"Explicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... imprisonment ended in his execution; and if it was so, it is difficult to see why such a fact should be suppressed. If the charge against him was at last dismissed, because the accusers did not think it worth while to come to Rome to prosecute it, St. Luke's silence is more explicable. In any case, we may regard it as almost certain that St. Paul ended his life under a Roman axe ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... observed that Carwin adopted, in some degree, a similar distinction. A tale of this kind, related by others, he would believe, provided it was explicable upon known principles; but that such notices were actually communicated by beings of an higher order, he would believe only when his own ears were assailed in a manner which could not be otherwise accounted for. Civility ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... one motive why she should make herself instrumental in the accomplishment of my ruin. It was explicable only on the presumption that she was attached to Ijurra—that Rafael Ijurra was the lord of her heart. If so, he could easily bend it to his will—for this is but the sequence of the other—could influence ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... spirit obtains supremacy, there freedom reigns; that in regard to England's downfall, there can be but one opinion—it is the very highest mission of German culture; that Germany's war is a holy war—such expressions as these, which are psychologically explicable without questioning their sincerity, seem out of harmony, to say the least, with what we know of Germany's political aspirations. Germany's desire for England's downfall does not appear to us to be based upon a moral motive; Germany's war seems far from being a holy war, and it is hard ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the distinction between the good self and the bad self arises. But in this very conception of a universe of spirits we have passed beyond the bounds of a purely rational philosophy. Such a universe is not explicable by reference to the vivifying principle of the self;" and accordingly we are driven back as before upon the alternative of philosophical chaos, or else of faith in such a superpersonal unity as is suggested by the doctrine ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... His Honour is developing an ungovernable irritability and a tendency to choleric obsessions, when the word 'Uitlander' is barely mentioned in his presence, that are causing the greatest concern to those around him. Only on some such grounds are explicable the raging exclamations he is reported to have permitted himself to lately use towards Johannesburg and the cause of reform upon which it is so earnestly engaged. That His Honour should have been generally credited with indulging in unconventional vernacular terms concerning the pronouncedly ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... from the bite of a mad dog differs from other contagious materials, from its being communicable from other animals to mankind, and from many animals to each other; the phenomena attending the hydrophobia are in some degree explicable on the foregoing theory. The infectious matter does not appear to enter the circulation, as it cannot be traced along the course of the lymphatics from the wound, nor is there any swelling of the lymphatic glands, nor does any fever attend, as occurs in the small-pox, and in many other contagious ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre,—which in the older prophets was the natural and historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... national pride should follow so many disasters by land is explicable only through the battle of New Orleans, whose crowning victory changed the aspect of prior engagements in the public memory, while it placed a new value on the marksmanship of the American soldiery. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... marks the delineation of form, no one will gainsay a frankly sensuous charm pervades the scene, a feeling which seems at first sight inconsistent with that reticence and modesty so conspicuous elsewhere. Yet I think all this is perfectly explicable on the basis of natural evolution. Exuberance of feeling is the logical outcome of a lifetime spent in an atmosphere of lyrical thought, and certainly Giorgione was not the sort of man to control those natural impulses, which grew stronger with ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... The meaning of these routes are not explicable, as we are unacquainted with what is meant by Saguenay. The river of that name flows into the north-west side of the St Lawrence 150 miles below Quebec, in a nearly east course of about 150 miles from the lake of St John. The other river, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... cup.' Of course the English verb spoylle never meant 'to rinse'; Caxton was misled by the sound of the Flemish spoel. Caxton's 'after the house,' as a translation of aual la maison (throughout the house), is explicable only by a reference to the Flemish version, which has achter huse. The verb formaketh, which has not elsewhere been found in English, is an adoption of the Flemish vermaect (repairs). Another Flemicism is Caxton's whiler ( while ere) for 'some time ago,' in Flemish wilen eer. It is ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... exact point on which parallelism has amended materialism. We have seen that every materialist doctrine is the expression of this idea, that physical phenomena are the only ones that are determined, measurable, explicable, and scientific. This idea does wonders in the natural sciences, but is at fault when, from the physical, we pass into the moral world, and we have seen how the materialistic doctrine fails when it endeavours to attach the physical to the mental. There are then ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... profuse in thanks, and announced that his mind was now at ease. By some mysterious process, not clearly explicable to himself, he contrived to lay aside a portion of his dress, and to dispose himself within the folds of balmy bedclothes that awaited him. In forty seconds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is quite explicable, but the explanation is not necessarily a justification. Although every division of the human family