"Sophistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigator," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and could not have told for my life whether it was today in America or ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Copyist, had principally confined the treasures of learning to Monasteries,[14-*] or to persons of rank and fortune. Yet, even with all the advantages of wealth, Libraries were extremely scarce and scanty; and principally consisted of books of devotion and superstition, legends, or the sophistical disquisitions of the schoolmen. An acquaintance with the Latin classics was a rare qualification, and the Greek language was almost unknown in Europe; but the Art of Printing had scarcely become general before it gave a new impulse to genius and a new spirit to inquiry. A singular concurrence ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... taught rather to love God and to be interested in his neighbour than to love respectability and to make a fortune. Indeed, to make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which requires a somewhat sophistical defence. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... theology, enthusiastically bent upon refuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do the conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice, or sophistical evasions ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Abbe Duplanty was persuading Pons to engage Mme. Cantinet as his nurse, Fraisier had sent for her. He had plied the beadle's wife with sophistical reasoning and subtlety. It was difficult to resist his corrupting influence. And as for Mme. Cantinet—a lean, sallow woman, with large teeth and thin lips—her intelligence, as so often happens with women of the people, had been blunted by a hard life, till she had come to look ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... hangs around the brightest portions of the mind: great at all times, greatest of all when, in a moment of difficulty, she is called upon to decide between the good and the evil, the just and the unjust, the generous and the mean, the ingenuous and the sophistical; and Marguerite, in one glance, saw all that Dumiger had failed to discover in the Count's appearance and manner,—the dark design, the selfish calculation; her simplicity of mind perceived indications of low, mean purposes, which he failed to discern. Thus it is ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... society, which is not either common-place or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... at large, that "every demonstration which has been produced for the necessity of a cause is fallacious and sophistical" (I. p. 111); it is affirmed, that "there is no absolute nor metaphysical necessity that every beginning of existence should be attended with such an object" [as a cause] (I. p. 227); and it is roundly asserted, that it is "easy for ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Necessity, strict Necessity: and though it may be called moral Necessity, in order to palliate and distinguish it from that which is natural; it operates on us, to all Intents and Purposes, equally the same; and the giving it a milder Name, looks like a sophistical Artifice. If Man's Nature be impaired by the Act of another, God, as a just and good Being, will either abate of the Rigour of his original Law, or replenish and restore our ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... while she also, at the same period, decreed the abolition of the gaming academies to which allusion was made in the preceding volume; and, finally, ascertaining that the edict against duelling issued by the late King had been evaded by certain sophistical observances, she published a declaration setting forth that all hostile meetings, however arranged, would not only entail the penalties already denounced against them, but henceforward be regarded as acts of assassination. This wholesome ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the overtaxed class. For example, take the householders in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... B.C. 423: an attack on Socrates, unfairly taken as an embodiment of the deleterious and unsettling "new learning," both in the form of Sophistical rhetoric and "meteorological" speculation. Worthy Strepsiades, eager to find a new way to pay the debts in which the extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him, seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory of Socrates, that he may learn to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of argumentation; and it was primarily to retaliate on such critics—who on their part no doubt exhibited some ill-founded convictions while attacking others—that he penned the APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For himself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Scripture, confirmed, as we are told it is, by the actual fact of the great disagreements among Christians, with a well-grounded mistrust of its soundness; we feel sure that there is something in it which is confused or sophistical. And considering the fact which appears to confirm it, I mean the actual differences between Christians and Christians, it soon appears by no means to bear out its supposed conclusion. For the differences between Christians and Christians by no means arise generally from ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... opportunity should present, exact of them satisfaction therefor. But it was knocking at a deaf man's door, as they did not regard these protests or even take any notice of them; on the contrary they have sought many subterfuges, circumstances, false pretences and sophistical arguments to give color to their doings, to throw a cloud upon our lawful title and valid rights, and to cheat us out of them. General Stuyvesant also has had many questions with them, growing out of this matter, but it remains ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... Charlotte," said he, giving it to Belcour: "take it to her when we are gone to Eustatia; and I conjure you, my dear friend, not to use any sophistical arguments to prevent her return to virtue; but should she incline that way, encourage her in the thought, and assist her to put her design ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... first," said he, "and give me a little assistance. Your sophistical exposition of the words of our princess is entirely thrown away. She said to me, 'At eleven o'clock I will expect you and the Baron von Trenck in my room.' That is certainly explicit—as it appears to me, and needs no explanation. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... reverence for him is still visible, and he takes every opportunity of contrasting his gigantic grandeur with the petty refinements of Euripides. With infinite cleverness and inexhaustible flow of wit, he has exposed the sophistical subtilty, the rhetorical and philosophical pretensions, the immoral and seductive effeminacy, and the excitations to undisguised sensuality of Euripides. As, however, modern critics have generally ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. He never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but elevated thoughts were always his chief consolation. Conversation about great writers and thinkers always seemed to ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... affairs; he saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for results. His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the mire. He was touched ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... or outside of it. After that he proceeds at once to enumerate the infim species under each of the two main heads. We shall presently imitate this procedure for reasons of expediency. For the whole phraseology of the subject is derived from Aristotle's treatise on Sophistical Refutations, and we must either keep to his method or break away from tradition altogether. Sufficient confusion has already arisen from retaining Aristotle's language ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... may seem to many persons mere casuistry, mere sophistical juggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing as relative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference which rests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of labor and trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very little labor ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... strongest situation, and he simply smiles when you make this opening for him. The voice says, 'Agreeable? Agreeable to burn forever in hell? Well, well, my friend—our ideas of pleasure differ.' This is sophistical twaddle. It is not the Christian that suffers from a fear of hell—it is the sinner, through his guilty conscience. Conscience, conscience; the only barrier between us and hell on earth! Christians are comforted by the thought of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... than Herodotus, in some respects, but entirely different in his style of composition, was the historian Thucydides, who was born in Athens about 471 B.C. In early life he studied in the rhetorical and sophistical schools of his native city; and he seems to have taken some part in the political agitations of the period. In his forty-seventh year he commanded an Athenian fleet that was sent to the relief of Amphip'olis, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... generous minds would use their best efforts to prove that men suspected of atheism had not denied God, because they would not have been understood had they attempted to say—"They have denied God perhaps, but that is no reason for killing them." Thence arose the sophistical apologies for certain doctrines, apologies made with a good intention, but which trouble the sincerity of history. These are the brands of servitude, which must disappear where liberty prevails. We are able now to call things ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to demonstrate, by the force of example and contrast, the sophistical absurdity of absolute theories, that, however naturally and harmoniously their parts may be made to correspond in thesis and system as a whole, according to which the same consequences, upon a given principle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and sophistical appeal to the national honour—a conceit surviving out of the dynastic past—that the populace of such a commonwealth can be stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous^, absonant^; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur [Lat.], it does not follow. deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum [Lat.], evasive; irrelevant &c 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c (absurd) 497. foolish &c (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tell you the very truth) my mind findeth not itself satisfied on this point. But ever methinketh that these things, with which you rather convince and conclude me than induce a credence and persuade me that every man is in prison already, are but sophistical fancies, and that except those that are commonly called prisoners, other men are not in any ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... passive party should know the felt wound; he remembered that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to hope the latter might be vouchsafed ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... grammarians, scholiasts, and commentators; and remains inexplicable to the present day. Such works Charpentier admirably compares to those subterraneous places, where the air is so thick and suffocating, that it extinguishes all torches. A most sophistical dilemma, on the subject of obscurity, was made by Thomas Anglus, or White, an English Catholic priest, the friend of Sir Kenelm Digby. This learned man frequently wandered in the mazes of metaphysical subtilties; and became perfectly unintelligible to his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... once launched into an elaborate exposition of his own affairs and a specious and equally elaborate defense and justification of himself and denunciation of his accusers. For nearly half an hour he reviewed step by step and detail by detail the charges against him—with plausible explanation and sophistical argument, but always with a singular prolixity and reiteration that spoke of incessant self-consciousness and self-abstraction. Of that dashing self-sufficiency which had dazzled his friends and awed his enemies there was no trace! ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... OF M. DANTES, last evening, in the Chamber of Deputies, was one of the most dangerous diatribes to which we ever listened—dangerous for the insidious and sophistical principles it advanced, and the almost fiend-like eloquence with which they were urged. Where are these things to stop? At what terrible catastrophe do these men aim? What crisis ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... and the like sophistical reasonings, that he endeavored to palliate his ingratitude and cruelty towards the hapless victim of his lawless desires; for hardened as he was in his libertinism, and unjust as were his sentiments with regard to women, he could not avoid feeling a pang of ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... the stratagems of goblins. I would not name to thee so salutary an advice as to dismiss thy innocent and unsuspicious prize, did not I know thee too obstinate and headstrong to listen to the voice of wisdom. Essay then thy base and low-minded temptations, thy corrupt and sophistical reasonings, to tarnish the unsullied purity of her mind, and it is well. If by such a wretch as thee she can be seduced from the obedience of virtue and the Gods, then let her fall. She were then a victim worthy of thee. But if thou essayest the means of tyranny and force, the attempt ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... propositions which are the starting point of the reason: for the assertion "Good is not good" is contrary to the assertion "Good is good" (Peri Herm. ii). Secondly, on the part of the process of reasoning; forasmuch as a sophistical syllogism is contrary to a dialectic or demonstrative syllogism. Wherefore it is clear that a false reason can corrupt the habit of a true opinion or even of science. Hence the Philosopher, as stated above, says that "deception is the corruption of science." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings are merely sophistical—that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are conscious that we are free; we know—we are as sure as we are of our existence—that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we choose. But this is less plain than it seems; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... not, my dear sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and it was no mere scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in Taxation No Tyranny, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves," and speaking indignantly ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... zeals, that do decry good works and rely only upon faith, take not away merit: for, depending upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more sophistical way do seem to challenge heaven. It was decreed by God that only those that lapped in the water like dogs, should have the honour to destroy the Midianites; yet could none of those justly challenge, or imagine he deserved, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... the proposition—again with a lengthened perturbation of the eyelids. "It would be possible to suggest a variety of objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind," he said at last, smilingly reflective. "Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the path." He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: "Is there ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... common sense of the Anglo-Saxon race did not almost universally denounce this hideous custom, I would bring Sextus Empiricus to show that the first laws ever enacted were to prevent men from devouring each other; and even this may be declared, by our sophistical emancipationists, to be one of the first violations of natural right. If the right of cannibalism is claimed, then will nature assert its wrong, and vindicate civilization. But if cannibalism is rejected by the emancipationists, then let ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... you can appeal—and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there—to wait and see his part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50} circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... devastating War is conclusive proof that even the worst of them recognizes that they all must finally stand before the moral court of the world's conscience and be judged. The same tendency is shown in the efforts of Germany—grotesquely and tragically sophistical as they are— to justify her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atrocities. At least she is aware that they ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... up of the judge was moderate in expression, but leaned against the prisoner on every point, and corrected the sophistical reasoning of his counsel very sensibly. Both reports said an expert was called for the prisoner, whose ingenuity made the court smile, but did not counterbalance the evidence. Helen sat cold as ice with the extracts in ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... up my mind, most illustrious prelate, to translate the Greek authors and by so doing to revive or, if you will, promote as far as I could theological studies—and God immortal, how miserably they have been corrupted by sophistical nonsensicalities!—I did not wish to give the impression that I was attempting forthwith to learn the potter's art on a winejar[37] (as the Greek adage goes) and rushing in with unwashen feet, as they say, on so vast an undertaking; so I decided to begin by testing ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... honourable and reliable are these straightforward statements of those American historians of the times, and the verdict of even a Boston jury, than the sophistical, elaborate, and reiterated efforts of Mr. Bancroft, in the 43rd and 44th chapters of his History, to implicate the soldiers as the provoking and guilty causes of the collision, and impugning the integrity of the counsel for the prosecution, the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... replied Mistress Nutter; "and proceeds to use all those sophistical arguments, which we have so often heard, to pervert her mind, and overthrow her principles. But Alizon is proof against them all. Religion and virtue support her, and make her more than a match for her opponent. Equally vain ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied that he could not find it in his heart to hate the French. If we do not oppose the natural movement of German unity, if we allow it to complete itself quietly by successive stages, it will not give supremacy to the barbarous and sophistical Germany, it will assure it to the Germany of intellect and culture. War, on the other hand, would establish, during a time impossible to calculate, the domination of the Germany of the ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... muster as much fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the Spectator on the Children in the Wood. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of Mr. Baxter under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... vigorous movement of the woman, the parade halted before the window by which Lorison stood. He saw that she was young, and, at the first glance, was deceived by a sophistical prettiness of her face, which waned before a more judicious scrutiny. Her look was bold and reckless, and upon her countenance, where yet the contours of youth survived, were the finger-marks of old age's credentialed ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... their estates double taxed to carry on a war they had no hand in, and you got nothing by. What account can you give of the multitudes you have forced to comply, against their consciences, with your new sophistical politics, who, like new converts in France, sin because they cannot starve? And now the tables are turned upon you; you must not be persecuted; it ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... can know what faith to give him. One man may make mistakes in names, and dates, and references, and yet have a real substance of truthfulness in him, a wish to enlighten himself and then you. Another may not be wrong in his facts, but have a declamatory or sophistical vein in him, much to be guarded against. A third may be both inaccurate and untruthful, caring not so much for anything as to write his book. And if the reader cares only to read it, sad work they make between them of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... mere ghosts and puppets. It is psychology of the first degree—elementary psychology—just as the colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... experience, to prove that we often act purely from a regard to the happiness of others, and are therefore social beings; and it is not necessary to be a consummate judge of the deceptions of language, to despise the sophistical trifler, who tells us, that, because we experience a gratification in our benevolent actions, we are therefore exclusively and uniformly selfish. A correct examination of facts will lead us to discover that quality which is common to all virtuous ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... of miracles in the world's history is also according to law,—parts, though minute parts, of a universal plan, and permitted for reasons worthy of the Creator. To both, or neither, is the same answer open. Your objection is, I think, a mere sophistical evasion of the difficulty. There is no difference whatever in the nature of the events, except that the variation from the 'established series of sequences' is infinitely greater in those portentous ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Bertrand, I am only an interested onlooker; and I am interested chiefly on Barrett's account. What I may feel it my duty to do if you three remain obdurate will be purely without reference to your rather sophistical definition of criminality. In any event, Blackwell is the man you will have to reckon with. As I say, I am concerned only so far as the outcome ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... for the greatest imagination, the most intense feeling, in portraits. But I can't do that kind of thing, and I must stick to my little sophistical fantasies, or my bald reports of nature. But Miss Saunders, if she were ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout. That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... act almost in the light of a crime; the books, however, had been merely folded up, and I therefore considered that there could be no possible harm in inspecting them, more especially as I had received no injunction to the contrary. Perhaps there was something unsound in this reasoning, something sophistical; but a child is sometimes as ready as a grown-up person in finding excuses for doing that which he is inclined to. But whether the action was right or wrong, and I am afraid it was not altogether right, I undid the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... what Professor Park has to say about it. There has been another review in "La Presse" equally favorable. All seem to see the truth about American slavery much plainer than people can who are in it. If American ministers and Christians could see through their sophistical spider-webs, with what wonder, pity, and contempt they would regard their own ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between right and wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate—which seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and showed especially scant respect for the 'Protestantism of the Protestant religion.' The father warned him grimly that he was not going to spend his hard-earned savings on ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have got another bale of French books from G. containing upwards of forty volumes. I have read about half. They are like the rest, clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral. The best of it is, they give one a thorough idea of France and Paris, and are the best substitute for French conversation ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... dedication. "I am no author; I read or I converse; I ask questions and I give answers." The writer throws himself into the historic situation with the vivid freshness of a contemporary, and if the criticism is sophistical, at least the picture is admirably dramatic. Seneca's position as the minister of Nero seemed exactly one of those cases which always excited Diderot's deepest interest—a case, we mean, in which the general rules of morality condemn, but ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... by special pleading to convince his companions in that frigid jury-box that they sojourned in a bower of roses, beset only by benignant zephyrs. He drew upon a fund of gaiety, wit, and anecdote, sophistical, but crowned with success. His cheerfulness communicated itself irresistibly. Each one hastened to contribute his own quota toward the general optimism. Even the lady passenger ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... venture upon, except as professed exercises of ingenuity, and which have been since in part retracted. But a wrong bias was thus given, and the author's theory was thus rendered warped, disjointed, and sophistical from the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... things are the work of God, so valour is made by Him and placed in the heart of stout champions, and freedom therewithal to use it as they will, for good or evil."—Fstbrra Saga (1852), p. 12: one of the sophistical additions to the story: see ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... criticism of the demonstrations is introduced later in close connexion with Bacon's new method; they are the rival modes of procedure, to which his own is definitely opposed. The philosophies which are "redargued" are divided into three classes, the sophistical, of which the best example is Aristotle, who, according to Bacon, forces nature into his abstract schemata and thinks to explain by definitions; the empirical, which from few and limited experiments leaps at once to general conclusions; and the superstitious, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... in the interest of well understood capitalistic interests. The extremes of yellow journalism and of avowedly capitalistic journalism, meet in a preference for salacious or merely shocking news, and in a predilection for blatant, sophistical, or merely nugatory and time-serving editorial expressions. Between the two really allied types of newspapers are a few which exercise a decent censorship over questionable news, and habitually indulge in the luxury of sincere editorial opinion. There are some ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... notions vaguely to their pupils, simply because they are ashamed to make that answer which every sensible person must frequently make to a child's inquiries, "I don't know."[12] Surely it is much better to say at once, "I cannot explain this to you," than to attempt an imperfect or sophistical reply. Fortunately for us, children, if they are not forced to attend to studies for which they have no taste, will not trouble us much with moral and metaphysical questions; their attention will be fully employed upon external ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates half a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic; some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; none suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and has never been put into practice by any State before or since. ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... sophistical argument He says when he is coming, and that's all I want to know here's a letter, I see, from that silly Mrs. Barker—her husband has quite given up drink, and earns good wages, sad the eldest boy has ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... an impression could be a voluntary state, or a volition, properly so called, we should not be responsible for it, because it is produced by the omnipotence of God. This, we doubt not, is in perfect accordance with the universal consciousness and voice of mankind, and cannot be resisted by the sophistical evasions of particular men, how great soever may be their genius, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... him the nature of the process to which he is being subjected. The two strangers are not serious; there are jests at the mysteries which precede the enthronement, and he is being initiated into the mysteries of the sophistical ritual. This is all a sort of horse-play, which is now ended. The exhortation to virtue will follow, and Socrates himself (if the wise men will not laugh at him) is desirous of showing the way in which such an exhortation ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... they believe they are earnestly and most successfully doing the work of God. Your leading abolitionists are as much affected by satanophany as your leading confederates, nor are they one whit more philosophical or less sophistical. The one loses the race, the other the individual, and neither has learned to apply practically that fundamental truth that there is never the general without the particular, nor the particular without the general, the race without individuals, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... should never dispute nor make questions; for that is," she saith, "that the fiend most seeketh of us for to fall in questions with him. He trusteth so highly in the great subtlety of his malice, that he should overcome us with his sophistical reasons. Therefore a soul should never make questions, nor answer to the questions of the fiend, but rather turn her to devout prayer, and commend her to our Lord that she consent not to his subtle demands; for by virtue of devout prayer, and steadfast ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... references to poesia, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... formally stated by any writer but Samuel Johnson; and therefore with all respect, nay, veneration, for his memory, we shall now shortly examine his statement, which, though, as we think, altogether unsatisfactory and sophistical, is yet a splendid specimen of false reasoning, and therefore worthy of being exposed and overthrown. Dr Johnson was not often utterly wrong in his mature and considerate judgments respecting any subject of paramount importance ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... means, is evident from the care and expense bestowed upon our poet's education. Under the tutorship of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, he had studied both natural philosophy and rhetoric in its sophistical form. In gymnastic exercises he exhibited a successful prowess, being twice victorious in the Eleusinian and Thesean games. Of his skill in painting, some specimens ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... white, your average voter seems to imagine that neither is ever even tempered: that his party is purest white, and the opposition party impurest black. That the other side reverses this colouring does not trouble him: it is merely due to the aforesaid sophistical faculty of proving black white. I once knew a man—no average voter he—who owned two comic papers, the one Radical, the other Conservative. How he must have chuckled as he planned the cartoons and settled ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... then circulated as if it were the coin it purported to be. Mieris, Beschryving der Munstn, 1726, explains the saga of Dido's ox-skin by means of this leather money. Certain it is, however, that the surprise with which the sophistical dialogue, Eryxias, mentions the matter, is a proof how foreign it was to the Greeks. Concerning the Roman plated denarii which were stamped with the silver coins, but which were also accepted by the state treasury, see Mommsen, R. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Northern war done for the greatest warriors but destroy the flower of their armies and the prestige of their name? Our maps, in placing the North at the top, and the South at the bottom of the sheet, impress us, by what may seem a sophistical analogy, with the imagination that Huns or Moguls, Kalmucks or Cossacks, have been a superincumbent mass, descending by a sort of gravitation upon the fair territories which lie below them. Yet this is substantially true;—though ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... himself the task of justifying innovation, and securing its reception with a hesitating public. Hence his criticism at this period was, as he himself has styled it, "polemical" and "aggressive." It was, however, neither violent nor sophistical. On the contrary, it was distinguished by the candor and the suavity of its tone. Goethe, who watched from afar a movement which, directly or indirectly, owed much to German inspiration, was particularly struck with this trait. "Our scholars," he remarked to Eckermann, "think ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... aristocratic reformer, who voted for the spoliation of the church property of France, on the ground, which that leveling sentimentalist Rousseau had advanced, that the church property belonged to the nation. But this plea, in both cases, was sophistical. It was, doubtless, a great evil that the property of the State had fallen into the hands of wealthy proprietors, as it was an evil that half the landed property of France was in possession of the clergy. But, in both cases, this property had been enjoyed uninterruptedly for centuries by the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... joined a patience of investigation, an independent strength of judgment, a clearness of rational vision, that fairly met him and obliged him to be the best man he could in the business. He could not get her into a sophistical maze; she found her way through immediately; he could not puzzle her, for what she did not understand one day she had studied out by the next. It is possible that Mr. Carlisle would not have fallen in love with this ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... render her at moments more prudent than the Servite Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had; more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the whole ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... vibrations of orange, yellow and similar colors. These are the colors of intellect, you will remember, and when the aura is charged and flooded with them it acts as a protection against the efforts of others to convince one against his will, by sophistical arguments, plausible reasoning, fallacious illustrations, etc. It gives to one a sort of mental illumination, quickening the perceptive faculties, and brightening up the reasoning and judging powers, and finally, giving a sharp edge to the ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... Strange fragments and shadows of these old systems still remain; and according to Fitzjames it would still in strict law be a penal offence to publish Renan's 'Life of Christ.'[178] The attempt to explain the law as referring to the manner, not the matter, of the attack is, he thinks, sophistical and the law should be simply repealed. A parallel case is that of seditious libels; and there is a very curious history connected with the process by which we have got rid of the simple, old doctrine that all attacks upon our rulers, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... diverse, as they proceed from the diverse objects, to please and affect our several senses. [4477]"As the species of beauty are taken at our eyes, ears, or conceived in our inner soul," as Plato disputes at large in his Dialogue de pulchro, Phaedro, Hyppias, and after many sophistical errors confuted, concludes that beauty is a grace in all things, delighting the eyes, ears, and soul itself; so that, as Valesius infers hence, whatsoever pleaseth our ears, eyes, and soul, must needs be beautiful, fair, and delightsome ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... be born from the family of Ahaz without the Jewish state being preserved in its then existing condition, and without Ahaz continuing on the throne. The Babylonish captivity intervened, and yet Messiah was to be born. Isaiah would thus have made himself guilty of a false sophistical argumentation."—We answer: What they, at that time, feared, was the total destruction of state and people. This appears sufficiently from the circumstance that the prophet takes his son Shearjashub with him; and indeed the intentions ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read in eighteen-forty. They may ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... of the German Chancellor in the Reichstag, already quoted, is infinitely preferable to the disingenuous defenses of Germany's ardent but sophistical apologists. Fully recognizing the import of his words, von Bethmann-Hollweg, addressing the representatives of the German nation, put aside with admirable candor all these sophistical artifices and rested the defense of Germany ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... Or again, false sophistical reasoning presents a difficulty: for because men wish to prove paradoxes that they may be counted clever when they succeed, the reasoning that has been used becomes a difficulty: for the intellect is fettered; a man being unwilling to abide by the conclusion because it does not please his ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... and II. deal with generalities; books III. and IV. with the physical geography and natural history of Mexico and Peru; books V., VI. and VII. with the religious and political institutions of the aborigines. Apart from his sophistical defence of Spanish colonial policy, Acosta deserves high praise as an acute and diligent observer whose numerous new and valuable data are set forth in a vivid style. Among his other publications are De procuranda salute Indorum libri sex (Salamanca, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them. If, then, Tracts for the Million seem a necessity, they also seem an impossibility; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... appears to be reasonable and cold on the surface, but whose three secret compartments are filled. The first, with female uneasiness, which is always in a state of flutter; the next, with sly tricks which are colored in imitation of good faith, with those sophistical and formidable tricks of apparently devout women; and the last, with all those charming, improper acts, with that delightful deceit, exquisite perfidy, and all those wayward qualities, which drive ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and is intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves as a protection against sophistical fallacy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... considerably more than a third of the whole. This is the relative proportion of the importance of the Colonies at these two periods, and all reasoning concerning our mode of treating them must have this proportion as its basis, or it is a reasoning weak, rotten, and sophistical. ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... resided a monk who was very skilful in all matters of natural philosophy. On my return, I paid him a visit. He. pitied me very much, and advised me, with much warmth and kindness of expression, not to amuse myself any longer with such experiments as these, which were all false and sophistical; but that I should read the good books of the old philosophers, where I might not only find the true matter of the science of alchymy, but learn also the exact order of operations which ought to be followed. I very much approved of this wise advice; but before I acted upon it, I went ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Gustave Le Bon maintains, in his brilliant, but sophistical, work on "The Psychology of Peoples," that the "soul of a race" unalterably determines even its art. He states that a Hindu artist, in copying an European model several times, gradually eliminates the European ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... age of Plato. The natural divisions are five in number;—(1) Book I and the first half of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; the first book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result. To this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to the question—What is justice, stripped of appearances? The second ...
— The Republic • Plato
... notice that an orderly sequence of ideas adds beauty to the composition: (9) I mean it will be easy to find fault with what is written incorrectly. (10) Nevertheless, I warrant it is written in this fashion with an eye to rectitude, to make the reader wise and good, not more sophistical. For I would wish my writings not to seem but rather to be useful. I would have them stand the test of ages in their ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... or a new conclusion for the one we undertook to prove; and this is called the Fallacy of Confusion. Under this head, indeed, of Fallacies of Confusion, might strictly be brought almost any fallacy, though falling also under some other head: for, some of the links in an argument, especially if sophistical, are sure to be suppressed; and, it being left doubtful which is the proposition to be supplied, we can seldom tell with certainty under which class the fallacy absolutely comes. It is, however, convenient to reserve the name ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... He has all the old monachal contempt of woman. He is cerebrally chaste. Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de reellement obscenes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... on Christian Divinity digested from such approved Protestant Divines as Amesius and Wollebius. But this method, he tells us, had ceased to satisfy him. Often he had found the theologians quibbling and sophistical, more anxious to "evade adverse reasonings" and establish foregone conclusions than to arrive at the truth. "According to my judgment, therefore," he adds, "neither my creed nor my hope of salvation could be safely trusted to such guides; and yet it appeared highly requisite to possess ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... delicto or merely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pillory and the rest of the colored people into our national rogues' gallery, where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints and sinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot of fools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that Negroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that they do—altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to among other things is that America, because of the crimes of individual ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... pure, impartial, unchangeable justice. They who continue this traffic, and enrich themselves, by the labor of these deeply oppressed Africans, violate these plain principles of justice, and no cunning sophistical reasoning in the wisdom of this world can justify them, or silence the convictions ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... crowded; all those fantastical hopes; those panic terrors which have been brought to operate on the will of man; what have they done? Has any or the whole of them rendered him better, more enlightened to his duties, more faithful in their performance? Have those marvellous systems, or those sophistical inventions, by which they have been supported, carried conviction to his mind, reason into his conduct, virtue into his heart? Have they led him to the least acquaintance with the great Cause of Causes? Alas! it is a lamentable fact, that cannot be too often exposed, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Letters are sophistical, his statements grossly exaggerated, and his advice sometimes shameless, as, for instance, in recommending what is now but too well known as 'boycotting.' The end, however, was gained, and the Dean was treated with the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... institution in the rebel scheme. Why then take pains to produce a contrary impression, by resorting to such futile distinctions, such wretched quibbles, and such absurd logic? It seems to me nothing but a mania for verbal distinctions and sophistical special pleas can explain such a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... sophistical. Then, again, I am afraid I could not tell it to you without crying, because you seem rather a manly man, and some of it might revolt you, and you might sympathize right out, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... been invented with an application to Philothee. Everything is pousse in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits of expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the unheard-of (ruissilant d'inouisme); but back of the double-horned paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that period, of the mot propre, the vers libre, and the rime brise. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... your guard to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover—if lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... United States has power over the ballot in States, mention may be made of a case which, in 1866, came before Justice Strong, then a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, but since a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. For sophistical reasoning it is a curiosity in legal decisions. One point made by Judge Strong was, that congress may deprive a citizen of the opportunity to enjoy a right belonging to him as a citizen of a State even the right of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... as an offset, still there is an undeniably strong and unscrupulous faction there, composed of the leading minds of the South, acute, imperious, sophistical, used to political and social rule, and backed by a small but cunning minority here at the North, so vile and contemptible that, in comparison with its adherents, they, these slave oligarchs, are 'Hyperion to a satyr.' These, with the thousands both North and South, misled and befooled by ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and partly sophistical. They were solid, so far as they asserted that the exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country. They were solid, too, in asserting that no prohibition could prevent their ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... observed that the greater part of this remarkable speech consists of an elaborate endeavour on the part of the Mytilenaeans to justify themselves. The arguments employed were entirely sophistical, for the Lesbians had no real grievance—and the statement that they were in danger of losing their independence was a pure invention. But they spoke to a partial audience, and the Spartans had already prejudged ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... sings or a lute-player touches his lute before the people who have engaged him, Cydias, after having coughed, and lifted the ruffle from his wrist, stretched out his hand and opened his fingers, begins to retail his quintessential thoughts and his sophistical arguments.... He opens his mouth only to contradict. 'It seems to me,' he gracefully says, 'that the truth is exactly the contrary of what you say,' or 'I cannot agree with your opinion,' or even 'that used to be my prepossession, as ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... after all, why should we be annoyed instead of being thankful, when bright flowers spring up on a dunghill? Certainly, my father would not have felt any indignity. He was the least superstitious and also the least sophistical of men. If a thing was worthy in itself he would never call it common or ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Another sophistical school led by Ajita Kesakambali taught that there was no fruit or result of good or evil deeds; there is no other world, nor was this one real; nor had parents nor any former lives any efficacy with respect ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... ignorant of the bent of their desires. Wherefore, by my story I purpose at one and the same time to shew you how great is the folly of all such, and how much greater is the folly of those who, deeming themselves mightier than nature, think by sophistical arguments to bring that to pass which is beyond their power, and strive might and main to conform others to their own pattern, however little the nature of the latter may brook such treatment. Know then that there was in Pisa a judge, better endowed with mental than with physical ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Church is of the greatest moment have been brought to view by our theologians and explained; in reference to which we are not disposed here to recount under what sort of opinions, and how dangerous, they formerly lay covered in the writings of the monks, canonists, and sophistical theologians. [This may have to be ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... organically symbolised that they coalesce indistinguishably into one: the Arddanari, the Being half Male half Female, He whose left half is his wife. That is the true ideal: cut in two, and destroyed, by the dismal inhuman monotheism of later sophistical speculation. ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... love than"—sinking his head and losing himself in tears.' His sorrow was speedily changed to anger. Pope, no doubt in admiration of his friend's genius, had privately printed 1,500 copies of his Patriot King, one of Bolingbroke's ablest but most sophistical works. The philosopher had only allowed a few copies to be printed for his friends, and the discovery of Pope's conduct roused his indignation. In 1749 he put a corrected copy of the work into Mallet's hands for publication with an advertisement in which Pope is treated with contempt. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Rose, 'must not begin his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... order to conceal the procedure as far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek words. ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... They systematised some hasty partial observations, melted them in their alembics, and from them deduced laws to regulate the entire world. They strove to subject life, multiple and many-sided, to the unity of the mind, that is, to their mind. The time-serving trickeries of a sophistical profession facilitated this imperialism of the reason; they knew how to handle ideas, twisting, stretching, and tying them together like strips of candy; it would have been child's play for them to make a camel pass through the eye of a needle. They could also prove that black was white, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... and expansive force of Hadrian's century lay concealed in the despised Christian sect. Art was expiring in a sunset blaze of gorgeous imitation, tasteless grandeur, technical elaboration. Philosophy had become sophistical or mystic; its real life survived only in the phrase 'entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren' of the Stoics. Literature was repetitive and scholastic. Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Juvenal indeed were living; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... avoidance of prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger |
