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Incapacity   /ɪnkəpˈæsəti/   Listen
Incapacity

noun
(pl. incapacities)
1.
Lack of intellectual power.
2.
Lack of physical or natural qualifications.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Incapacity" Quotes from Famous Books



... room with its silver and knick-knacks—its beautifully worked cushions and charming water-colours, its shining rows of complete editions and dainty china stood to him now for incapacity. Three weeks ago it had seemed ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole

... reasons for believing that the authors of the telegram to you are among those who introduced and obtained the adoption of the Leavenworth resolution, and who are endeavoring to organize a force for the purpose of general retaliation upon Missouri. Those who so deplore my 'imbecility' and 'incapacity' are the very men who are endeavoring to bring about a collision between the people of Kansas and the ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... the execution of these proposals is committed; because the people anticipating victory, do not when there comes defeat ascribe it to the short means or ill fortune of the commander, but to his cowardice and incapacity; and commonly either put him to death, or imprison or banish him; as was done in the case of numberless Carthaginian generals and of many Athenian, no successes they might previously have obtained ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... cousin exchanged glances of consternation, and perhaps each knew she might be thankful that he did not come himself instead of sending, and yet feared that the abstinence was a proof more of incapacity ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was over. In a scene of general helplessness the long drama closed, and, what we call accident, for want of some better word, cut the knot at last over which human incapacity had so vainly laboured. The Bishop of Paris retired from Rome in despair. On his way back, he met the English commissioners at Bologna, and told them that their errand was hopeless, and that they need not proceed. "When ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... announcement that they were all at the point of death. Violet's spirits would have been damped but for the sight of the table spread with parcels directed in dear familiar writing, and she was pouncing on them when Sarah began her grave requests for orders, and Violet felt her own ignorance and incapacity growing more patent every moment as questions about arrangements beset and tormented her on every side. At last she was left to enjoy the out-spreading of the precious gifts, the devices characteristic ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment,—that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt farther. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... expected to extend her protecting aegis over the remote and isolated settlements on her borders. These would have to depend on themselves alone, for resistance to ruthless irruption, and exemption from total annihilation. The Indians well knew the weakness of those settlements, and their consequent incapacity to vie in open conflict with the overwhelming force of their savage foes; and their heriditary resentment to the whites prompted them to take advantage of that weakness, to wreak this resentment, and involve ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... heart-burnings then must any nation see themselves obliged to contribute to the support of a set of men of whose incapacity to serve them they are well apprized, and who do their country a double diskindness, by being themselves employed in posts to which they are unequal, and by keeping others out of those employments for which ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... he admitted at last; "and I have not succeeded. That is a sorry incapacity, for the world has small patience with a man who can not make his ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times repeated, that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no interest in the society of women and was wholly continent. But this charge of physical incapacity seems to have had no real foundation. It had been made against some of his predecessors. It was afterward hurled at Napoleon the Great, and also Napoleon the Little. In France, unless a royal personage was openly licentious, he was ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... data to support them. On the whole then, one must say that this work fails to unravel some "knots in this tangled skein of human endeavor and error." When after a survey of the history of the Negro during the last fifty years an investigator concludes that the Negro has shown an incapacity for commerce and finance, and that he must not struggle to equip himself in the same way that the white man has, one must believe that the writer has not the situation thoroughly in hand. The great difficulty of the author seems to be that he did not remain in the country long enough to know it, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... education of the higher and lower classes, to admit of our finding the elements of good society in either of them. The lower orders are ignorant, from want of means of instruction; the higher, from indolence and perpetually increasing incapacity. It is besides not a little curious that, even in the bygone days of ceremonious manners, the higher classes, by whom they were practiced, were uniformly taught by those illiterate persons of the lower classes who almost alone practice the ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady

... have proceeded to San Francisco, and followed up their conquest, had the little army been in possession of the necessary provisions and ammunition; but General Martinez, either from incapacity or treachery, had omitted these two essential necessaries for an army. We are proud and happy to say, that Emanuel Bustamente, the young distinguished officer, of a highly distinguished family, who conducted himself so well in Yucatan during the last struggle, commanded ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... self-advertised respect and sympathy for the honest, sober working man." In the same article we read: "Total abstainers are capable of viler actions than those of certain drunkards, while the profoundest depth of ignorance and incapacity to think are attributes of millions of total abstainers."[869] When Mr. John Burns advised the workmen to help themselves by abstaining from drink and gambling, the whole Socialist press raged, and he was called a traitor to the cause ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... Mr Merton, "can be more rational or moderate than these sentiments; why then do you persist in pleading your incapacity for an employment which you can ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?" Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;" ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley

... had been, without doubt, a disagreeable child; and as a young girl she had been only a little softer: self-willed, hot-tempered, vain, she had not got on particularly well with her father, whom she despised for his drunkenness and incapacity. He was conscious of this and did not pardon it in her. Her musical faculties showed themselves at an early age; her father repressed them, recognising painting as the sole art,—wherein he himself had had so little success, but which had ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as weighty a matter, quite ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence- -: anamnesis famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... had got into his head with his promotions, and was less presumption than stupidity, and still less vanity, of which he had none. The joke is, that the mainspring of the king's great affection for him was this very incapacity. He confessed it to the king at every step, and the king was delighted to direct and instruct him; in such sort that he grew jealous for his success as if it were his own, and made every excuse ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... an educated musician, though there is much charm and originality in the national color of his motive." When he heard Chopin play in after-years, however, he confessed the fascination of the performance, and bewailed his own incapacity to produce such effects in execution, though himself one of the greatest pianists in the world. So, too, Moscheles, though dazzled by Liszt's brilliant virtuosoism and power of transforming a single instrument into an orchestra, shook his head in doubt over such performances, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... them the suffrage, we have given our women equal rights. Unless for demonstrated incapacity, upon what grounds shall we now deny ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston

... the same old ground that men have always stood up on, the ground of man's great strength and capability, and wimmen's utter weakness, helplessness, and incapacity. Josiah enlarged almost wildly on the subject of how high, how inaccessibley lofty the Conference wuz, and the utter impossibility of a weak, helpless, fragaile bein' like a women ever gettin' up on it, much less settin' on it. And then, oh how vividly he depictered ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... anon broken the monotony of his aimless life. Of these ignominies the one he had felt most, perhaps because it deprived him of the independence which even in his stupidest times he put his pride in, was the ignominy of love; that is to say, of what love was to him, unworthy incapacity of doing without a woman whom he despised and even occasionally hated. The very fits of moral hysterics, nay, of moral St. Vitus's dance, of which such love maladies largely consisted, sickened him, degraded ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... our wounded man had charmed us with several songs, and we all of us had done what we could, despite our incapacity, to pay him back in kind, he pulled a sheet of crumpled paper out ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne

... be selfish, unfeeling; but the fundamental incapacity for gratitude in girls of Polly's class will probably surprise and pain their mistresses until the end of the world. After all, Polly was right. An attempt to clear Raoul by telling the superficial truth must involve terrible risks, and might at any ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... under the sense and thorough conviction of the greatness and incomprehensibleness of God, as being every way past finding out; and also under the conviction of our own darkness and incapacity to conceive aright of him, even as to what ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)

... more frequently, than in the bush; nor is it exhibited by the lower classes in so shameless a manner as by the gentlemen settlers, from whom a better example might be expected. It would not be difficult to point out the causes which too often lead to these melancholy results. Loss of property, incapacity for hard labour, yielding the mind to low and degrading vices, which destroy self-respect and paralyse honest exertion, and the annihilation of those extravagant hopes that false statements, made by interested ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... Of this ignorance and incapacity for every thing but the work of destruction, their own party made the most angry complaints. Yet were those men the fittest to act as Spiritual prompters to an aspiring faction, bent on overturning existing institutions, and establishing their ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... to the end of the paragraph, his cup of coffee hung suspended in mid air. Then down it went untasted, he jumped from his seat, and hurried from the room. For the said paragraph ended with the remark, that the not unfrequent incapacity of the ablest of business men for looking the inevitable in the face with coolness sufficient to the making of a will, was not only a curious fact, but in the individual case a pity, where two ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... Indeed, the history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been masters of words have also been masters of things—masters of the facts of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table. Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer. Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in another, and a man is all the more likely to make a name if he ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... many slaves without any other right than that of their tyranny, relieving their necessities and making their payments with the first person whom they meet—bringing him, beguiled by some other pretext, to the Spaniards; and the injury was suffered without any complaint, because of the incapacity and dullness of the poor Subanos. The latter, as they are so unused to intercourse with us, and so shut up in their own lives, had no arguments to oppose to what they did not understand; and showed their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... of American girls become affected with amenorrhea[35] or menorrhagia[36] solely on account of excessive mental exertion at such periodical epochs of incapacity. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... confidence enough to write on any social question. Of the books sent him, he chose such as seemed worthiest of notice, but could not do much. He felt not merely a growing disinclination, but a growing incapacity for the work. How much the feeling may have been increased by the fact that his health was giving way, I can not tell; but certainly the root ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... leads us to this preference. Thus, to relieve the indigent and distressed, to single out the unhappy, from whom can be expected no returns either of present entertainment or future service, for the objects of our favours; to esteem a man's being friendless as a recommendation; dejection, and incapacity of struggling through the world, as a motive for assisting him; in a word, to consider these circumstances of disadvantage, which are usually thought a sufficient reason for neglect and overlooking a person, as a motive for ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... when they wish to stop at moderation, at order, at a monarchy based on solid principles and supported by the solid middle class, they are suddenly made to realize how little their theories correspond with their real desires. Incapacity, misrule, is everywhere. Narbonne has been made War Minister! At this crisis, when the allied armies are gathering on the frontier, when war is imminent against two hundred and fifty thousand of the finest ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... is: All said and done, There's nothing new beneath the sun, And many times before, a title Was incapacity's requital! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... church or mote-house of the neighbours for their chief building. Only note that there are no tokens of poverty about them: no tumble-down picturesque; which, to tell you the truth, the artist usually availed himself of to veil his incapacity for drawing architecture. Such things do not please us, even when they indicate no misery. Like the mediaevals, we like everything trim and clean, and orderly and bright; as people always do when they have any sense of architectural power; because then they ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... this, certainly we could offer no direct confutation of the wonderful tale. In regard to alleged facts of this character, the wisest of men are, and always must be, mere children. But it would be monstrous to say, that this wild assertion derived any support from their admitted bewilderment and incapacity. This would be to attempt to found knowledge upon ignorance. The dim analogies resting on questionable facts, the bold assumptions and slippery arguments on which such daring hypotheses must be based, can be refuted, for the most part, only by reasoning in kind,—by arguments nearly ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... civilization, is but slightly drawn upon or exercised; she is not so much wasted as not used. Having by fortune and tradition nothing to do, she remains passive till events and time make her incapable of doing, while the world glitters past in its various activity, throwing her incapacity into ever stronger relief, till her time is over and the general muddle is given a kind of sacredness, even of beauty, by ceasing. She has done nothing but live and been nothing but alive, both to such passive purpose that the ceasing is pitiful; and it is by pushing on to this end, ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor

... fortune. The aristocracy encouraged dissertations on the social contract, the rights of man, and the equality of citizens. At the theater it applauded plays which criticized privileges, the arbitrariness and the incapacity of men in high places, and abuses of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... show higher mental development than those who are confined to the fields. The experiment of education, continued for more than one generation, has never been tried. The black is in many of his endowments inferior to the white; but until he and his children and his children's children have shown an incapacity to be raised by a suitable training, honestly given, to an intellectual and moral condition that shall fit them for self-dependence, we have no right to assert that slavery is a necessary condition, if in the meaning of necessary we include the idea of permanence. It is not needful to present ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... sheer incapacity, to go further. Jenny had not always been easy to understand, but ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... effected. All I dare hope is, that, if in accepting this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow citizens: and have thence too little consulted my incapacity, as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me; my ERROR will be palliated by the motives which misled me, and its consequences be judged by my country, with some share of the partiality in which ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall

... character marvellously, and was the only man Masupha had the slightest regard for." If our Government had more men of the type of General Gordon, we may rest assured that we should have fewer of these petty little "nigger wars," which, more often than not, are brought on by incapacity and want of sympathy on the part of our representatives abroad. One great charm about Gordon's character was his sympathy for the weak and helpless. It mattered not whether the helpless one were a king or a slave, so long as he was ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... grace, having sent for the offender, reasoned with him, and solicited the priest to question him on any learned subject. This the man, overcome by the bishop's good nature, and knowing his own glaring incapacity, declined, and entreated his forgiveness, which was immediately granted, with a charge to employ his time better when he returned to his parish. Cromwell was much vexed at the lenity displayed, but the bishop was ever more ready ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... population, who are under the necessity of incessant and fatiguing physical labor, all those of weak character by nature, all those who are abnormally enfeebled intellectually by the effects of nicotine, alcohol, opium, or other intoxicants—are always in a condition of incapacity for independent thought, and are either in subjection to those who are on a higher intellectual level, or else under the influence of family or social traditions, of what is called public opinion, and there is nothing unnatural or incongruous ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... abbeys or sees, whose abbots or bishops are contumaciously disobedient to the Holy See, or to their lawful monarch, he being in the communion of the Church and at peace with the said Holy See. If, therefore,—to come to that point at which my incapacity, through the devious windings of my own simplicity, has been tending, but with halting steps, from the moment that your Majesty deigned ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... never thought much of it. When it now thus became a reality, her whole soul was overcome by it: she fell to the ground and burst into a flood of tears. Whether she had a full right to the throne, she could not judge: what she felt was her incapacity to rule. But whilst she uttered this, a different feeling passed through her, as she has told us herself: she prayed in the depths of her soul that, if the highest office belonged to her legally, God might give her the grace to administer it to his honour. The next day she betook ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... predominated over all the rest. The writer was, indeed, in those days, marvellously like Coleridge,—subtile in analysis to excess, of gorgeous imagination, bewitching discourse, fine scholarship, with a magnificent power of promising and utter incapacity in performing, and with the same habit of intemperance in opium. By his own account, his "disease was to meditate too much and observe too little." I need hardly explain that this was De Quincey; and when I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... they cared not a jot for. They were of the pseudo-democracy which wants to live without working, consume without producing, obtain posts without being trained for them, and arrive at honours without desert—the selfish and purblind pseudo-democracy of incapacity and cheek. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... was never one of those who cannot be convinced that some particular course is not the wisest and most just to adopt without at once rushing to the conclusion that the leader who makes any mistakes must be in the wrong because of wilfulness or mere incapacity, and is therefore not worthy any longer ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... they open their houses, modestly confessing, it may be presumed, their own incapacity, mainly trust to wax candles and upholstery. Gentlemen seem to rely on their white waistcoats. To these are added, for the delight of the more sensual, champagne and such good things of the table as fashion allows to be still considered as comestible. Even in this respect the world is ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... circumstances, with the means at his disposal. His confidence, too hastily bestowed, was repaid by ingratitude and contumely. Wright never spoke of his commander without using terms of disparagement, and dwelling on his incapacity. "He was gone to destruction," he said, "and would lose all who were with him." He repeated these words to me, and others even stronger, both in Melbourne and in Adelaide. McDonough, in his evidence ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... brilliant volume is of intrinsic interest, its charm is due more to the mode of description than even to the things described. It gives us Russia from a Bohemian point of view. The characteristics of Mr. Sala are keen observation, vivid description, lively wit, indomitable assurance, and incapacity of being surprised. To his resolute belief in himself, in what he sees with his own eyes and conceives with his own brain, the book owes much of its raciness, its confident, decisive, "knowing" tone, its independence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not one between belief in supernatural persons or miraculous events and the sternest view of such belief as a breach of intellectual integrity: it is the difference between belief in the efficacy of the crucifixion as an infallible cure for guilt, and a congenital incapacity for believing this, or (the same ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... because such a thorn could never have been left when the prayer for its removal was earnestly presented; nor could it ever have been, when left, an occasion for glorifying. Manifestly it was no weakness removable by his own effort, no incapacity for service which in any manner approximated to being a fault, but purely and simply some infliction from God's hand (though likewise capable of being regarded as a 'messenger of Satan') which hindered him in his work, and took down any proud flesh and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... wishes to remove him, and is mischievous because it sometimes serves to keep in the service incompetent men not guilty of specific wrongdoing. Having these facts in view the rule has been amended by providing that where the inefficiency or incapacity comes within the personal knowledge of the head of a department the removal may be made without notice, the reasons therefor being filed and made a record of the department. The absolute right of the removal rests ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... hostile tribe. Carlos, who spares me the pains of thinking, regards the position as dangerous, and he has undertaken to pay Nucingen out if the Baron takes it into his head to spy on us; and he is quite capable of it; he spoke to me of the incapacity of the police. You have lighted a flame in an old chimney choked ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... hope she won't give you any real trouble. If she does, I shall feel more than half responsible. But otherwise she will be an interesting study for you. She is nearly all white; how much of racial lying, and slothfulness, barbarism, and general incapacity that black vein of hers contains will give you food for thought, for she certainly will reveal herself in the ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... unhurried, penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of their acts. We do not blame city dwellers for not having it; we ourselves lose it when we venture into their maelstrom. Like them, we become dwarfed by overwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to "sense" the humanity of the countless human simulacra about us. But we do not stay where we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow of Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what Is usually ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... marks the beginning of the decline of medical science in ancient times, and this decline was contemporaneous with the overthrow of the Roman State. As everybody knows, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire resulted from the profligacy and incapacity of the emperors, luxurious living and vice among the people, tyranny of an overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell quickly into the hands of the barbarians, and her power was broken. In A.D. 395, was ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... recognisable as germs, were among the solid particles strained off. Secondly, he proved that these germs were competent to give rise to living forms by simply sowing them in a solution fitted for their development. And, thirdly, he showed that the incapacity of air strained through cotton- wool to give rise to life, was not due to any occult change effected in the constituents of the air by the wool, by proving that the cotton-wool might be dispensed with altogether, and perfectly free access ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... may be dim from old age," replied Paul, "and perhaps I only guess, but I should say that the one nearest us is a shiftless character whom I used to know in my youth, a man who, despite his general worthlessness and incapacity, had a certain humorous and attractive quality of mind that endeared ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... means a vast range of activity—more than can possibly be performed by any single individual. We wish to do a thousand things that we never can do. We are constantly forced to limit the field of our activity. Physical incapacity, mental incapacity, limitations of our environment, conflict between one wish and another of our own, opposition from other people, and mere lack of time, compel us to give up many of our wishes. Innumerable wishes must be laid aside, and some, resisting, have ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... Julian on matters of fact because they are both highly superstitious—the one paying a childish deference to dreams, the other showing himself a profound believer in magic? In short, Irenaeus betrays no incapacity which affects his competency as a witness to a broad and comprehensive fact, such as that with ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... to Drake the ship had become the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea. The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could be made a ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... it is this—that every member of a community is bound to do something for that community, in return for what he gets from it; and neither intellectual cultivation, nor the possession of material wealth, nor any other plea whatever, except that of physical or mental incapacity, can excuse any of us from that plain and personal duty.... And though it may be, in a community like this, considered by some to be a heterodox view, I will say that it often appears to me, in the present day, that we are a little too apt in all classes to look upon ourselves as mere machines ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... coming into his eyes, 'and that is one reason why I am quite determined not to precipitate matters. We can't afford to have revolution after revolution in a poor and struggling place like Gloria, and so I want these people to give the full measure of their incapacity and their baseness so that when they fall they may fall like Lucifer! Hamilton would be rather for ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... weight seems long ago to have been reached: for forts and ships it cannot be far off. Armor and projectiles must soon bring each other to a standstill; as when, in the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, offence and defence reached the reductio ad absurdum of the incapacity of men-at-arms to inflict serious injury upon each other, or even to pick themselves up when the weight of their armor, with some aid from the clumsy blows of an antagonist, had overthrown them. Assailant and assailed were in equilibrio, and personal equilibrium could not be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... feel—feelings which were false. Music is an implacable mirror of the soul. The more a German musician is naive and in good faith, the more he displays the weaknesses of the German soul, its uncertain depths, its soft tenderness, its want of frankness, its rather sly idealism, its incapacity for seeing itself, for daring to come face to face with itself. That false idealism is the secret sore even of the greatest—of Wagner. As he read his works Christophe ground his teeth. Lohengrin seemed to him ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... planted there by an unerring rule >From thy example the pure flame arose, Thy life, my precept,—thy good works, my school. Could my weak pow'rs thy num'rous virtues trace, By filial love each fear should be repress'd; The blush of Incapacity I'd chace, And stand, Recorder of thy worth, confess'd But since my niggard stars that gift refuse, Concealment is the only boon I claim Obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse, Who cannot raise, but would not sink, thy fame, Oh! of my life at once the source ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... my incapacity more than on that strange night, when Emily was flying about with Martyn to all the doors and windows in a wild state of excitement, humming ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... profoundly. That was obviously not his sister! Then a confused feeling of incapacity to give a good reason for being there came over him. Suddenly he recollected ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... imputation of avarice or meanness, with the sum comparatively inconsiderable of fifteen millions of francs a year, are marvellous, and expose his successors, and indeed all European Princes, to the reproach of negligence or incapacity. In this branch of his government he owed much to Duroc. It is said that they often visited the markets of Paris (les halles) dressed in plain clothes and early in the morning. When any great accounts were to be submitted to the Emperor, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... exploits, for which he has friendly praise, were performed in a cause of which his heart did not approve? And does not this explain why he gives so much space to Messalla's verses, and why he so quickly passes over the victory of Philippi with an assertion of his incapacity ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... Nelly had no one but himself to depend upon. It was plain to see that his early burden of shame and sorrow had developed a strong character in the lad. There was none of the listlessness and awkward incapacity and self-admiration that made some of the other Tideshead boys so unattractive, but Harry Foster had a simple way of speaking and of doing whatever had to ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett

... of the cause or approach of disease is no 374:18 argument against the mental origin of disease. You con- fess to ignorance of the future and incapacity to preserve your own existence, and this belief helps rather than 374:21 hinders disease. Such a state of mind induces sickness. It is like walking in darkness on the edge of a precipice. You cannot forget the belief of danger, and your steps ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... knows his own voice; many men do not know their own profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle's famous "Characteristics" article; allow for exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes under the great law just stated. This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found in the family as well as in the individual. So never mind what your cousins, brothers, sister, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about the fine poem you have written, but send it (postage paid) to the editors, if there are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... side with the humble trade of soldering. Nevertheless, no accomplishment of a mechanical kind is so serviceable to the physicist as handiness with the soldering bit; and, as a rule, there is no other exercise in which the average student shows such lamentable incapacity. The following remarks on the subject are therefore addressed to persons presumably quite ignorant of the way in which soldering is carried out, and do not profess to be more than of the most ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... become the sort of an ass who is storing up information and solving vast and intricate problems in order to be kind to my superiors when, struck with panic at their own tardily discovered incapacity, they rush to me in a body to ask me how ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... him, fearing to offend him by taking upon him such an office, for which he was every way unqualified. Basil retorts with warmth, that his treachery towards himself was unpardonable, because he was acquainted with his friend's incapacity. Chrysostom answers, that he should never have betrayed him into that dignity, if he had not known his charity and other qualifications. In order to show that he had reason to shun that charge, he in his third book sets forth the excellence and obligations of that dignity; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... Shakespeare's figures is his, I will not say incapacity to give, but utter indifference to giving, his personages a typical character so strikingly manifest as in Hamlet; and in connection with none of Shakespeare's works do we see so strikingly displayed that blind worship of Shakespeare, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in old folio.'" Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... he not? Played out and done with as I was. Suffered to go about and do and be as I pleased, by virtue of my eminent incapacity for harm. Yes, that was it. And, anyhow, there was nothing to ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun

... and they all came back to the original state of mind from which they started, and remembered that quiet and subdued tones and an incapacity for the consideration of secular subjects were the proper mental attitude for all that remained ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... sagacity or the good faith of the statesmen who have had the management of affairs. It is not practicable to imagine how such an outcome as the present could have been brought about by any degree of stupidity or incapacity alone, nor is it easier to find evidence that the utmost sagacity of the statecraft engaged has had the slightest mitigating effect on the evil consummation to which the whole case has been brought. It has long been a commonplace among observers of public events that these professedly defensive ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... Old-World pueblo off the ordinary route. The mayoral of the diligence in the old times, the domestic servant of to-day, the senora who happens to sell you fish, or the senor who mends your boots, all strike the same note—an absolute incapacity for imagining that there can be any inequality between themselves and any other class, however far removed from them by the possession of wealth or education. Wealth, in fact, counts for nothing in the way of social ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... under the editorial management of Mr. Charles Lindsey—a careful, graceful writer of large knowledge —it exercised much influence as an exponent of the views of the Liberal Conservative party; but soon after his retirement it lost its position, and died at last from pure inanition and incapacity to keep up with the progressive demands of modern journalism. In 1857, Mr. McGee made his appearance in Canada as the editor of the Montreal New Era, in which he illustrated for some years the brilliancy ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... you will find among the ignorant and the vicious and the criminal classes. Is stupidity a sin? asks Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question. And the great schoolman answers himself, "Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is not a sin. But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing his soul in the things of this world so as to shut out all the things of God and of the world to come, in which case stupidity is a deadly sin." Now, from all that, you must already see what ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... me, or why it was necessary to commit to memory the cases of nouns and the tenses of verbs. I know not whether this was owing to the unwillingness of my instructor to give himself the trouble, or to my supposed incapacity to apprehend the explanation. The last of these I do not admit. My docility however came to my aid, and I did not for a moment harbour any repugnance to the doing what was required of me. At first, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... and even from Albert, her admiration of him, and her incapacity to love him till her own character be more advanced, are told with great naturalness. Her travels with Joseph Haydn, are again as charmingly told as the Venetian life. Here the author speaks from her habitual existence, and far more masterly than of those deep ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... how much his point of view of the whole course and relation of things had changed. His mind was the last to dogmatize on any subject. There was a candid and childlike desire to know, with an equal confession of the incapacity of the human intellect. I wish I could recall the actual expressions he used, but the sense was that which has been so well stated by Hooker in concluding an exhortation against the pride of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... dead there was no other Caesar, no naturally indicated successor to the empire. The influence of the name of Caesar had spent itself in the crimes, madnesses, and incapacity of his descendants. Then began a general search for emperors; and the ambition to be created spread abroad amongst the men of note in the Roman world. During the eighteen months that followed the death of Nero, three pretenders—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—ran ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... strange coldness. That it was due to something within him and not outside himself was clear to him. He frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being moved by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his casual existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings. From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, into the wood. Here, where in the dense black darkness glaring patches of moonlight ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... appear to remember what she talked of and he had evidently great difficulty in sustaining any kind of conversation. His lack of interest in the subjects she started, and his equal incapacity to contribute to her entertainment, were so obvious that she could not conceal her disappointment. An indefinite alteration had come over his whole person and manner. The pettishness that might be caressed into fondness, had yielded to a ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... these desires were the directors of her reason, which, aided by an exuberant imagination, was never at a loss to justify any act, be it ever so cruel and abject. In short, the chief characteristic of George Sand's moral constitution was her incapacity of regarding anything she did otherwise than as right. What I have said is fully borne out by her Ma Vie and the "Correspondance," which, of course, can be more easily and safely examined than her deeds and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... fresh discontent among the Irish. Their cause had already been well-nigh ruined by the interference and incapacity of the French generals, and, on the retirement of Lauzun, they had confidently expected that Sarsfield would be appointed commander-in-chief, and that henceforth there would be unity of design in their operations. Saint Ruth was accompanied by a large number ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty

... produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent from slum tenements. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... the successors of Wu-wang profited by the lessons given them by past history. Incapacity, excessive severity and undue weakness had created discontent and loosened the relations between the emperor and his vassals. Increase in the extent of the empire greatly added to this decline of central power. For the emperor's own dominion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... borderland between heaven and hell for those who are from incapacity either not morally bad ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... courts not only for infidelity, but also without even the shadow of Scripture authority—for alleged cruelty, intemperance, desertion, prolonged absence, mental incapacity, sentence to the penitentiary, incompatibility of temper and such other causes as the court, in its ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... labourer at Stanfold had given himself a severe hurt, while engaged in mowing; the result was a long fit of illness, followed by utter incapacity for all laborious exertion. Two years after this accident, he was thrown from his horse, and so violently trampled, that he was taken up by the passers-by, senseless and apparently lifeless. For forty-eight hours, he remained unconscious, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... luck began to turn against my father's calculations; and by the Friday evening, I was posted on the boards as a defaulter for the second time. Here was a rude blow: my father would have taken it ill enough in any case; for however much a man may resent the incapacity of an only son, he will feel his own more sensibly. But it chanced that, in our bitter cup of failure, there was one ingredient that might truly be called poisonous. He had been keeping the run of my position; ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... everybody is born with the capacity of being a great scholar. All people are no more born great scholars like Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like Handel and Beethoven. What is much worse than that, many come into the world with the incapacity of reading, just as they come into it with the incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another. To them I have nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too much for them. They can only skim the surface even of that. I go further, and frankly admit that the habit and power ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... he was, also, the first lawyer at the bar of the Supreme Court and was known as a ripe and cultivated scholar. So the people who shook their heads at him—and they were neither few nor far between—did it on other grounds than that of incapacity. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... it suits them to do so) to embark on all manner of anti-individualistic enterprises. This anomaly, however, is merely one among many flagrant instances of that ignorance of precedent which revives long-buried heresies, that incapacity for thought which seems unaware of inconsistencies, or that shameless perversity which seeks out and proclaims any sort of general principle which happens to suit ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... of the Cardinal of Lorraine, it was certainly furnished by the experience of the last session. Catharine, however, was loth to abandon the scheme from which she had expected such important results to flow. With her usual incapacity to understand the strength of religious convictions deeply implanted in the soul, she still hoped to secure, from a private interview of the more moderate Roman Catholics with a few of the leading Protestants, a plan of agreement that might serve to unite both communions. Some of her more conscientious ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... powerful in countries where the regal power has no one to contradict it; even the justice of a king leads him to place barriers around him, by keeping every one in his place; and it was almost without example in Prussia, to find a man deprived of his civil or military employments on account of incapacity. What an advantage therefore ought not the French army to have, composed almost entirely of men born of the revolution, like the soldiers of Cadmus from the teeth of the dragon! What an advantage it had over those old commanders of the Prussian fortified places and armies, to whom ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... to obtain some certain information ere the King should come home, and have to interfere with a high hand; and Malcolm's arguments about his obligations as a captive, too, had their effect. He perceived his own incapacity to act; and in his despair at nothing being done consented to risk Malcolm in the search, while he himself should proceed to the King, only ascertaining on the way that Lilias was not at Whitby. And so, in grief and anxiety, the ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a similarity of names and identity of occupations, seemed to strike him as a peculiarly happy one, and he never tired of using it. The Mexicans on the ranch also took up the name, adding another syllable to accommodate their lingual incapacity for the final "p," gravely referring to her as "La Madama Bo-Peepy." Eventually it spread, and "Madame Bo-Peep's ranch" was as often mentioned as ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... the breach was not properly his own, but the people's on whom he depended; and this is justified from what I said before, namely, that every promise of that kind supposes the possibility of such a disappointment, even in the very nature of its making; for, if the man were not under a moral incapacity of payment, he would not promise at all, but pay at the time he promised. His promising, then, implies that he has only something future to depend upon, to capacitate him for the payment; that is to say, the appointments of payment by other tradesmen, who ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... The incapacity of the King, the venality of the Princes, the arrogance of the hierarchy, the insubordination of the nobles, the licentiousness of the Court, the despotism of the Government; all the errors and all the vices of their rulers, were jealously noted and bitterly registered by an oppressed and ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... ideal of character, a pattern of perfect manhood for imitation, if the message of the Gospel were regarded as stopping short at that point, could only be discouraging to men conscious of moral weakness, of spiritual impotence and incapacity. It is probable that one of the reasons why the plain man to-day is so very apt to regard Christianity as consisting in the profession of a standard of ideal morality to which he knows himself to be personally incapable ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... Socrates, and had divided men's minds long before Christianity. Socrates himself, following, of course, the taste of his talent—that of a surpassing dialectician—took first the side of reason; and, in fact, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward incapacity of the noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions? In