must have passed through many social phases, and must therefore have experienced revolutionary shocks, yet the rule of man's existence has ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... by a grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality of matter in its innumerable manifestations—the effect of its instincts—at all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is not the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations suggested by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... license in India can inflict no greater slur than is cast on the English in England by their having to take out gun licenses, it is evident that the vehemently expressed desire for the repeal of this Act is only explicable when read along with the previously quoted remarks with reference to the native volunteering and the armed population in sympathy with them at their back, and with the detonating matter which appears in those seditious pamphlets to which ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... souls are assigned to animals, so primitive man often credits trees and plants with souls in both human or animal form. All over the world agricultural peoples practise elaborate ceremonies explicable, as Mannhardt has shown, on animistic principles. In Europe the corn spirit sometimes immanent in the crop, sometimes a presiding deity whose life does not depend on that of the growing corn, is conceived in some districts ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of Rumsey's boat, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... objects as situated in events. I mean molecules and electrons. These objects are not recognised in isolation. We cannot well miss Cleopatra's Needle, if we are in its neighbourhood; but no one has seen a single molecule or a single electron, yet the characters of events are only explicable to us by expressing them in terms of these scientific objects. Undoubtedly molecules and electrons are abstractions. But then so is Cleopatra's Needle. The concrete facts are the events themselves—I ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... "If, as we maintain, natural selection is the great active cause which has produced the whole wonderful variety of organic life on the earth, all the interesting phenomena of human life must also be explicable from the same cause. For man is after all {238} only a most highly-developed vertebrate animal, and all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. The whole history of nations, or what is called ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... conditions, or Pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Physics; Biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mineral, personal memoranda, abrupt raids of criticism, crude gossip of philosophy, varied sands and clumps—without bothering ourselves because certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming under their own name with entire fitness or amiability. (It is a profound, vexatious never-explicable matter—this of names. I have been exercised deeply ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... noticing that, though natural selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not. Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the parents. It is now as inexplicable as any other origination; and, if ever explained, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... stretcher bearers in the course of trench warfare, the testimony is abundant, and the facts do not seem explicable by accident. It may be that sometimes the bearers were suspected of seeing too much; and it is plain from the general military policy of the German armies that very slight suspicion would be acted on in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... legend as a substitute for the folklore of all the little gods condemned by the Church; so that the fairy tale is in all Europe the link between Christianity and paganism, and to the weakness of vanquished Rome her departed empire seemed only explicable as the result of magic. The Capitol, in the imagination of such tales, became a tower of wizards. High above all, a golden sphere reflected the sun's rays far out across the distant sea by day, and at night a huge lamp took its place as a beacon for the sailors of the Mediterranean, even ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... usurping grain be always rye? Perhaps those curious facts which have been stated with regard to forests of one kind of trees, when burnt down, being succeeded (without planting) by other kinds, may yet be found most explicable, as this is, upon the hypothesis of a progression of species which takes place under certain favouring conditions, now apparently of comparatively rare occurrence. The case of the oats is the more valuable, as bearing upon the suggestion as to a protraction of ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... am off hard on the road to Borgo, drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: e.g. Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil that will hinder the building of bridges; ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... 'following.' The greatest dramatic sopranos that ever sing Brunhilde and Kundry enjoy no such popularity. It belongs exclusively to the nightingale primadonnas, whose voices enchant the ear if they do not always stir the blood. It may be explicable, but no explanation is at all necessary, since the fact cannot ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... reverence. We do not say that those who do not share our opinion of Buddha, Socrates, Mohammed, Bruno, Cromwell, Danton, or even Plato or Shakespeare, are grovelling materialists and candidates for perdition. No, the chatter about Christ is only explicable on the ground that he was, and still is by millions, worshipped as a god. The glamor of the deity lingers round the form of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... that, to believe that the Hebrew communities are in a principal measure the descendants of the Ten Tribes, and of the other captivities preceding Christ, is a just, and fair, and sensible inference, which explains circumstances that otherwise could not be explicable. But let that pass. We will suppose all the Jews in all the cities of the world to be the lineal descendants of the mob who shouted at the crucifixion. Yet another