say, "a much greater license in conversation and in epistolary correspondence was permitted between the sexes than in our decorous ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Presently I was aware that the stranger's eye was directed on myself; and there ensued a conversation, some of which I could not help overhearing at the time, and the rest have pieced together more or less plausibly from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... administration, but in preserving for their local communities the benefits of social order and economical and honest government. At least until the good offices of kindness and education have been fairly tried the contrary conclusion can not be plausibly urged. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... in other respects, which is best regulated and most easily governed? which has most of the fear of God in it, the deepest reverence for his word, that where the Bible is read or from which it is excluded? It is easy for ingenious men to reason plausibly, and tell us that such and such injurious effects must follow from making sacred things too familiar to the youthful mind; but who ever heard of such effects following from the use of the Bible as a school-book? It will be time enough to listen to this objection ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... ENTENTE CORDIALE, that in giving its incomparable fleet it had rendered all the service that its political interests, according to former standards of expediency, justified; and it could have been plausibly suggested that the ordinary considerations of prudence and the instinct of self-preservation required it, in the face of the deadly assault by the greatest military power in the world, to reserve its little army for the defense ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Nahuatl visitors is not easily answered. That the circular temple in Mayapan, with four doors, specified by Landa as different from any other in Yucatan, was erected to Quetzalcoatl, by or because of the Aztec colony there, may plausibly be supposed when we recall how peculiarly this form was devoted to his worship. Again, one of the Maya chronicles—that translated by Pio Perez and published by Stephens in his Travels in Yucatan—opens with a distinct reference to Tula and ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... that dilatoriness lamented as natural, which he applauded in himself as politic. Without the Tories, however, nothing could be done; and, as they were not to be gratified, they must be appeased; and the conduct of the Minister, if it could not be vindicated, was to be plausibly excused. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... as the ocean, it presents the most fitting type of the infinite. It cleanses, it purifies; it produces, it preserves. "Bodies, unless dissolved, cannot act," is a maxim of the earliest chemistry. Very plausibly, therefore, was it assumed as the source of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... "It is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality is distilled which affects everything one does. Those who have known sorrow can best depict it—not perhaps most plausibly, but most convincingly—and with fewer accessories, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... live on venison and bromides. We chose the Adirondacks because it was near and safe, and because we could tell people that Beatrix needed the air. Of course, they'll know we are lying; but we may as well lie valiantly and plausibly, while we are ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... time. He had learned how to pass examinations by "cramming"; that is, in three or four days and nights he could get into his head enough of a selected fragment of some scientific or philosophical or literary or linguistic subject to reply plausibly to six questions out of ten. He could retain the information necessary for such a feat just long enough to give a successful performance; then it would evaporate utterly from his brain, and leave him undisturbed. George, like his "crowd," not only preferred "being ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... so strong as there is to demonstrate this son to have plotted against me? Yet does this parricide presume to speak for himself, and hopes to obscure the truth by his cunning tricks. Thou, O Varus, must guard thyself against him; for I know the wild beast, and I foresee how plausibly he will talk, and his counterfeit lamentation. This was he who exhorted me to have a care of Alexander when he was alive, and not to intrust my body with all men! This was he who came to my very bed, and looked about lest any one should lay snares for me! This was he who took care of my sleep, and ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... he would have more adequately—or should I say more plausibly?—marked the transition from romanticism to realism. Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist—far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous. He essayed ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... him on my case; and thither we forthwith proceeded. I found him a large, unwieldy figure, of a dull, heavy look, but by no means deficient in science or natural shrewdness. He confirmed my previous impression that I ought to lose blood, and plausibly enough accounted for my present sensation of fulness, from the inferior pressure of the lunar atmosphere to that which I had been accustomed. He proposed, however, to return to my veins a portion of thinner blood in place of what he should take away, and offered me the choice of several animals, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
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