the end, however, though silently and secretly, he laughed also at himself: with ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... first by Priscilla's disappointment about the cottage, then by a certain restiveness she showed before the more blatant inefficiencies of the Baker housekeeping, then by a marked and ever recurring incapacity to adapt herself to her new environment, and lastly and very heavily when Fritzing in the course of conversation let drop the fact that he had said she was Maria-Theresa. This was a very black cloud ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... Wilmington, and to place him at the head of the ministry. It is remarkable that this man, who was a mere cipher, should have been again had recourse to, after his failure in making a government at the very commencement of the reign of George the Second, when his manifest incapacity, and the influence of Queen Caroline, had occasioned the remaining of his opponent Sir Robert Walpole in power. With Lord Wilmington came in Lord Harrington, as president of the council; Lord Gower, as privy seal; Lord Winchilsea, as first lord of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... numerous stories connected with the origin of the mistletoe, one is noticed by Lord Bacon, to the effect that a certain bird, known as the "missel-bird," fed upon a particular kind of seed, which, through its incapacity to digest, it evacuated whole, whereupon the seed, falling on the boughs of trees, vegetated and produced the mistletoe. The magic springwort, which reveals hidden treasures, has a mysterious connection ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... the case. The vessel they were overhauling was a small tramp steamer, which had evidently found courage, through the general incapacity of the Spanish navy and the fancied security of neutral waters, to flaunt the Stars and Stripes. It was therefore most disconcerting to find herself suddenly pursued in the English Channel by a ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... man's native incapacity to do right (total depravity), held by some religious bodies, is antimoral since it denies human freedom. The attempt to modify it by the supposition of divine impartation of moral power is inadequate unless such power ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... have always thought, Sir, that incapacity and inexperience must prejudice the cause they undertake to defend; and it has been diffidence of myself, not distrust of the cause, that has hitherto made me so silent upon a point on which I ought to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... imparted by a smell to a dog, a mole, a hedgehog, or an insect. The instruments of smell are the antennae. A poor ant without antennae is as lost as a blind man who is also deaf and dumb. This appears from its complete social inactivity, its isolation, its incapacity to guide itself and to find its food. It can, therefore, be boldly supposed that the antennae and their power of smell, as much on contact as at a distance, constitute the social sense of ants, the sense which allows them to recognise one another, to tend ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... suggests that compulsion is limited not by indifference—how could the character of its members be matter of indifference to the community?—but by its own incapacity to achieve its ends. The spirit cannot be forced. Nor, conversely, can it prevail by force. It may require social expression. It may build up an association, a church for example, to carry out the common objects and maintain the common life of all who are like-minded. But the association must be ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... upon the prevailing philosophy of Swift, viz., that 'all his views were directed towards what was immediately beneficial, which is the characteristic of savages.' This is undeniable. The meanness of Swift's nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely appalling. His own yahoo is not a more abominable one-sided degradation of humanity, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... mutual the assistance so freely at their command, and that men in a Leicestershire field so punctiliously afford to each other. The point on which they so prominently fail in this particular is, to speak plainly, their habitual, neglect—or incapacity—at gateways. Given the rush and crush of three hundred people starting for a run and pressing eagerly through a single way of exit—to wit, an ordinary gate swinging easily and lightly, and requiring only that each passer through ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... Graves' enthusiasm to resort to slave labor exclusively, partly on hire from their owners and partly by purchase. At the height of this regime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered 158.[45] But whether from the incapacity of the negroes as mill hands or from the accumulation of debt through the purchase of slaves, the company was forced into liquidation at the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... of a league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... execution of this painting is coarse and careless in the extreme, yet there is a spirit and freedom of touch which has hit off the character of the objects represented, and forbids us to impute the negligence which is displayed to incapacity. Another object of interest in the kitchen is a stove for stews and similar preparations, very much like those charcoal stoves which are seen in extensive kitchens at the present day. Before it lie a knife, strainers, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... necessary for carrying on the government. The question was difficult. To place the royal power in any other hands than the King's, even for a temporary purpose, required an Act of Parliament. But the King formed an essential portion of the legislature. He, however, now being disabled by mental incapacity from performing his royal functions, where was the substitute to be found? Fox, always reckless, and transported with eagerness to be in possession of the power which would be conferred on him by the regency of the Prince ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... office as high priest, and issued his encyclical on public worship on the 18th of July, which, as the anniversary of the disasters on the Cremera and the Allia,[432] had long been considered an unlucky day. But his ignorance of all civil and religious precedent was only equalled by the incapacity of his freedmen and friends. He seemed to live in a society of drunkards. However, at the consular elections he canvassed for his candidates like a common citizen.