question! My grandfather is a Bedouin ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... with the reasoning in the text. But to be sure, a wider induction is requisite for the establishment of any theory. This is not the place for it. The instances adduced by Dr H. in support of his theory, are explicable on another principle, viz. that every excitement of mind or body is followed by a depression precisely proportioned to its intensity. This seems a law in our economy, deducible from almost unlimited observation, and of extreme importance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... underlying longevity, the resumption of feral characteristics, the sterility of many animals under confinement, are not only made intelligible but are shown to be all part and parcel of the same story—all being explicable as soon as Memory is made the main ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... considerations seriously to concern him, he might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, and an occasional gambling flyer, his balance was precarious, so to speak. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... impossible marvels, such as people of only one leg. It is to be noted that "the peoples in towns," who are apparently Huron-Iroquois, are here referred to as "good people," while the Hochelagans speak of them as "wicked." This is explicable enough as a difference of view on distant races with whom they had no contact. It seems to imply that the "Canada" people were not in such close communication with the town of Hochelaga as to have the same opinions ...
— Hochelagans and Mohawks • W. D. Lighthall
... of Median names, containing roots not found in any known names of Persians, but easily explicable from Zend, Sanscrit, or other cognate tongues, and therefore not antagonistic to the view that Median and Persian were two closely connected dialects. Such, for instance, are the royal names mentioned by Herodotus, Deioces, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on natural grounds—what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having become mesmerism or hypnotism ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... cease to thrill when we dissect. But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes. And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... she thought of her own father. What would become of him? Where was he this night? The sense of impending disaster gave strength to her, however. She rose and put her hand on Willy's arm as he walked to and fro across the earthen floor. She was the more drawn to him from some scarce explicable sense of ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... Cosenza, Cotrone and Catanzaro, an average white man will seldom find, in any Calabrian hostelry, what he is accustomed to consider as ordinary necessities of life. The thing is easily explicable. These men are not yet in the habit of "handling" civilized travellers; they fail to realize that hotel-keeping is a business to be learnt, like tailoring or politics. They are still in the patriarchal stage, wealthy proprietors for the most part, and quite independent ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... present infinitive is the form in which a Latin or a Greek root is always given in Webster and other received lexicographic authorities. It is a curious fact, that, in all the school etymologies, the present indicative should have been given as the root, and is explicable only from the accident that it is the key-form in the Latin dictionaries. The change into conformity with our English dictionaries needs no defense, and will probably hereafter be imitated by all authors ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... synchronously with its revolution—that is, once in 88 days—on an axis sensibly perpendicular to its orbital plane. No certain signs of a Mercurian atmosphere are visible. The globe is seamed and furrowed with long narrow markings, explicable as cracks in cooling. It is, and always was, a dead world. From micrometrical measures, moreover, the inferences were drawn that the planet's mass has a probable value about 1/20 that of the earth, while its mean density falls ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to borrow an argument from Butler, as that which now happens must be consistent with the attributes of the Deity, if such a Being exists, Evolution must be consistent with those attributes. And, if so, the evolution of the universe, which is neither more nor less explicable than that of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... keeping parallel to the French when within point-blank, the others following her as they could; a process which, from the varying distances, would expose each to a concentrated fire as they successively approached. Byng's action is only explicable to the writer by supposing that he thus by "steer with" understood "steer for;" for when, after the fleet tacked together, the new van ship (formerly the rear) did not of her own motion head for the leading enemy, he signalled ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... not very explicable on any principles, as a detail not visible without search was sought and verified, and that by a habitual mocker at anything out of the common way. For example, Hone published a comic explanation, correct or not, of ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... times powers of life and death over all the members of the household. In the ruder ages the father might either kill or sell his children; and afterwards, among the ruling classes his powers remained almost unlimited until modern times. Allowing for certain local exceptions, explicable by tradition, or class-exceptions, explicable by conditions of servitude, it may be said that originally the Japanese paterfamilias was at once ruler, priest, and magistrate within the family. He could compel his children to marry or forbid them to marry; ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... beloved Mary to join the home party at Deerhurst without delay. Pembroke rejoiced in this prospective relief to the minds of his aunt and cousin, being well aware that he had left them in a state of intense anxiety, not only on account of the baronet's strange conduct,—which had not been explicable in any way to their alarmed observations,—but on account of himself, whose mind had appeared from the time of his father's incensed departure in a state verging on derangement. On the instant of his return from the deserted hotel, while passing Mary, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... prices rose throughout the world. Between 1870 and 1890 the production of gold fell off while its use as money increased greatly, and prices fell. A great increase of gold production has occurred in the period since 1890. In part the rising prices since 1897 are explicable as the periodic upswing of confidence and credit, but in the main doubtless they are due to the stimulus of increasing gold supplies.[10] These are but a few of many instances in monetary history, which, taken together, make an argument of probability in favor of the quantity theory so strong ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... treated in a way to throw light upon educational methods and theory. "Some biologists treat mental phenomena as mere correlates of physiological processes.... Others, including a number of psychologists also, regard psychological phenomena as fully explicable in terms of behavior, and as constituting therefore a phase of biological science." The Committee of the American Psychological Association on the Academic Status of Psychology recommends "that the Association ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... pampered menials. An audience that can accept this old-fashioned cheap-novel kind of clap-trap, and witness, without surprise, the marvellous departure of all the guests, supperless, for no assigned cause, or explicable reason, not even an alarm of fire having been given, will swallow ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... which, as it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention, therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them is hidden from us, as ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... moonlight had now become weird. From the trees and bushes crept legions of tall, gaunt shadows, and whilst some of these were explicable, there were others that certainly had no apparent counterparts in any of the natural objects around them. Even Curtis, in spite of his scoffing, showed no inclination to examine them too closely; but kept his face resolutely turned to the more cheery light ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... all swept into the Darwinian net. "Nothing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight; yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together?" These phenomena are all explicable if ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... (received on July 9th), in which he said: "To judge by the French newspapers, you are as popular in France as Pitt at the height of the great war." A note from the Memoir renders this state of feeling explicable: [Footnote: A very different current in French opinion from that of the newspapers found outlet in this letter ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... which they are composed are in many cases not retained in the colloquial tongue, in which they must once have been included, and are in some instances lost from the language altogether, so much so as to be only partially explicable even by scholars. The argument applies likewise, in their degree, to camps, barrows, and other ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... darkness like a shapeless black shadow, stretched along the horizon to the west and north, pierced only by the long beam of the searchlight on Golden Hill, sweeping slowly to and fro at intervals. Watching this, for want of something better to do, we presently noticed that, for some reason not explicable to us, the beam never travelled farther south than a certain point, where it invariably paused for a few seconds, and then slowly swept round toward the ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people whose incomes exceeded L5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the rich class ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... photograph was explicable by several surmises: zu Pfeiffer might have met Lucille at Washington, Paris, or Berlin: she might have given him the photograph or he might have bought it, or even stolen it. But—the signature "a toi, Lucille"! There lay the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... the belief that many other phaenomena are consequences of the affections of other beings, more or less like itself. And having thus good evidence for believing that many of the most interesting occurrences about it are explicable on the hypothesis that they are the work of intelligences like itself—having discovered a vera causa for many phaenomena—why should the child limit the application of so fruitful an hypothesis? The ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders, the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the faubourgs that were at once ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... Obscurity of the question. Flechsig's theory.—Physiological conditions: are they cause, effect, or accompaniment? Chief factor: change in cerebral and local circulation.—Attempts at experimentation.—The oddities of inventors brought under two heads: the explicable and inexplicable. They are helpers of inspiration.—Is there any analogy between physical and psychic creation? A philosophical hypothesis on the subject.—Limitation of the question. Impossibility of ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... charge against him? Perhaps such evidence would be adduced to her that she could have no choice but to judge and condemn him. Gilbert Grail had thought him infamous; perhaps Annabel would hesitate as little. She would have remarked a strangeness in his manner to her, explicable now. Believing, how she must scorn him! How those beautiful eyes of hers would speak in one glance of cold contempt, if ever he passed beneath them! She might take the nobler part; she might hold it incredible till she had a confession from his very lips. But were women magnanimous? ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... started up, realizing that she was too late now to go on to Cheiron's and would only just have time to return for lunch with her aunts. She must go instead in the afternoon. So she walked briskly to the house, with a strange feeling of relief and joy, which she was quite unable to account for in any explicable way. ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... did James think the emotions were explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations which go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... with the greatest possible plainness and simplicity to the poorer and less favored classes. If there were things in Christianity that were inexplicable mysteries, I had no wish to meddle with them at all; if there was nothing but what was explicable, I wished to be able to speak in such a manner as to make the whole subject of religion plain to them. My belief was that there were not any inexplicable mysteries in Christianity; that though there were doctrines in Christianity which had been mysteries in earlier ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... non-conducting rocks, electricity and magnetism, had tempered the laws of nature, giving us only a moderately warm climate, for the theory of a central fire remained in my estimation the only one that was true and explicable. Were we then turning back to where the phenomena of central heat ruled in all their rigour and would reduce the most refractory rocks to the state of a molten liquid? I feared this, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the mystery of iniquity, the work of Antichrist among mankind. Under the influence of the historic method it assumed a different aspect, and the mystery became very explicable. Hobbes had struck the keynote in a passage of profound truth as well ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... together with striking professional anecdotes then gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with aunt Kimble's annual failure to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's irascibility concerning the odd trick which was rarely explicable to him, when it was not on his side, without a general visitation of tricks to see that they were formed on sound principles: the whole being accompanied by a strong steaming odour ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... suggested that they might be due to some form of parallel variation dependent on climatic influences; and I myself adduced other cases of coincident local modifications of colour, which did not appear to be explicable by any form of mimicry.[106] But we neither of us hit upon the simple explanation given by Dr. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable evidence of many persons, it would have had no living energy. How an hallucination could occur in the requisite strength to the requisite number of people is neither explained nor explicable, except upon the supposition that the Apostles were in a very different frame of mind at the time of Christ's Crucifixion from that which all the evidence we can get would seem to indicate. If Strauss ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... in the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount. Those "smiles to earth unknown," had then ceased for ever. The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his "long walks in the country." His wife never did this; she had not the physical strength to do it; and, if she had been the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... tree is the prey of such a desire, but he does not realize it, or he might discontinue his inefficacious leaps. The man tormented by his unworthy act in the past is quite aware of the futility of his longings. His condition is psychologically explicable, but to a rational being, in so far as rational, it is ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... alone, that believed in these stories. We can afford to smile at them now; but our English ancestors entertained superstitions of much the same character at the same period, and with less excuse, as the circumstances surrounding them were better known, and consequently more explicable by common sense than the real mysteries of the deep, untrodden forests of New England. The gravest divines not only believed stories similar to that of the double-headed serpent, and other tales of witchcraft, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... head. He believed implicitly that there could not be men on this planet. On the glacier planet every animal had been separately devised from the creatures of Earth. There were resemblances, explicable as the result of parallel evolution. By analogy, there could not be exactly identical mankind on another world because evolution there would be parallel but not the same. But if there were even a mental equal to men, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task—he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises as he may by ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... instantly discharged by a transference of the elementary particles of the opposite kind in opposite directions, but parallel to the current. Even the differences between common and voltaic electricity, when applied to effect chemical decomposition, which Dr. Wollaston has pointed out[A], seem explicable by the circumstances connected with the induction of electricity from these two sources (25.). But as I have reserved this branch of the inquiry, that I might follow out the investigations contained in the present paper, I refrain (though much ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... case there are rules analogous to those which distinguish between honourable and dishonourable war, but they are less clearly defined and less universally accepted. In criminal prosecutions a remarkable though very explicable distinction is drawn between the prosecutor and the defender. It is the etiquette of the profession that the former is bound to aim only at truth, neither straining any point against the prisoner nor keeping back any fact which ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... had recounted some famous feat of arms, or some romantic history of which the Colonel had been the hero, this impression would have been natural, or, at least, explicable. But she knew nothing of him except that he had been condemned as a spy by a council of war, and yet she dreamed of him the very night after ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... scrutinize and dissect the character of others is an idle and unprofitable task; and the most skilful anatomist will often be forced to withhold his hand when he unexpectedly meets with something he does not understand—some confirmation of the character of his patient which is not explicable on his theory of human nature. To become operators on our own shrinking spirits is something worse; for by probing the wounds of the soul, what can ensue but callousness or irritability. And it may be remarked, that those persons who have busied themselves most with inquiries into the causes, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and nerve-force will be generated in excess, which naturally leads to action of some kind. Not one of the above movements, so clearly expressive of affection, are of the least direct service to the animal. They are explicable, as far as I can see, solely from being in complete opposition or antithesis to the attitude and movements which, from intelligible causes, are assumed when a dog intends to fight, and which consequently are expressive of anger. I request the reader to look ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... in a moment; and with more joy than disappointment found that we were directly under the passage, in a square space without any opening. Not a door nor a window, nor any explicable purpose for this sort of closed vestibule. Why was there a staircase leading into a blind space? Why was there a strong padlocked ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... in the manipulation had not Gaertner expressly stated that he had during many years grown these two varieties together, and they did not spontaneously cross; and this, considering that the plants are monoecious and abound with pollen, and are well known generally to cross freely, seems explicable only on the belief that these two varieties are in some degree mutually infertile. The hybrid plants raised from the above five seed were intermediate in structure, extremely variable, and perfectly fertile.[226] No one, I believe, has hitherto ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... sort of Chymists seem to have duly consider'd how great Variety there is in the Textures and Consistences of Compound Bodie; sand [Errata: Bodies; and] how little the consistence and Duration of many of them seem to accommodate and be explicable by the propos'd Notion. And not to mention those almost incorruptible Substances obtainable by the Fire, which I have prov'd to be somewhat compounded, and which the Chymists will readily grant ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... its chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too, and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the dairyman ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... them from the consequences of their own mistakes. It is only by giving Government credit, as I have been doing throughout, for the complete sincerity of their expressions and conduct, that their behaviour is explicable. Assume that their policy was a war policy, and it is quite intelligible. Whenever difficulties arise, their resolution is instantly to have recourse to violence. Every word they utter, every dispatch they write, seems always ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... fine English, the beauty of Helen Keller's style would, in part, be explicable at once. But the extracts from Miss Sullivan's letters and from her reports, although they are clear and accurate, have not the beauty which distinguishes Miss Keller's English. Her service as a teacher of English ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Luis de Leon, they combined to reveal him in his least attractive posture. His comparative promptitude in accepting Mancio as patrono, his unwillingness to abide by his choice, his sudden hostility to Mancio, his final acceptance of Mancio, are all explicable variations. Nevertheless they showed a disregard for superficial consistency which might easily be misinterpreted as caprice. The bias of the court had been veering away from the prisoner for some time. His series of actions with respect ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... in thirty-one degrees: two minutes, south and one hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west," he said curtly, and turned away. There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment before they walked off, made a striking group. Their sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had won a battle in which it ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Calvinism all those affected were inflamed with a positive hatred of the beautiful in art. If this had been confined to the destruction of images to which idolatrous worship was offered, it would be explicable and justifiable, but it extended to the most innocuous objects. Delicate tracery such as adorns the west front of the church of Vendome, a lace-work of beautiful sculpture representing trailing roses and vines, birds and reptiles, was ruthlessly hacked. Churches, cathedrals, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... jest then intelligible enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few than ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... or more explicable reason. It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character needed ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shall we understand the errors and confusions of the communicators? How can an infinite power seem at times so limited, so finite, when the conditions remain unchanged? On the other hand, the lapses of memory and confusions are quite explicable on the spiritualistic theory; we cannot reasonably think that a change so great as death should not induce some disturbance of mind, at least temporarily, or should not greatly weaken certain groups of memories which, in the new surroundings, have ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Pierrette dared not complain of her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains she now felt in her head. The origin of her cousin's present anger was the non-revelation of Brigaut's arrival. With Breton obstinacy Pierrette was determined to keep silence,—a resolution that is perfectly explicable. It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he was in Provins. What joy to have seen him! That single glimpse was like the look an exile casts upon ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... practical order? It implies, in the first place, a constant reference to tradition. The system has grown up without any reference to abstract principles or symmetrical plan. The legal order supposes a traditional common law, as the ecclesiastical order a traditional creed, and the organisation is explicable only by historical causes. The system represents a series of compromises, not the elaboration of a theory. If the squire undertook by way of supererogation to justify his position he appealed to tradition and experience. He invoked the 'wisdom of our ancestors,' the system of 'checks and balances' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... be urged that Marco believed the legend of the reappearance of the Volga in Kurdistan, but yet, if the text be read with care and the character of the traveller be taken into account, this error is scarcely explicable in any other way, than that he ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... herds. At this time the rut was past, the bucks no longer sought the does, the fawns had not been born, and the yearlings had left their mothers; so that each animal usually went by itself. When chased they were very apt to take to the water. This instinct of taking to the water, by the way, is quite explicable as regards both deer and tapir, for it affords them refuge against their present day natural foes, but it is a little puzzling to see the jaguar readily climbing trees to escape dogs; for ages have passed since there were in its habitat any natural ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... obviously Segistan, to which Mechran appears to have been then joined, from the circumstance before related of the Polos having gone from China by sea to this kingdom. The strange application of Timochaim is probably corrupt, and may perhaps be explicable on the republication of the Trevigi edition of these travels; till then, we must rest satisfied with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... insane at one period of history and have been held up as models of sanity at another. The most immediately destructive consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism. It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... engagement and "surround the enemy rear." With his remaining ironclads Persano formed three divisions of three ships each and swung across the enemy's bows in line ahead. Just at the critical moment, and for no very explicable motive, he shifted his flag from the Re d'Italia in the center to the Affondatore, which was steaming alone on the starboard side of the line. The change was not noted by all his ships, and thus caused confusion of orders. The delay ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... listened. He heard nothing, and he stole half-way up the flight and again stood. Still all was silent. He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top—whence, turning his head a little, he could command the passage—when a sound arrested him. It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... any disguise was the one thing she suspected and could not tolerate. It may be questioned whether she ever deceived herself; but it must be said, that on the whole she flattered weakness—and excused, by enchanting eloquence, much which cannot always be justified merely on the ground that it is explicable. But to explain was something—all but everything at the time of her appearance in literature. Every novel she wrote made for charity—for a better acquaintance with our neighbour's woes and our own egoism. Such an attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely frank, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... he actually suggested taking Cyril with him to see the condemned man. He wished Cyril to see Daniel; he said gravely that he thought Cyril ought to see him. The proposal was monstrous, inexplicable—or explicable only by the assumption that his mind, while not unhinged, had temporarily lost its balance. Constance opposed an absolute negative, and Samuel being in every way enfeebled, she overcame. As for Cyril, he was divided between fear and curiosity. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Another case is still more difficult to understand: Dr. Herbert raised, from the seeds of a highly cultivated red cowslip, cowslips, oxlips of various kinds, and a primrose. (2/10. 'Transactions of the Horticultural Society' 4 page 19.) This case, if accurately recorded, which I much doubt, is explicable only on the improbable assumption that the red cowslip was not of pure parentage. With species and varieties of many kinds, when intercrossed, one is sometimes strongly prepotent over the other; and instances are known ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... seen varies with the relation to the body in certain ways that we regard as natural and explicable. When I am near it, the visual experience is not just what it is when I recede from it. But how can I know that I am near the desk or far from it? What do these expressions mean? Their full meaning will become clearer ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... narrow pipe the influence of the walls makes itself felt and produces various effects, in particular a kind of dispersion in space of the harmonics of the sound. This phenomenon, according to M. Brillouin, is perfectly explicable by a theory similar to the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... her. He had seen not much of her. Only on that Sunday afternoon had he and she reached a sort of intimacy—unspoken but real. He had liked her. He had even admired her. She was no ordinary being. And he had sympathized with her for Marguerite's quite explicable defection. He had often wished that those two, the charwoman and his beloved, could somehow have been brought together. The menaces of death had brought them together. Mrs. Lob was laid out in the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... probable cause why the sandstones lie undermost, and the red marl uppermost—can they not find one for themselves? I do not say that it is the cause, but it is at least a causa vera, one which would fully explain the fact, though it may be explicable in other ways. Think, then, or shall ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be resolved into normality once the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... theoretical inquiry into the simplest thinkable aspect of things as existing. "Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explicable the things