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Confounding   Listen
adjective
confounding  adj.  Tending to contradict (a hypothesis).
Synonyms: contradictory.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Confounding" Quotes from Famous Books



... Albert Pike, in his letter, "Touching Masonic Symbolism," speaks of the "poor, rude, unlettered, uncultivated working Stone-masons," who attended the Assemblies, he is obviously confounding Free-masons with the rough Stone-masons of the Guilds. Over against these words, read a brilliant article in the Contemporary Review, October, 1913, by L.M. Phillips, entitled, "The Two Ways of Building," showing how the Free-masons, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... to War and Confusion, as it was the first Game the Devil play'd after the confounding of Languages and Divisions at Babel so it was a Conquest upon Mankind, purely devilish, born from Hell, and so exactly tinctured with Satan's original Sin Ambition, that it really transform'd Men into ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of Eden, told him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother went over the hill and down toward the valley but that his father, wearing a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood upon the ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson

... such cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial magnitudes. But manifestly, if spatial magnitude ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... works of each, does not confound their persons, for he refers to them both by the common (as it may once have been) name of Eachard, and at least twenty times by the wrong name. This, we admit, is a small matter; but what will some Edinburgh Reviewer (temp. Albert V) say if he finds a writer confounding Catherine and Thomas Macaulay as "the celebrated author of the great Whig History of England"—a confusion hardly worse than that of the two Eachards—for Catherine, though now forgotten by an ungrateful public, made quite as much noise in her ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here was already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him—the Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian—seeking his homely colonies, fearing his neighbor of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... day be their family pride. They blinded themselves to the magnitude of the failings of which they were now and then told, by persuading themselves that such failings were common to all men of any strength of character; for, till sad experience taught them better, they fell into the usual error of confounding strong ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... had sent out important generals and learned tacticians, and a fairly large and unwieldy mass of men, who were bound by their healthy appetites to stick to their base and hug the railway lines, while the enemy shifted about with the most annoying and confounding velocity, delighting to deceive as to their position, and in their deception being for the most part eminently successful. There is a passage in the Scriptures that mentions that "the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountain," and this quotation ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... forsaken?—ay, have not the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, and name the Most High by another name—by the name of Serapis—confounding the substance of the Invisible? Does not Egypt cry aloud for freedom?—and shall she cry in vain? Nay, nay, for thou, my son, art the appointed way of deliverance. To thee, being sunk in eld, I have decreed my rights. Already thy name is whispered in many a sanctuary, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... brilliancy. My good friend here, gentlemen, deals in conjectural certificates and broken metaphors. He dislocates more tropes, to my sorrow, than even his friend Shakespeare, whom he thinks a greater philosopher than Aristotle, and who calls the murder of an individual sleeper the murder of sleep, confounding the concrete with the abstract, and then talks of taking arms against a sea of troubles; query, a cork jacket ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... creeping, Swelling and flinging, Showering and springing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking; 15 Turning and twisting, Around and around, Collecting, disjecting, With endless rebound. Smiting and fighting, 20 In turmoil delighting, Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking, 5 And darting and parting, And threading and spreading, And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And hitting and spitting, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... a Christian man, our thirst Was comparable with Queen Mary's. All The talk was of confounding heretics, The heretics the Spaniards. Yet methought, 'O their great multitude! Not harbour room On our long coast for that great multitude. They land—for who can let them—give us battle, And after give us burial. Who but they, For ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism, or it may be that cynical rage which, confounding the good and the bad in existing opinions, breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness and antipathy."—Works of P. B. Shelley, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... issue of a marriage consummated before the birth of his parents while they were still within the womb of their mother Rhea-Nuit. This was a way of connecting the personage of Haroeris with the Osirian myths by confounding him with the homonymous Harsiesis, the son of Isis, who became the son of Osiris through his mother's ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... whiteness, blotting out the whole of the south-east ocean, rolling in hills of blinding brilliance into the blue heavens, and curving and dying out into an airy film of silvery-azure radiance leagues away down in the south-west. But to my solitary eye the spectacle was an amazing and confounding one. ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings. As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset this dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below. Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof. I stared at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a wooded plain. Below me steeps of green swept down to the river. I stared at them until I fancied ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... life here- after: So likewise, in the Courte, if a yong Ientleman will ventur him self into the companie of Ruffians, it is ouer greate a ieopardie, lest, their facions, maners, thoughtes, taulke, and deedes, will verie sone, be euer like. The confounding of companies, breedeth confusion of good maners // Ill compa- both in the Courte, and euerie where else. // nie. And it maie be a great wonder, but a greater shame, to vs Christian men, to vnderstand, what a heithen writer, Isocrates, doth leaue in ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham

... point it may be permissible to question Mr. Chesterton's use of words in one important point. He appears to fall into the old error of confounding reason with reasoning. Reason is one thing and argument another. It may be impossible to express either human nature or religious faith in a series of syllogistic arguments, and yet both may be reasonable in a higher sense. Reason includes those extra elements to which Mr. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... to tell the Reader that the last Civil War in this Lunar Country ended in the Victors confounding their own Conquests by their intestine Broils, they being as is already noted a most Eternally Quarrelling Nation; upon this new Breach, they that first began the War, turn'd about, and pleading that they took up Arms to regulate the Government, not to overthrow it, fell in with the Family ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe

... only in the field, but by myriads at home, among those who pretend to urge on the war. He has them 'spying and lying' every where—promoting cabals in favor of a General, and exciting opposition, in order to eventually crush him—urging Southern rights and amnesties—deluding and confounding every thing. No wonder, after all, that the London Times, comprehending nothing, should have been so wildly asinine as to see in the Message only a bid to conciliate the South!—a timid, making-up measure. The Times is behind our times, and no wonder, when a Russell ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of Christology the monophysites' debased conception of deity was a consequence of "confounding the natures." Attributes and actions, belonging properly only to Christ's humanity, were ascribed recklessly to His divinity. The test phrase "theotokos," invaluable as a protest against Nestorianism, became a precedent for all sorts of ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... therefore, is spurious or faulty can only have reference to details - some circumstances in one or the other history or prophecy designed to stir the people to greater devotion; or in some miracle, with a view of confounding philosophers; or, lastly, in speculative matters after they had become mixed up with religion, so that some individual might prop up his own inventions with a pretext of Divine authority. (75) But such matters have little to do with salvation, whether they be corrupted little ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza

... the English government, many popular writers have fallen into the error of confounding the struggle for parliamentary supremacy with the struggle for democracy. Nothing could be more misleading. The "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 was a coup d'etat engineered by the upper classes, and the liberty it preserved was the liberty of nobles, squires, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... slight indeed,—same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books, etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... will tell Count Rechberg that if Germany persists in confounding Schleswig with Holstein, other Powers of Europe may confound Holstein with Schleswig, and deny the right of Germany to interfere with the one any more than she has with the other, except as a European Power. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones

... one small bit of literal butter dug up in a Milesian stone jar lately from the bottom of some Irish bog. Great romance (i.e. absurd innocence of character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this mixed up with such eager curiosity, and enormous knowledge of the tattle and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed to have the deaths and marriages of the ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin

... Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... Gringoire, and, conducting his own affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the crowd as much as possible: "Begin the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... in one letter, 'are constrained to stay in this city; but we are not alone, for the power of our Father is with us, and it is daily made manifest through weakness, even to the stopping of the mouths of lions and to the confounding of the serpent's wisdom; eternal praises to Him for evermore. In this city, iniquity is grown to the height. We have three meetings or more every week, very large, more than any place will contain, and which we can conveniently meet in. Many of all sorts ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... they supply it by sovereign decrees which they cannot carry out, whatever they may do. Instead of seeking justice in the harmony of facts, they take it from their feelings, calling justice everything that seems to them to be love of one's neighbor, and incessantly confounding matters of reason with ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... to us to-day a matter of profound gratitude that these the earliest American lawgivers were eminently worthy their high vocation. While confounding, in some degree, the separate functions of government, as abstractly defined at a later day by Montesquieu, and eventually put in concrete form in our fundamental laws, State and Federal—it is none the less true that these first legislators clearly discerned their inherent rights ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... with midsummer idyls, while Christmas carols would be the appropriate reading in July or August. He thinks this would provide a grateful relief—like ice on a hot day or a blazing log on a cold one—from the effects of any intensity of temperature in the opposite seasons. But this is confounding sensations with mere conceptions, and seeking to "cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast." The ice cools and the fire warms, but a description of one or the other in place ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... hopeful view of human stupidity when he expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love." [Footnote: Preface to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... day, it is true, both the prickly-pear cactus and the American agave (which the world at large insists upon confounding with the aloe, a member of a totally distinct family) have spread themselves in an apparently wild condition over all the rocky coasts both of Southern Europe and of Northern Africa. The alien desert weeds have fixed their roots firmly in the sunbaked clefts of Ligurian Apennines; the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... developed to an inhuman extent under the influence of solitude,—De Sade was simply, to those who knew him, "un aimable mauvais sujet" gifted with exceptional intellectual powers. Unless we realize this we run the risk of confounding De Sade and his like with men of whom Judge Jeffreys was ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... and to its great disgrace, this employment of the dog has been accompanied by such wanton and shameful cruelty, that the Legislature—somewhat hastily confounding the abuse of a thing with its legitimate purpose—forbade the appearance of the dog-cart in the metropolitan districts, and were inclined to extend this prohibition through the whole kingdom, it is much to be desired that a kindlier and better ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... Parma and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... glances passed between Frank and Katrine as he excused himself to go to his room for rest, and then, alone at twilight, he broke the seal upon the confession of that Francis who had preceded him. To his utter confounding, he discovered in the envelope a certificate of legal marriage between Francis Ravenel and Patricia McDermott, duly witnessed and sealed. Wrapped with several letters which had been exchanged between them was a detailed ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... been thrown in; but as HE always had to be thrown in with them, and was a good-sized dog, his aquatic reputation faded also. He remained simply "a yaller dog." What more could be said? His actual name was "Bones"—given to him, no doubt, through the provincial custom of confounding the occupation of the individual with his quality, for which it was pointed out precedent could be found in some ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... you understand how that's done, and there's no need of my explaining it. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. You see what a predicament that would leave the Deity in if you divided, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... strategies," why should not Mrs. Aitken aspire to hear the silences bend? To do her justice, she does not use such expressions very often—her style is usually simple and comprehensible—but she does sometimes make the mistake of confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... events this is undoubtedly the P. eudora of Donovan, in his Insects of New Holland. M. Godart, however, most erroneously quotes another work of Donovan, namely, The Insects of India, and gives an erroneous description, apparently from confounding some Indian insect with the insect described by Donovan. Godart has also erroneously altered the Fabrician description of P. nysa, and thus added to the multitude of proofs which his laborious work affords, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... leave nothing unsaid against Epicurus, crying out, Fie, fie upon him, as confounding their presumption concerning God by taking away Providence; for God (they say) is presumed and understood to be not only immortal and happy, but also a lover of men and careful of them and beneficial to them, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... Holland not confounding—as so often has been the case—the precepts of moral philosophy with those of political economy, did not, out of fear for the doom of Jeroboam, forbid the use of starch. They simply laid a tax of a stiver a pound ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Cyclopean, and described by Pausanias, is utterly different, being composed by immense blocks of stone, with small pebbles inserted in the interstices. (See Gell's Topography of Rome and its Vicinity.) By some antiquaries, who have not made the mistake of confounding these distinct orders of architecture, the Cyclopean has been deemed more ancient than the Pelasgic,—but this also is an error. Lycosura was walled by the Pelasgians between four and five centuries prior to the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... is confounding the status of a citizen of the United States and the status of a citizen of the United States who as such is a citizen of the State of his residence. Maintaining, as I do, that there is no authority to make any body a citizen of the United States so as to convert him thereby into a citizen of ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... champions: and yet this secret leaks out and poisons all minds against the cause. Because of it, Paoli will have no dealing with you. Because of it, though you raise your standard on the mountains, no Corsicans flock to it. Pah!" I went on, my scorn confounding him, "I called you her champion, the other day! Be so good as consider that I spoke derisively. Four pretty champions she has, indeed; of whom one is a traitor, and the other three have not the spirit to track him down ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... especially teach us, is the beauty and the value of charity; of that large-hearted humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, generous, earnest thought and endeavour, in whatsoever shape they may have appeared; a charity which, without weakly or lazily confounding the eternal laws of right and wrong, can make allowances for human frailty; can separate the good from the evil in men and in theories; can understand, and can forgive, because it loves. Who can read Sir James Stephen's works without feeling ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... thought of him with respect. I have always felt the same for Alexander, with whom he has been classed as a madman by several writers, who have reasoned superficially, confounding the morals of the day with the few grand principles on which unchangeable morality rests. Making no allowance for the ignorance and prejudices of the period, they do not perceive how much they themselves are indebted to ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... Pontifices, as they were the lawyers, were in like manner the historians of Rome (Cic. de Or. ii. 12). Cicero and Varro repeatedly consulted their records, which Cicero dates from the origin of the city, but Livy only from Aneus Martius (i. 32). Servius, apparently confounding them with the Fasti, declares that they put down the events of every day (ad Ac. i. 373); and that they were divided into eighty books. Sempronius Asellio (Gell. v. 18) says they mention bellum quo initum consule, et quo modo confectum, et quis triumphans ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms, he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of character, and to establish the great principle that character can be indefinitely modified. The way is thus opened to questions of conduct, to positive ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... be done!' [Nay, more confounding and appalling still, he added:] 'You owe more than your money will pay, and I am ready now to pay your annuity, and no more; and when you are ready to receive it, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... efforts had a remarkable result, precisely for the reason that they never succeeded in speaking pure French, and that in their ill-cleared brains the two languages were never kept distinctly apart. The nobles, cleverer men, could speak both idioms without confounding them, but so could not these rurales, who lisped the master's tongue with difficulty, mixing together the two vocabularies and the two grammars, mistaking the genders, assigning, for want of better knowledge, the neuter to all the words that did not designate beings with a sex, in other words, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... influential hour rolled on, the terrors of the hateful Presence grew more confounding to the mortal senses of the victim, and the knot of the accursed sophistry became more inextricable in appearance, at least to the prey whom its meshes surrounded. He had not power to explain the assurance of pardon which he continued ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... implies that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... order to avoid the confusion which arose from thus confounding the cause and effect, that modern chemists adopted the new word caloric, to denote the principle which produces heat; yet they do not always, in compliance with their own language, limit the word heat to the expression ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet

... thus jerked back by the skirts, so to speak, from the open jaws of death by a single savage had proved more confounding to the steadfast mind of Big Black Burl than when but a few minutes before he was dragged thither by twenty, insomuch that ever since the unexpected surcease of the fiendish frolic he had continued to stare about him in a state of bewilderment ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... the top and bottom centres it is capable of exerting little or no power; but at those times there is little or no steam consumed, so that no waste of power is occasioned by the peculiarity. Those who imagine that there is a loss of power caused by the crank perplex themselves by confounding the vertical with the circumferential velocity. If the circle of the crank be divided by any number of equidistant horizontal lines, it will be obvious that there must be the same steam consumed, and the same power expended, when the crank pin passes from the level of one line to the level ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... not certain," said La Fontaine; "and you appear to me to be confounding Epicurus with Pythagoras, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... very good man to exhale some of your satisfaction in writing two notes to me; you could not have taken a better line in my opinion; but as for showing your satisfaction in confounding my experiments, I assure you I am quite enough confounded—those horrid seeds, which, as you truly observe, if they sink ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... said Mr Escot, "in confounding them with those of the sons of little men, the degenerate dwarfs of later generations; you will well bestow them in giving them to me: for I will have this illustrious skull bound with a silver rim, and filled with mantling wine, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... the vast and dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone over ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... residing at Kandy and with the aid of the priests, who being ignorant of English could only assist him to Singhalese equivalents for Pali words. Hence he was probably led into the mistake of confounding wajira, which signifies "diamond," or an instrument for cutting diamonds, with the modern word widura, which bears the same import but is colloquially used by the Kandyans for "glass." However, as glass as well ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... wrong, moveth in the universe, though none can say This is God! This body with its physical attributes is only the means by which God—the Supreme Lord of all maketh (every creature) to reap fruits that are good or bad. Behold the power of illusion that hath been spread by God, who confounding with his illusion, maketh creatures slay their fellows! Truth-knowing Munis behold those differently. They appear to them in a different light, even like the rays of the Sun (which to ordinary eyes are only a pencil of light, while to eyes more penetrating seem fraught with the germs of food ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post, as the night advanced, began to make larger demands on his attention; and ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... EMPEROR, that in my sermon I say anything displeasing to your Imperial self. I must not remind you that you are a man like other men, a man liable to weakness and error, swayed by temper, capable, since your position gives you power, of trampling on the rights of others in a moment of passion, of confounding justice with your own desires and of mistaking the promptings of ambition or malice or envy for an inspiration from Heaven itself. No, I must not say all this or any of it, but, on the contrary, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various

... to the end of the roof and beheld there, behind a goodly curtain, a little chamber in whose midst stood a couch of juniper-wood[FN285] plated with shimmering gold and covered with a handsome carpet. On this sat a lovely young lady, confounding all beholders with her beauty and comeliness and symmetry and perfect grace, and by her side a youth, whose hand was on her neck; and he was kissing her and she kissing him. When I saw them, O Prince ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... go? The one occupation of her life has been, for some time back, to follow Mr. Snagsby to and fro, and up and down, and to piece suspicious circumstances together—and every circumstance that has happened has been most suspicious; and in this way she has pursued her object of detecting and confounding her false husband, night and day. Thus did it come to pass that she brought the Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn together, and conferred with Mr. Tulkinghorn on the change in Mr. Guppy, and helped to turn up the circumstances in which the present company ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... part thinking of my woes. I had swallowed the draught as if it had indeed been a potion to put me out of all remembrance of my misery. I had snatched the dagger and stabbed myself with great satisfaction, and I felt I should at least have the comfort of confounding my enemies ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... the gravel-strewn plateau, gun in hand. He felt glad of his five-chambered companion. Those rough friends of his on the ranch were right. There was nothing so compelling, nothing so arbitrary, nor so reassuring to the possessor and confounding to his enemies, as a ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... want your wife and mother for?" asked Canny. "That's mere foolishness, my lad. It's the devil confounding you, damn his soul! Don't you listen to him, the cursed one. Don't let him have his way. He is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, 'I don't want them!' He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him and say: 'I don't want it!' I ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community may exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but in order to exist, it must be comprest and hedged in by another ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... Quebec, and who threatened to renew the attack this year, constructed, at the charge of the King, this citadel, with the fortifications therewith connected, for the defence of the country and the safety of the people, and for confounding yet again a people perfidious towards God and towards its lawful king. And he has ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy[201].' WATSON. 'I own I am for much attention to accuracy in composing, lest one should get bad habits of doing it in a slovenly manner.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are confounding doing inaccurately with the necessity of doing inaccurately. A man knows when his composition is inaccurate, and when he thinks fit he'll correct it. But, if a man is accustomed to compose slowly, and with difficulty, upon all occasions, there is danger that he may not compose at ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones[62] of as many bag-pipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piece-meal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the air. I despatched four of them, but the rest got away, and I presently ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... Diego, and calls one of the daughters Phillipine. Spotorno says that the daughter Maria took the veil; confounding her with a niece. These are trivial errors, merely noticed to avoid the imputation of inaccuracy. The account of the descendants of Columbus here given, accords with a genealogical tree of the family, produced before the council of the Indies, in a ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... homogeneity the founders of the kingdom indulged to excess their propensity for centralization, with the consequence that Italy has exhibited regularly an admixture of bureaucracy and liberalism even more confounding than that which prevails in the French Republic. In theory the administrative system is broadly democratic and tolerant; in practice it not infrequently lends itself to the employment of the most arbitrary devices. Abuse arises most commonly from the powers ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... confounding this jealous and most unamiable and ill-tempered tyrant of the universe with the Absolute of Aristotle!" cried Euergetes; "he stigmatises most of what you and I and all rational Greeks require for the enjoyment of life as sin—sin upon sin. And yet if my easily ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... he invited Fraeulein to the opera or theater. The parent must attend. As she was equally occupied, it did not appear easy for him to arrange for the two. Besides, Frau Bucher killed everything under these confounding and confounded circumstances. She sat between him and her daughter and ruled the conversation. It was little better than taking her alone, so he ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... border-lands and narrow inland seas of Southern Europe allured man, in presence of their opposite shores, to the perpetual exchange of his productions. An arm of the sea is not a barrier, but rather a tie between the nations. Appearing to separate, it in reality draws them together without confounding them.[16] On such a theatre we may expect that commerce will be developed on an extensive scale.[17] And, along with commerce, there will be increased activity in all departments of productive industry, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... The angels nearly always occur in couples, as in the case of Antoine Vrard, one of the earliest printers to adopt this form; but a few exceptions may be mentioned where only one appears, namely, in the Mark of Estienne Baland, Lyons (1515), in which an angel is represented as confounding Balaam's ass; and in that of Vincent Portunaris, of the same place and of about the same time, in which an angel figures holding an open book; in the four employed by G.Silvius, an Antwerp printer (1562), in three of which the figure is also holding a book; in the elaborate Mark ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... specimens of the Musulungu or Musurungu, a wilder race than that of Shark Point: the English, of course, call them Missolonghi, because Lord Byron died there. Here the people say "le" for "re," and "rua" for "lua," confounding both liquids, which may also be found in the Kibundo tongue. In Loango, according to the Abbe Proyart, the national organ does not admit the roughness of the r, which is changed to l. Monteiro and Gamitto assert (xxii.) that the "Cazembes or Lundas do not pronounce the letter ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... proud man's contumely; Epitome and Focus of the disparities and maddening contrasts of this wrong world, that assemblest together in one great heap the woes, the joys, the elevations, the debasements of the various tribes of man; mightiest of levellers, confounding in thy whirlpool all ranks, all minds, the graven labours of knowledge, the straws of the maniac, purple and rags, the regalities and the loathsomeness of earth,—palace and lazar-house combined! Grave of the ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... with them, as well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark, and leaf, and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch too; beyond those at first she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions; never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... failures, if others laugh; parrot-like repetition of some syllables (118). Gain in understanding of words heard; association of definite object with name (119). More movements executed on hearing words (120). Confounding of movements occurs, but grows rare; begging attitude seen ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... and in doing so met with a disaster. A strong wind setting in from the north, as the troops were passing, brought the waters of the Mediterranean over the low strip of sand which is ordinarily dry, and confounding sea and shore and lake together, caused the destruction of a large detachment; but the main army, which had probably kept Lake Serbonis on the right, reached its destination intact. A skirmish followed between the Theban troops of the first division under Lacrates and the garrison ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... no more changes its species, by evolving matter from Spirit, than natural 24 science, so-called, or material laws, bring about altera- tion of species by transforming minerals into vegetables or plants into animals, — thus confusing and confounding 27 the three great kingdoms. No rock brings forth an apple; 1 no pine-tree produces a mammal or ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy

... which compels involuntary withdrawal; and that there is a stage at which the voluntary and involuntary actions are mixed. But the difficulty of absolute discrimination is no reason for neglecting the broad general contrast; any more than it is for confounding light with darkness. If we are to include as examples of volition, all cases in which pleasures and pains "stimulate the active machinery of the living framework to perform such operations as procure the first and ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... sometimes by adding sometimes by rabbating, of a sillable or letter to or from a word either in the beginning, middle or ending ioyning or vnioyning of sillibles and letters suppressing or confounding their seueral soundes, or by misplacing of a letter, or by cleare exchaunge of one letter for another, or by wrong ranging of the accent. And your figures of addition or surpluse be three, videl. In the ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham

... No. LV. [2] Edge-Hill, Book I. [3] The author has here fallen into an error in confounding Beaudesert, near Henley in Arden, with a place of the same name, near Cannock Chase. The mistake was pointed out to him a few days after its publication, by his valued friend and relative, the Rev. Thomas Price, Rector of Enville, Staffordshire. Mr. Price's ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... in opposition to the rights of man," says another letter from Franche-Comte, "to find one's self in perpetual fear of having one's throat cut by scoundrels who are daily confounding liberty with license." ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... bridge was the one great natural phenomenon, the one grand spectacle which I had ever seen that did not at first give vague disappointment, a confounding of reality, a disenchantment of contrast with what ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... to the convent is half an hour; in the way is shewn the head of the golden calf, which the Israelites worshipped, transmuted into stone. It is somewhat singular that both the monks and the Bedouins call it the cow's head (Ras el Bakar), and not the calf's, confounding it, perhaps, with the "red heifer," of which the Old Testament and the Koran speak. It is a stone half-buried in the ground, and bears some resemblance to the forehead of a cow. Some travellers have ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... security and respect, as long as they continue faithful. Thus, by mild treatment they will be invited to obedience and the love of peace, and the thought of certain punishment will deter them from rash attempts. We have often observed persons who, confounding these matters, by complaining of faults, depressing for services, flattering in war, plundering in peace, despoiling the weak, paying respect to revolters, by thus rendering all things confused, have at length been ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis

... reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while, that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in Russian snows—alas! starting from it only ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... strenuous supporter of that policy of neutrality which Washington wisely adopted. The Secretary of the Treasury was assailed by those who envied and hated him, in various ways. His official integrity was called in question, but the investigations which he courted led to the confounding of his enemies, while his personal character stood brighter than ever. So bitter became the opposition that some of their number wished for the success of the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, as Mr. Jefferson's correspondence shows; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... and countries of Kyle, Cunningham, and Carrick, of old extent, To our trusty and well-beloved William Chalmers and John M'Adam, students and practitioners in the ancient and mysterious science of confounding right and wrong. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... you think that which was our home and our treasure box has now become a trap for the confounding of those who believe we are a threat ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... of words and phrases where the strictest exactness and perspicuity are required, that an ordinary English style is apt to become loose and shadowy; and it is precisely here that we are entitled to expect the severest, chastest form of utterance. Coleridge used to complain of a general confounding of the word 'notion' with 'idea,' and was often at great pains to point out the distinction between the two, as also between many other words similarly misused. Archdeacon Hare, too, has remarked upon the common misapplication ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... mentions them in his "Tour on the Mountains;" but he must have been mistaken, confounding one tribe with another, or perhaps deceived by the ignorance of the trappers; for that tribe occupied a range of country entirely out of his track, and never travelled by American traders or trappers. Mr Farnham could not ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... in that day's black fury Like leaves shall be whirled in the blast; Hoary-headed Eryri Prone to the plough-lands cast! Then shall be roaring and warring And ferment of sea and firth, Ocean, in turmoil upboiling, Confounding each bound of earth. The flow of the Deluge of Noah Were naught ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... of the two women he would prefer as the centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield robed in imperial purple, or Maria Ferres robed in ermine. And as he lingered pleasurably over this uncertainty of choice, he ended by mingling and confounding his two anxieties—the real one for Elena and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... to ten routs in one evening. When Edward was elevated upon their shoulders, he could not help being gratified with the romantic effect produced by the breaking up of this sylvan camp. [The author has been sometimes accused of confounding fiction with reality. He therefore thinks it necessary to state, that the circumstance of the hunting described in the text as preparatory to the insurrection of 1745, is, so far as he knows, entirely ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... from the command of the District of Kansas inaugurated[242] what contemporaries described as "Sturgis' military despotism,"[243] in amplification of which it is enough to say that it attempted the utter confounding, if not the annihilation, of the Indian Expedition, a truly noble undertaking to be sure, considering how much was hoped for from that expedition, how much of benefit and measure of justice to a helpless, homeless, impoverished people and considering, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... Babylonian and Etruscan spells, and thus go to strengthen the hypothesis often put forward with more or less plausibility that Druidism had an Eastern origin. At all magical rites spells were uttered. Druids often accompanied an army, to assist by their magical arts in confounding the enemy.[52] ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... history. This practice resulted in some erroneous conceptions, notably in regard to their relations with aborigines and general native policy, as referred to in previous chapters. It also imperceptibly fostered sentiments confounding legality with grace, and the by-product of that subtle corrupting leaven which is apt to see a splint in the eye of another whilst unmindful of the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness, some undercurrent, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of theme—which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... space permitted; but the intelligent parent, who has rightly comprehended the method of management here described, and the spirit in which the process of applying it is to be made, will be in no danger of confounding ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... see some shadows of this, if we look up to the clear sun. We are able to see nothing for too much light. There is such an infinite disproportion here between the eye of our mind, and this divine light of glory, that if we curiously pry into it, it is rather confounding and astonishing, and therefore it fills the souls of saints with continual silent admiration ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... up to me defiantly. My blood boiled. I would have mortgaged the prospects of my Lives of Great Men (not that they were worth mortgaging) for the exquisite satisfaction of confounding this abominable woman. Then I saw the peril of the situation. I thought of horrid headliners in the papers: "Author charged with abusing servant girl," or, "Arrest of Archibald Fairfax on serious ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... claimed that mind is simply the result of the molecular action of the brain. This theory is as unreal as Banquo's ghost—it will not bear a moment's investigation. It is simply confounding the action of the mind upon the brain with the mind itself. Every effect must have a cause. When I make a special mental effort what is the cause lying behind the effort? Is it the molecular action of the brain? I will to make the effort, and do it. Then ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... discreditable to him to refuse to read his Christian documents in the light of a trained scientific criticism. We shall have made some positive advance in rationality when the man who is perfectly capable of dealing sanely with legend in one connection, and, in another, will insist on confounding it with history proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... their enemies to present the project of a law in the Senate, where the Escoces had a majority, to suppress secret societies by severe penalties against those who adhered to such associations. For the better insuring of success, the Escoces assumed the language of morality; and, confounding their own affair with that of their native country, clamored hypocritically against the pernicious influence which clandestine meetings exercised in public affairs. According to them the cry of the nation was against secret societies. The bill ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... fatal argument. "The superior race must control the inferior." Very well; if they insist on invoking the ordeal by battle to decide which is the superior, let it be so. It will be found that they have made the common mistake of confounding barbarism with strength. Because the Southern masses are as ignorant of letters and of arts as the Scottish Highlanders, they infer themselves to be as warlike. But even the brave and hardy Highlanders ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... distance of 5 deg. and then of 10 deg., the calculations of modern astronomers have gauged the polar distance existing in 1492 at 3 deg. 28', as against the 1 deg. 20' of to-day. The confusion of Columbus was very like his confounding an old world with a new, inasmuch as he supposed it was the pole star and not the needle which ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various

... clubb'd into a dream: As little weight his vain presages bear, Of ill effect to such alone who fear: Most prophecies are of a piece with these, Each Nostradamus can foretell with ease: 520 Not naming persons, and confounding times, One casual truth ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... singular mistake with regard to the Aylwin characters than that of Morris being confounded with 'Wilderspin' was that of confounding, as certain newspaper paragraphs at the time did, 'Cyril Aylwin' with Mr. Whistler. I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been inquired about more than any other in the book. I knew him, I think, even ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... the want of those solid objections which they endeavor in vain to find. The error which limits republican government to a narrow district has been unfolded and refuted in preceding papers. I remark here only that it seems to owe its rise and prevalence chiefly to the confounding of a republic with a democracy, applying to the former reasonings drawn from the nature of the latter. The true distinction between these forms was also adverted to on a former occasion. It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; ...
— The Federalist Papers

... and painstaking records. Tau had his magic, Mura not only his plants but the delicate miniature landscapes he fashioned, to be imprisoned forever in the hearts of protecting plasta balls. But Weeks had never shown his work before and now he had an artist's supreme pleasure of completely confounding ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... afraid he has introduced some confusion into the natural history of the earth, in not properly distinguishing the mineral operations of the globe, and those again which belong entirely to the surface of the earth; perhaps also in confounding the natural effects of water upon the surface of the earth, with those convulsions of the sea which may be properly considered as the accidental operations of the globe. This subject being strictly connected with the opinions of that philosopher with regard to primitive mountains, I am ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... compelled to classify, and thereby simplify the multiplicity of citizens, and only to know humanity in a representative form and at second-hand. Accordingly they end by entirely losing sight of humanity, and by confounding it with a simple artificial creation of the understanding, whilst on their part the subject-classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that address themselves so little to their personality. At length, society, weary of having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the earth brings to us at least once during its period the threadbare, thriceworn, stale, flat, and academic discussion of critic and artist. We believe comparisons of creator and critic are unprofitable, being for the most part a confounding of intellectual substances. The painter paints, the composer makes music, the sculptor models, and the poet sings. Like the industrious crow the critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up in the furrows the chance grains dropped ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... that KANP'U was the port frequented by the early Arab voyagers, and of which they speak under the name of Khanfu, confounding in their details Hang-chau itself with the port. Neumann dissents from this, maintaining that the Khanfu of the Arabs was certainly Canton. Abulfeda, however, states expressly that Khanfu was known in his day as Khansa (i.e. Kinsay), ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... mistake of confounding conversation on "religion" with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but well-trained children ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... March 1730, and again for a week in the following September. On three other weeks there is a charge against him of fivepence in the books. Mr. Croker has made that darker which was already dark enough by confounding, as I have shewn, two John Taylors who both matriculated at Christ Church. Boswell's statement no doubt is precise, but in this he followed perhaps the account given by Hawkins. He would have been less likely to discover Hawkins's error from the fact that, as Johnson's name was for about three years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of the brief minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged by the wrappings she wore. He did not, however, believe this. He had every reason to refuse the belief; ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... become a distinct dialect; and it would even be difficult to fix at present the varieties in which it occurs. One of its prominent peculiarities, however, is easily perceived: it consists in the constant confounding of the soft and hard consonants; and the reader must well bear it in mind when translating the language that meets his eye into one to become intelligible to his ear. Thus to the German of our poet, kiss becomes giss; company - gompany; care - gare; count ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... riding through the cotton and rice and cane, home to a stately old mansion, where long-eared hounds bayed him welcome, and a woman looked for him and met him with happy and beautiful smile. There might—there would be children. And something new, strange, confounding with its emotion, came to life deep in Duane's heart. There would be children! Ray their mother! The kind of life a lonely outcast always yearned for and never had! He saw ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... is the Catholic Faith, that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance. For the Person of the Father is one, of the Son another, of the Holy Ghost another. But the divinity of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost is one, the glory equal, the majesty equal. Such as is the Father, such also is the Son, and ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds

... of each separate thing, but one which requires development. Species, then, are those forms into which genus is divided without any single one being omitted; as if any one were to divide justice into law, custom, and equity. A person who thinks that species are the same things as parts, is confounding the art; and being perplexed by some resemblance, he does not distinguish with sufficient acuteness what ought to be distinguished. Often, also, both orators and poets define by metaphor, relying on some verbal resemblance, and indeed not without giving a certain degree of pleasure. But ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... Wordsworth's, to be founded upon fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream- scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested by his friend's dream, and ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... German theology, confounding divine and human laws, permitted no dual overlapping spheres of mundane and celestial rule as had all previous religious and, social orders since Christ had commanded his disciples to "Render unto Caesar—" There could be no conscientious objection to German law on ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement—beginning over ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... am far from wishing to hold up this imported minister as a model of Christian graces for my descendants to admire. No one can be more convinced than myself how much sectarians are prone to substitute their own narrow notions of right and wrong for the Law of God, confounding acts that are perfectly innocent in themselves with sin; but, at the same time, I am quite aware too, that appearances are ever to be consulted in cases of morals, and that it is a minor virtue to be decent in matters of manners. The Rev. Mr. Worden, whatever might have been ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... wrinkled visage, animated by zealous wrath, and emancipated, by the very mention of the test, from the restraints of her own prudence, and Cuddie's admonition—"Div ye think to come here, wi' your soul-killing, saint-seducing, conscience-confounding oaths, and tests, and bands—your snares, and your traps, and your gins?—Surely it is in vain that a net is spread in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... the literary market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the somewhat slovenly use of the editorial we, which at the fag-end of passages sometimes dropped into I. [Upon my remarking upon this to Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of the singular and plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously suggestive effects in a very different work, Macbeth, where the kingly we is tripped up by the guilty I in ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... you are perhaps confounding this with some remembered adventure of your own. There was no appointment. But I felt confident that blue-eyed ogre was walking every morning along the path where I met him first, and that he would compel me to open the door and walk straight ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... cabinets felt it a great temptation to assist the colonies of the domineering mistress of the seas to change themselves from her dependencies into her naval rivals. But the attempt and not the deed might prove confounding; neither could a wise monarch assume with entire complacency the position of an aider and an abettor of a rebellion on the part of subjects whose grievances appeared chiefly an ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... the confounding "individual variations" with "minute or imperceptible variations," is well exposed by C. Wright, and that part I should like to see reprinted; but I always thought you laid too much stress on the slowness of the action of Natural Selection ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... is even an uncertainty as to the school of philosophy to which he belonged. External evidence seems to testify that he was an Epicurean; but internal would lead us to classify him with the Platonic. Unscrupulous in argument, confounding canonical gospels with apocryphal, and Christians with heretical sects, delighting in searching for contradictions, incapable of understanding the deeper aspects of Christianity, he has united in his attack all known objections, making use of minute criticism, philosophical theory, piquant sarcasm, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... western shores of Asia Minor were occupied by Grecian colonies, and all remembrance of AEne'as and his followers lost. When the narrative of the Trojan war, with other Greek legends, began to be circulated in Lati'um, it was natural that the identity of name should have led to the confounding of the AEne'adae who had survived the destruction of Troy, with those who had come to La'tium from the Pelasgic AE'nus. The cities which were said to be founded by the AEne'adae were, Latin Troy, which possessed empire ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... perhaps, in expounding that passage, Mr. Le Breton may have referred in passing—as an illustration merely—to the unhappily prevalent modern doctrines of socialism and communism. He may have warned his boys, for example, against confounding a Christian communism like this, if I may so style it, with the rapacious, aggressive, immoral forms of communism now proposed to us, which are based upon the forcible disregard of all Property and all vested interests of every sort. I don't ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... suspicion weighed within her nevertheless. She took it for a mania to speculate on herself. There are states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of confounding it by the look direct and the downright word. Yet her nature compelled her inwardly to phrase the sentence: 'Emma is a wife!' The character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the homes or cattle of our chiefs, is equally and utterly unfounded; and is partly to be accounted for from the name of power and terror which these barbarians left behind, and partly from ignorant persons confounding them with the most illustrous and civilised ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... The shadow of the passions of the moment traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things. Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic, humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous intellect. Without going deeply ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo



Words linked to "Confounding" :   contradictory, unsupportive



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