[433] In everything he courted the favour of the lowest classes, attending ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... Cesarean sections self-performed, and in the literature of obstetric operations many of the minor type have been done by the patient herself. In the foregoing cases it is to be understood that the operations have been performed solely from the inability to secure surgical assistance or from the incapacity to endure the pain any longer. These operations were not the self-mutilations of maniacs, but were performed by rational persons, driven to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... providing for this matter in Dublin—L5,686 on public libraries, and L4,100 on baths and workhouses, against L1,217 and L1,627 for like purposes in Dublin. "Therefore," say the Belfast men, "we will not have our affairs managed by these incompetent men, who, besides their demonstrated incapacity to deal with finance, are dependent for their position on the illiterates of the agricultural districts, who are to a man under the thumb of the priests, and who, moreover, have shown that their rapacity is equal to their lack of integrity, and whose ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... is left to the majority, the compact being that the decision of the majority shall be that of the whole. Minors are excluded from this right, because the law considers them as infants, because it makes the parent answerable for civil damages committed by them, and because of their legal incapacity to make any compact. Women are excluded because husbands are answerable in law for their wives, as to their civil damages, and because the very nature of their sex makes the exercise of this right incompatible with the harmony and happiness ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... to-day, the same intolerance of anything higher than the low level, the same incapacity to comprehend simple devotion and lofty aims, the same dislike of a man who comes and rebukes by his silent presence the vices in which he takes no part. And it is a great deal easier to say, 'Poor fool! enthusiastic fanatic!' than it is to lay to heart the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... his literary friends. Among the latter he now numbered several names of note, such as Guthrie, Murphy, Christopher Smart, and Bickerstaff. He had also a numerous class of hangers-on, the small-fry of literature; who, knowing his almost utter incapacity to refuse a pecuniary request, were apt, now that he was considered flush, to levy continual ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... always without books, for he read only a few works of fancy—a very few—and without sequence; so that he knew nothing except what he had seen, and until the last was exclusively occupied with the Court and the news of the great world. I have a thousand times regretted his radical incapacity to write down what he had seen and done. It would have been a treasure of the most curious anecdotes, but he had no perseverance, no application. I have often tried to draw from him some morsels. Another misfortune. He began to relate; in the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... vain, the good lady had an incapacity of attention, and was resolved on her grievance. She went away at last because "those horrid doctors will be gone now, and I will be able to see poor papa, and tell him when I will take home the baby, though I don't believe he will ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Ages, were deliberately palmed upon mankind as undoubted facts, can follow the history of the false decretals, and the discussions that were connected with them, or can observe the complete and absolute incapacity most Catholic historians have displayed of conceiving any good thing in the ranks of their opponents, or of stating with common fairness any consideration that can tell against their cause, without acknowledging ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... "Fool!" thought he, "to think she would hang frivolities upon that glorious head for me." Yet his disappointment told him he had really hoped it; he would not have sat out the play but for a leaden incapacity ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... earnest purpose in the Administration to extinguish the rebellion by force of arms, they will sustain it. What they would do if ever they should come to the conviction that the national existence is in peril through incapacity, selfish personal ambitions or treachery on the part of the Administration, it is not necessary to predict. The conjuncture is not likely to arrive. Of one thing, however, you may be sure: the great loyal body of the nation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... stood irresolutely at the far corner of the jetty. He always approached his flock with diffidence, although they treated him kindly enough, much as they treated such of their own children as were handicapped in the race of life by some malformation or mental incapacity. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... valued usually more at sixty-five than at thirty-five, and the further fact that thirty-five is often the dead-line for admission to the lower ranks of the same industry or commercial position, is a proof that this age-limit of the worker in lower position is not one of definite knowledge of actual incapacity after forty years of age but rather due to other conditions. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the easier management of younger than of older subordinates. It is hard for many men to "order about," in peremptory fashion, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... accepted it, the issue of the crusades might have been different from what it was. His authority would at least have kept in check the discords, perfidies, and excesses to which he, probably with justice, afterward attributed the failure of the enterprise. From these causes, together with a fatal incapacity on the part of the French and German generals, the second crusade resulted in nothing but the wholesale massacre of the Christian armies by the Turks. Bernard, who had predicted the success of the expedition, was deeply distressed at the unfortunate result; the more as, with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... however, of the lamest character, as the ambassador took care to show. Firstly, they said they had been taken by surprise. This was manifestly false, as the ambassador attended at the Guildhall upon invitation. They next pleaded ignorance and incapacity in receiving one of so high degree, when the ambassador reminded them that they had recently done honour to the Spanish ambassador; and lastly they endeavoured to throw the whole of the blame upon the master of the ceremonies. This excuse, however, like the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... the incapacity of thought, the discontented temper; which are the consequence of excess in physical indulgence; hence the wonderful effects of wine upon those who always drink in moderation. "When you have drunk wine," says Brother Martin, "you see everything double, you think doubly ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... belief of any sort than anyone I ever wish to know. I would not advise you to prosecute this branch of study. I am content to acknowledge that of many things I know nothing, and never can be any wiser; but Guy Hartwell is too proud to admit his incapacity to grapple with some of these mysteries. Beulah, my wife is one of the happiest spirits I ever knew; she is a consistent Christian. When we were married, I watched her very closely. I tell you, child, I hoped very much that ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans



Words linked to "Incapacity" :   incapableness, inability, incapability, capacity



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