as we know them?" The 'beginning' of things (for it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by him as something which was long ages before, and which had ceased to be; rather it ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... undemonstrative, of the theoretic ideas which give their social creed whatever life and consistency it may have. Such ideas are these: That the conditions of the social union are not a mystery, only to be touched by miracle, but the results of explicable causes, and susceptible of constant modification: that the thoughts of wise and patriotic men should be perpetually turned towards the improvement of these conditions in every direction: that contented acquiescence in the ordering that has come down to us from the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... people who had no conscious relation to God. Their authors seem to think it a most interesting thing that such lives should go wrong, and they base upon that fact the suggestion that life is essentially a tragic and rather disappointing matter. To me nothing seems more inevitable and more entirely explicable than that on such terms life should fail, and should fail alike for the married and the unmarried. What ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone can see and ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... gained by the investigations of the past quarter of a century, approximately correct solutions have been reached; and that, in any event, it is by no means imperative to regard the phenomena in question as inexplicable, or as explicable only on ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... from the Acts of Patrick is a negative argument. It is explicable perhaps by the supposed irregularity of Declan's preaching. Declan was certainly earlier than Mochuda and yet there is no reference to him in the Life of the latter saint. Ailbhe however is referred to in the Tripartite Life of Patrick and the cases of Ailbhe ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... mother of Jesus, is also placed in company with the Galilean women; elsewhere (Gospel, chap. ii. 35), Luke predicts that a sword of grief will pierce her soul. But this renders his omission of her at the cross the less explicable.] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... analyzed. As a result of fifty-five experiments, twenty showed no alteration of oxygen consumption as the result of cooling, nine gave a lessened consumption, while the remaining twenty-six showed an increased using up of oxygen. This diversity of result is explicable on the basis of observations made by Prof. Zuntz, who was himself experimented upon, as to his subjective heat sensations during the experiments. He found that after the first impression due to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... necessary, at this late day, if you would have a chord "bite," to put a trace of acid in its sweetness. With this clue in mind, his unusual procedures become more explicable without ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... all that was of interest concerning these twain in their relation to her. Their influence upon her life is explicable alone by the nature of her longings. Time was when both represented for her all that was most potent in earthly success. They were the personal representatives of a state most blessed to attain—the titled ambassadors of comfort and peace, aglow with their credentials. It is but natural that when ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Nevertheless I am pleased to attribute little to conditions, and I wish I had done what you suggest—started on the fundamental principle of variation being an innate principle, and afterwards made a few remarks showing that hereafter, perhaps, this principle would be explicable. Whenever my book on poultry, pigeons, ducks, and rabbits is published, with all the measurements and weighings of bones, I think you will see that "use and disuse" at least have some effect. I do not believe in perfect reversion. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most important sentence in Who's Who?—namely, that in which Mr Hardy confesses that in 1868 ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... show definitely that the underestimation or overestimation of a given standard is determined, among other factors, by the intensity of the stimulation employed. The apparently anomalous results obtained in the early investigations are in part probably explicable ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... called; and attentive students may perceive that the thought of Emilia was already blending by subtle transitions with the new thought of Jane. One poem, almost terrible in its intensity of melancholy, is hardly explicable on the supposition that Shelley was quite happy in his home. ("The Serpent is shut out from Paradise.") These words must be taken as implying no reflection either upon Mary's love for him, or upon his own power to bear the slighter troubles of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... psuchen hautou] in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.—2. The fact that the same uncommon expression occurs not fewer than five times in the same discourse of Christ, and that so intentionally and emphatically, is explicable only when it was thereby intended to point to an important fundamental passage of the Old Testament.—3. In the discourses of our Lord, the expression is, no less than in the passage before us, used of His sacrificial ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... follow for himself the remaining phenomena of reversion, he will, I believe, find them all explicable on the theory that they are due to memory of past experiences fused, and modified— at times specifically and definitely—by changed conditions. There is, however, one apparently very important phenomenon which I do not at this moment see how to connect with memory, namely, the tendency ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... special reason for our divorce. None at least that is palpable, or explicable, to the world. As far as I know, Richard has no entanglements; and I have no lover. Neither have we lost our wits, nor become religious maniacs. There is no shadow of scandal connected with our separation beyond that which must inevitably arise ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis |
