"Baseless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... development of the world is a great fact; the theory of atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... me better, nothing would afford my country greater pleasure and satisfaction, than to see this marriage consummated. It would nail that baseless lie which has ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of the plains from one ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front, and the increased activity of the German airmen, created some natural depression, which might have been more pronounced had not Mr. PEMBERTON-BILLING seized the occasion to reiterate his charges of "Murder" already condemned as baseless by two judicial tribunals. The House will do anything in reason, but it refuses to accompany Mr. BILLING in his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... person on whom the whole nation depends—is placed in the path of parliament. Therefore the contention that a constitutional monarchy will be attained if a person other than the President be made a monarch is false and baseless. ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... German. "The home is sacred." The speaker's tone was so malevolent that Hamilton was impressed, in spite of himself. And then, suddenly, a suspicion upreared itself in his brain—a suspicion so monstrous, so absurd, so baseless, so extravagantly impossible, that he would have laughed aloud, but for the sincerity of the feeling manifested in the faces of the men before him. His eyes roved from Schmidt to the faded woman who was the man's wife. He saw her shrinking behind the ample bulk of ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Zoo's dietary," says Mr. POCOCK, "were effected without difficulty." The rumour that the hippopotamus demanded a pailful of jam with its mangel-wurzels, in the belief that they were some kind of homoeopathic pill, appears to have been baseless. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... corroborate the fact, many people insist that the flames burst out at once in different parts of the city; not allowing the wind to have any hand in it. So much for the plot. But the fabricators of plots in all countries build their conjectures on the "baseless fabric of a vision;" and it seems even a sort of poetical justice, that whilst this Minister is crushing at home plots of his own conjuring up, on the Continent, and in the north, he should, with as little foundation, be accused of wishing to set ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... distance appears between the two. Consequently, it is the appearance of distance that results in believing one thing about what one thinks and perceives, and another thing about what one sees and hears. But this becomes baseless when one reflects that the spiritual is not in space as the natural is. Think of sun or moon, or of Rome or Constantinople: do you not think of them apart from distance (provided the thought is not joined to the experience gained by sight or hearing)? Why then ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of Lakshmi. She became incarnate again, many centuries afterwards, as the wife of Krishna, another incarnation of Vishnu [W. H. S.]. Reckoning by centuries is, of course, inapplicable to pure myth. The author believed in Bentley's baseless chronology. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... fears, creating what they dread; Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here, [5] There, the heart-witherings of unuttered fear, And that sad death, whence most affection bleeds, Which sickness, only of the soul, precedes. Thy baseless wealth dissolves in air away, Like mists that melt before the morning ray: No more on crowded mart or busy street Friends, meeting friends, with cheerful hurry greet; Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants bend Their altered looks, and evil days portend, ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... that bright summer afternoon, as the procession of clergy passed out and the organ pealed forth its melodious strains, there he stood in the church, where his father had stood before him, chafing against his lot, and conscious, who shall say how bitterly conscious, that like the baseless fabric of a dream the poems of the priest of St John would vanish, and he, Thomas Chatterton, the true poet, stand exposed as an unskilful forger. Sixteen summers had barely passed over his head, and yet in moments like these he looked as if the storms of twice sixteen years had left their ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... Emmanuel's sense of personal dignity preserved him from bending to the rod of imperial displeasure. Cavour was ready even to forestall the cry for precautionary measures; the air was full of wild rumours, and he thought that Victor Emmanuel's days and his own were threatened, a baseless suspicion, for the most reckless conspirators in those times accounted regicide madness in a free country. But he believed it, and for this reason, as well as from his entirely sincere abhorrence of political crime, he was quite in ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... maternal tenderness of Rome, and the filial obedience of Constantinople. In the synod of Florence, the Greeks and Latins had embraced, and subscribed, and promised; but these signs of friendship were perfidious or fruitless; [5] and the baseless fabric of the union vanished like a dream. [6] The emperor and his prelates returned home in the Venetian galleys; but as they touched at the Morea and the Isles of Corfu and Lesbos, the subjects of the Latins complained that the pretended union would be an instrument ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... and their influence when discovered to be baseless, the power of supernatural Christianity will doubtless pass away, but the effect of the revolution must not be exaggerated, although it cannot here be fully discussed. If the pictures which have filled for so long the horizon of the Future ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... Georgina eight and Helen three! Nothing could better illustrate the clash between enthusiasm and despair that fills a Chestertonian while reading any of his literary biographies. For so much is built on this theory which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... ordinary measure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance, for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we had too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation" as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly by our fondness for making our father—I can at any rate testify for the urgency ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... noted again and again: mere size has often little to do with a man's physical prowess. The list of anecdotes wherein the little fellow "puts it all over" the big bully is exceptionally long. Nor are more than a bare majority of the anecdotes baseless. In our own lumber woods a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound man with no other weapon than his two hands once nearly killed a two-hundred-pound blacksmith for pushing him off a bench. This phenomenon arises from the fact that the little man seems capable often of releasing at will a greater ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... our hearts were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer, on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper: with a special stipulation that they were "not to be fetched till twelve." This wandering of the antelope's fancy, led to the surprising arrival ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... mankind.[184] It was once commonly stated, as by Morgan and by Maine, that this abhorrence was the result of experience; the marriages of closely related persons were found to be injurious to offspring and were therefore avoided. This theory, however, is baseless because the marriages of closely related persons are not injurious to the offspring. Consanguineous marriages, so closely as they can be investigated on a large scale,—that is to say, marriages between cousins,—as Huth was the first to show, develop no tendency to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... slanted beams, she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude; and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to the morose Rory ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... only in his heart, and that only in calm meditation. But in this separation from real life he is likely to lose sight of all the limits of human nature, and seeking pure form he may easily lose himself in arbitrary and baseless conceptions. Reason will abstract itself too much from experience, and the practical man will not be able to carry out, in the crush of real life, what the contemplative mind has discovered on the peaceful path of thought. Thus, what makes a dreamy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... by irritation and envy—a vice which so frequently stains the human soul. In one of these notices, which appeared, by the way, in a very filthy little newspaper, a certain scamp, guided by wretched gossip and baseless rumours about my chats in our prison, called me a "zealot and liar." Enraged by the insolence of the miserable scribbler, my friends wanted to prosecute him, but I persuaded them not to do it. Vice is ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Christians had filled no large space in the eye of the world. Until the days of Domitian we do not hear of a single noble or distinguished person who had joined their ranks. That the Pudens and Claudia of Rom. xvi. were the Pudens and Claudia of Martial's Epigrams seems to me to be a baseless dream. If the "foreign superstition" with which Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, was charged, and of which she was acquitted, was indeed, as has been suspected, the Christian religion, at any rate the name of Christianity was not alluded to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... He thought of his own daughter Lesley, placed in Ethel's position, and he felt that he could not let Ethel go unwarned. And yet—could he believe Oliver Trent to be such a scoundrel on the mere strength of this woman's story! It might be all a baseless slander, fabricated for the sake of obtaining money. And there was so little time ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to act. And there is of course a slow process going on in the world by which this moral restraint is becoming habitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinct is a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxieties which our reason in vain ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about to enter. He stopped at the door to tell John that he would take a stroll round the garden before he came in, as he had a headache, and went on through the walks which were sacred to Lucy, not thinking of her, but wondering bitterly whether anybody would stand by him, or whether an utterly baseless slander would outweigh all the five years of his life which he had spent among the people of Carlingford. Meanwhile John stood at the door and watched him, and of course thought it was very "queer." ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... dependencies. There is no "one rational order among a host of possible systems." There is no "true filiation of the sciences." The whole hypothesis is fundamentally false. Indeed, it needs but a glance at its origin to see at once how baseless it is. Why a series? What reason have we to suppose that the sciences admit of a linear arrangement? Where is our warrant for assuming that there is some succession in which they can be placed? There is no ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... phenomena—that is, to changes perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... founded and endowed for the perpetuation and propagation of the doctrines of our denomination, I had never entertained the faintest shadow of doubt as to the infallibility of our creed; but now all faith in it vanished like the baseless fabric of a dream. Here at the fountain head of wisdom, from which streams were supposed to flow for the healing of the nations, my faith in the beliefs of my ancestors fled, nevermore to return; here, where lived the great high priests of the sect, I had expected to find the whole air ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... regiments of half-size at the outset, with a full complement of officers. This measure, however agreeable it might have been to the horde of aspirants for commissions, was in itself calculated to destroy all self-respect in the soldiers, being based on the utterly baseless assumption that they required twice as many officers as whites, and was foredoomed to failure, because no esprit de corps can be created in a regiment which is from the first insignificant in respect to size. It is scarcely conceivable that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... already enjoy the bliss of the prophetic vision, until the bursting in of the reality? Ah, ye do! Now think it not over-officious in your cousin of low capacity to assure you that your hopes are but the baseless fabrics of vain minds. The day of examination will reveal to your astonished sensibilities that ye have dreamed the dream of fools. Those noble young men, who are the objects of your hatred, will soar above you triumphantly, and ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... of such a measure, which at best would end in answering a few questions of unprofitable curiosity; whilst, on the other hand, without a knowledge of the ground on which value depends, or without some approximation to it, Political Economy could not exist at all, except as a heap of baseless opinions. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... insisted that 'prayer for their deceased brethren was not only lawful and useful, but their bounden duty.'[122] All of them, however, without exception, contested with perfect sincerity that their doctrine on these points was not that of Rome, and that they entirely repudiated, as baseless and unscriptural, the superstructure which that Church has raised upon it. The nonjuring separation drew away from the National Church many who as a matter of private opinion had held the tenet without rebuke; ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... cabinet and rely upon the Governor of the state to appoint the latter to the Senate. The propriety of this course of action depended somewhat on the question of Sherman's physical condition. Rumor declared that he was suffering from mental decay, due to his age, but McKinley believed the rumor to be baseless, summoned him to the cabinet, and Hanna was subsequently appointed to the Senate. When Sherman took up the duties of his office it appeared that the rumor had been all too true, and a serious lapse of memory on his part in a diplomatic matter forced his immediate ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... no fact; it is rather the baseless fancy of incompetent observers, to some extent acquiesced in, or at least not contradicted, by the proud Castilian, who cares not at all about the opinions of other nationalities, and who never takes ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... the little arts of cunning; they treat life like a game of chess, in which success is everything. All that remains to them from antiquity, is something gigantic in their expressions and in their external magnificence; but this baseless grandeur is frequently accompanied by all that is vulgar in taste, and miserably negligent in domestic life. Is this, Corinne, the nation which you would be expected to prefer to every other? Is this the nation whose roaring applauses are so necessary to ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... purse. 'Sir,' said I, 'if, "exempt from public haunt," I could get something to do when this dross is gone. In London there are sermons in stones, certainly, but not "good in everything,"—an observation I should take the liberty of making to the Swan if he were not now, alas! "the baseless fabric of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lord Strangford, 'is treated at length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Muller's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest TANGIBLE form is shown to have been Iverio. Pictet's connection with Arya is quite baseless.' ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... civilization. It was our first wonder; and when presently we turned away from it I think it was our last. But this solitude and desolation add infinitely to its charm; just as the mystery and romance that enshroud the far-off monasteries in their desolate mountain retreats would fall away as "the baseless fabric of a vision" if they were brought into the crowded and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... interested in her than they had been in the Sphinx), and that, if she could have done so without hurting their feelings, she would have struck them dead. But my fears that their mental suggestions might obsess her were baseless. She did not speak when the golden billows parted to give us a first vision of the great Mystery of the Desert. I had led Monny by a roundabout way, and instead of seeing the Sphinx from the back, we came upon ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... cards has tumbled to pieces, or rather it is slowly dissolving, as Shakespeare says, "like the baseless fabric of a vision". The Biblical chronology, history, ethics, all are alike found to be defective and doubtful. Divine Revelation has become discredited; a Human Record takes its place. What has brought about this startling change? The answer is, Knowledge. Thought, research, criticism, have shown ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... fond of declaiming against the caprice and ingratitude of the people, and of telling us that under a democratic government neither men nor measures can remain for an hour unchanged. The witness alike of the present and of the past is an answer to baseless theories like these. The spirit which made democratic Athens year by year bestow her highest offices on the patrician Perikles and the reactionary Phokion, still lives in the democracies of Switzerland. The ministers ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... built up by his young imagination, are glorious at a distance, but when approached the colours fade? They are erected with no foundation, no roof; no walls, windows, doors, or furniture—in fact, they are, as Shakespeare says, "the baseless fabric ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... broad foundations the Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting the nature of ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all, has vanished; in very deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there; of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying, (were they of adamant,) only slower. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... received us courteously, and an assistant was called to show us the instruments. All observatories are much alike; therefore I will not describe this, except in its peculiarities. One of these was the presence of small, light, portable rooms, i.e., baseless boxes, which rolled over the instruments to protect them; two sides were of wood, and two sides of green silk curtains, which could, of course, be turned aside when the boxes, or little rooms, were rolled over the apparatus. Being covered in this way, the heavy shutters can be left open for weeks ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... feelings, by fitting to them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own views and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results, from which, if they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to shrink as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of those which ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was furious,—with myself, Sniatynski, and Clara. I am neither so vain, foolish, nor mean that every conquest of that kind should rejoice me; therefore felt annoyed at the thought that Clara might love me, and nourish some baseless hopes. I knew she had some kind of undefined feeling, which, given time and occasion, might develop into something more lasting; but I had no idea this vague feeling dared to wish or expect something. It suddenly struck me that the announcement of her departure was prompted by a desire ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... little, drunken no great amount of wine. Like a shaken carpet the plain rose and fell; a mirage lifted the coasts of distant islands, piling them above the horizon into castles and fortifications baseless as a dream. The sun dipped; up from the east rushed the night. The tunal grew a dark smudge, drawn by a wizard forefinger around De Guardiola, his men-at-arms, the silver bars and the gold crescents from Guiana. Out swung the stars, blazing, mighty, with black spaces ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... old legend, Childe Roland, is the incarnation of the Greek spirit, the young, light-hearted master of the modern world, at whose trumpet blast the dark towers of ignorance, superstition and deceit have vanished into thin air, as the baseless fabric of a dream. Not that the jeering phantoms have flown! They still beset, in varied form, the path of each generation; but the Achaian Childe Roland gave to man self-confidence, and taught him the lesson that nature's mysteries, to be solved, must be challenged. On a portal of one of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in midair; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails a system based on ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... topographers, who have founded upon it the tradition that two knights on their way to Fulham to be blessed by the Bishop of London quarrelled and fought at the Westbourne Bridge, and killed each other, and hence gave rise to the name. This story may be dismissed as entirely baseless; the real explanation is much less romantic. The word is probably connected with the Manor of Neyt, which was adjacent to Westminster, and as pronunciation rather than orthography was relied upon in early days, this seems much the most likely explanation. Lysons says: "Adjoining to Knightsbridge ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... which the popular doubter is certain to appeal, is an equally baseless ground of separation. For all the animals I have above named are rooted and fixed, while many true plants of lower grade are never rooted at all. The yeast plant, the Algae that swarm in our ponds, and the diatoms ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... realization of human unity in Christ, of the dividing barriers of colour and race and caste-all these are essential elements in the Christian vision. The man of the world may, and probably will, pronounce each and all of them to be chimerical, the baseless fabric of a dream. He will find no thoughtful man who is genuinely Christian ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... as well as a wrong method of philosophising. The one leads, it may be, but to a few modest results, of no very brilliant or original character, yet of sterling value and importance. The other may conduct to startling paradox, to applauded subtleties, to bold and novel speculations, but baseless, transient, treacherous. It evidently requires something more than intellectual keenness; it requires the virtue of forbearance, and a temperate spirit, to adhere to sober rectitude of thought, and eschew the temptations that a daring and self-willed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... figure—one that would be remarkable anywhere, towering above the rail and almost herculean in its massive proportions, coupled with the sad look in his noble face, and which reminded me somehow or other of one of the pictures of the old Cavaliers of the Stuart days, made me resent the more the baseless imputation ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... the older woodsman fear any direct results from the younger's very real, though baseless, anger. These men were bound together by something stronger than any part of themselves. Over them stood the Company, and to its commands all other things gave way. No matter how rebellious might be ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... why the crops were smaller in 1835 and 1836 than in former years, was, that the planters in the preceding seasons, either fearful that the negroes would not take off the crops after emancipation, and acting on their baseless predictions instead of facts, or determined to make the results of emancipation appear as disastrous as possible, neglected to put in the usual amount of cane, and to clean the coffee fields. As they refused to sow, of course they ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... never get more than fifty roubles, is just as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and Malthus getting more than a station-master. No, quite the contrary; I see that society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these people, which is utterly baseless, and I fancy there's envy at ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... humble one of tracing upon gritting glass, with a grating pencil, hard outlines of coarse sketches squeezed tight against the window-pane. After the manner in which I used to draw, I have since sought to write; for such a picture-frame then as mine, the airy, baseless fabric of an Italian revel is no fitting subject, and had the Roman Carnival for 1860 been even as other carnivals are, I should have left it unrecorded. It has been my lot, however, to witness such a carnival as has not been seen at Rome before, and is not likely to be ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... of the baseless attacks on myself and the colleagues of my Embassy in the columns of the Providence Journal impels me to ask whether your Excellency cannot see your way to make it clear that these attacks are ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... the assurance that if any attempt at coercion should be made by the Republican National Administration, they would themselves meet it with force, and that, if war should come, it would be in the free States and not in the slave States. The South, in 1865, had apparently forgotten these baseless assurances; they had forgotten that, in the hour of conflict, the Democrats who did not become loyal, at once became silent, and that the few—scattering exceptions to a general rule—who were demonstrative and loud in their sympathy ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... weave fresh wreaths of such flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world's flowers being withered, would be grieved by those sorrowful jewels; and to what purpose? Why should it be? They were but a sign of broken joys and baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle dust. Let them be. He would restore ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... article is intended to convey is that in those industries which are controlled by Jews no such attempts have been made to better the lot of the workers employed in them as have been made in those industries which are controlled by non-Jews. This charge, likewise, is wholly baseless, as anybody who desires to know the truth can readily ascertain. It was my good fortune and privilege, as one of the representatives of the public appointed by President Wilson, to serve as a member of the First Industrial Conference convoked ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... also a pregnant example of the contrast between the scientific and the emotional methods of regarding nature; and it admirably illustrates the differences between well-grounded, suggestive, hypotheses, and baseless speculations. ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's strange behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded. Then it was that ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vastly strengthened the grasp of conservation upon the minds and consciences of our people. Efforts to obscure or belittle the issue have only served to make it larger and clearer in the public estimation. The conservation movement cannot be checked by the baseless charge that it will prevent development, or that every man who tells the plain truth is either a muck-raker or a demagogue. It has taken firm hold on our national moral sense, and when an issue does that it ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... did not waste all his time chuckling over the baseless rejoicings of the people of the town. He made himself acquainted with some of the white slaves, men who had been brought from England, and finding some of them very much discontented with their lot, he ventured to tell them that he was ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... standard in mid Sweden rear, And check th' oppressor in his fell career: Say, that, impatient of unjust command, Indignant Denmark spurns him from her land! He builds a lofty tower; the basis stands Fix'd in the stormy ocean's moving sands: The turrets in unstable grandeur rise, The baseless fabric shoots into the skies, Soon shall the glories of the ponderous hall Come thundering down, to crush him ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... insinuation, baseless enough at the beginning, was now but too well justified. Colonel Cockshott was on his raw-boned brown hunter, and even my brief acquaintance with horses enabled me to see that Wild Rose no longer regarded him ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... card to Gordon Hallock, telling him you are there. He will be charmed to put himself and the Capitol at your disposal. I know that Jervis doesn't like him, but Jervis ought to get over his baseless prejudices against politicians. Who knows? I may be entering politics ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... selection is concerned—or the allegation that homologous structures occur in different divisions of organic nature—not only does it fall to the ground, but positively becomes itself converted into one of the strongest arguments in favour of the theory. As soon as the allegation is found to be baseless, the very fact that it cannot be brought to bear upon any one of all the millions of adaptive structures in organic nature becomes a fact of vast ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... good literary workmanship. It does not weary the reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthusiasm—not to say baseless encomium—for which too many female biographers have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling women.'... Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... darkened into dusk, through sheer fatigue she relaxed into certainty that both the hope and the fear were baseless: Elizabeth had not gone to David; she couldn't have done such an insane thing! David's mother began to be sorry she had suggested to Blair that his wife might be in Philadelphia. She began to wish she had stayed in Mercer, and not left them all to their cruel anxiety. "If she has done what ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... tatted, I make bold to declare was essayed, until things came to such a pass that every odd bit of dry goods lying around the house was, in the absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of my nightcaps,—an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later stages of abstract idealism. However, prejudice is stronger than truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not give an account of itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... not a word more. I will keep sacred and secret in my heart what you have told me, dear child. I will not judge you hardly. You are young—so young—as young as I was when I went forth to sorrow and misery. For you, even though I think your dream baseless, and that you are feeding hope on what may turn out to be the ashes of disappointment, I will not despair. I know your idol is worthy, and love for one who is pure and noble cannot work ill in the end. I will keep your secret; now, ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English language stands. It has the start of all other languages—the mechanical advantage—the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... neither did he admit his impotence to solve it; but he guessed a solution. Now, guessing in science is a very hazardous proceeding, and Lamarck's reputation has suffered woefully for the absurdities into which his baseless ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... demon within him would spring out and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, she ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... hill upsprung With pointed rocks against the light, The crag sharpshadowed overhung Each glaring creek and inlet bright. Far, far, one light blue ridge was seen, Looming like baseless fairyland; Eastward a slip of burning sand, Dark-rimmed with sea, and bare of green, Down in the dry salt-marshes stood That house dark latticed. Not a breath Swayed the sick vineyard underneath, Or moved the dusty southernwood. "Madonna," with ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... sang their merriest as day closed in; and as they turned upon their walk, and the good man saw through the vista of garden and orchard a bright light flitting across an upper window of his house, the mad hope flashed upon him for an instant (such baseless fancies will sometimes possess the calmest minds) that she had waked,—his Rachel,—and was there to meet him. The next moment the light and the hope were gone. His fingers gave such a convulsive grip upon the hand of his little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... beyond the grave is far more real and vivid among table-rapping Spiritualists than among conventional Christians. The notion that those who reject the Christian (or any other) scheme of salvation by atonement must reject also belief in personal immortality and in miracles is as baseless as the notion that if a man is an atheist he will steal ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the very foundations of Christian faith are abandoned by men who would fain be looked upon as the apostles of modern thought. May GOD preserve His people from abandoning the faith once for all delivered to the saints, for the baseless ephemeral fancies of the ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... tailor. By the influence of the Earl of Sandwich, he was entered in the public service. Beginning as a clerk in the Exchequer, he was soon transferred to the Naval Department, and rose to the high office of secretary to the Admiralty. His services were interrupted for a time, on the baseless suspicion that he was a Catholic, during the panic about the supposed "Popish Plot," but he was returned to his charge, and held it until the accession of William and Mary. Pepys was a man of very wide interests. He was a member of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... was finishing the very last one of the four or five which had stood there, Mistress Elliott appeared upon the scene, to find her precious dainties faded like the baseless fabric of a vision, leaving behind them only a few broken bits of pie crust. A series of "short, sharp shocks" (as described in "The Mikado") then rent the air, summoning Prudence Ann and Delcy, the maid, to the scene ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... for thought. Numberless acts of the past life rise up to the recollection, many a deed, and thought, and word, which must bring either pain or fear; principles undergo a test which the wrong and baseless cannot bear. Death looks terribly near. What can stand a man in good stead on an occasion like this? One thing, and one thing alone—sound Bible religion; a firm faith in Him who took our nature upon Him, and died for our sins, and rose again, that He might present us, rising with ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... And it was well for me that I did hear it; for nothing less could have cured my infatuation. I always said and thought, that I would never believe a word against you, unless I heard it from your own lips. All the hints and affirmations of others I treated as malignant, baseless slanders; your own self-accusations I believed to be overstrained; and all that seemed unaccountable in your position I trusted that you could account for ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... could by patience find An entrance to the caverns of his mind, I might reclaim him from this dark estate: In friendships I had been most fortunate— 575 Yet never saw I one whom I would call More willingly my friend; and this was all Accomplished not; such dreams of baseless good Oft come and go in crowds or solitude And leave no trace—but what I now designed 580 Made for long years impression on my mind. The following morning, urged by my affairs, I left bright Venice. After many years And many changes I returned; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... baseless and indefensible critical assertion. It is evidently to be ascribed to the fact that the metre of the ancient ballads is employed in both plays. But my tone is quite different from Hertz's; the language of my play has a different ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... evidential value. It is an old trick of the public press in the United States, and probably in Europe also, to start a sensation with a blazing front page story, and in the course of a few weeks follow it with a complete and sarcastic expose of the whole matter as a baseless fabrication, piling facts on facts to show that the first story was an ingenious piece of deception got up by the subject with the purpose of making capital out of the credulity of the public. There are no better detectives ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... him to be so treated! How gladly he would work for him all the rest of his days! And how welcome his grandfather would make him to his cottage! Lord Lossie would be the last to object. But he knew it was a baseless castle while he built it, for Mr Graham would assuredly provide for himself, if it were by breaking stones on the road and saying the Lord's Prayer. It all fell to pieces just as he lifted his hand to ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the battle of Fredericksburg filled him with triumphant joy, and he saw in fancy "Peace with her beautiful rainbow plucked from the bosom of the storm and spread from east to west, from north to south, over all the sunny plains and snowy heights." Unfortunately, his radiant fancy wrought in baseless visions and the fires of the storm had burned away that brilliant rainbow before Peace came, as a mourning dove with shadowy wings ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... "Miller's" picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the "Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken by two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at Cambridge. Equally baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, that he completed his academical studies at Paris—and equally futile the concomitant fiction that in France "he acquired much applause by his literary exercises." ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... us hope," she said, changing her tone to one of unconcerned detachment, "that we have been discussing baseless suppositions. Let us hope that her heart is quite untouched. And for both your sakes," she concluded, her head in the air, "let us hope that you and she will never ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... of the subject would have little or no effect upon those who had already reached middle-age, has—out of Paris—not been fulfilled. There are, indeed, one or two who have thought it their duty to denounce the theory as morally dangerous, as well as scientifically baseless; a recent instance of the sort we may have to consider further on. Others, like the youth at the river's bank, have been waiting in confident expectation of seeing the current run itself dry. On the other hand, a notable proportion of the more active-minded naturalists had ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Chopin drew up the programme of his funeral, and asked that on that occasion Mozart's Requiem should be performed.] Also the story about Chopin's wish to be buried beside Bellini is, according to the latter authority, a baseless invention. This is also the place to dispose of the question: What was done with Chopin's MSS.? The reader may know that the composer is said to have caused all his MSS. to be burnt. Now, this is not true. From Franchomme ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... rector, triumphantly. "Now, constable, there is no more to say, except that I beg you will not expose me and mine to painful trouble, and yourself to ridicule by going on with this baseless charge." ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... baseless charge took the steward all aback. He stiffened in his chair, a picture of consternation, and guilt appeared stamped on every feature; but he had the presence of mind to look to Mr. Nugent's eye for guidance and sufficient strength of character to accept this ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... so like that in which you actually have your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of resemblance, America prophesies another Altruria. I know that to some of you all that I have told of my country will seem a baseless fabric, with no more foundation, in fact, than More's fairy-tale of another land where men dealt kindly and justly by one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in the unity and equality of a family. But why should not ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... which to enter her presence. It was a pleasure to him to know that; though he knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet sovereignty of her glance was so much added pain, so much added folly, to the dream-like and baseless passion with which she had ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... flight, we would insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man's morals ... but no! We were persuaded that rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been seen dancing at Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z—— was a baseless fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled. And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so. 'I suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask, with a feint ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... Louisiana wrote to his sweetheart: "DEAR MAMIE,—I have shot an alligator. When I have shot another, I will send you a pair of slippers." The implication is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, a base and baseless calumny. New York itself does not present a higher average of female beauty than Chicago, and that is saying a great deal. But I must not enlarge on this fascinating topic. A Judgment of Paris is always a delicate business, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... terror. They had charged him with sinning on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... nature and in the Old Testament, profounder admiration of His character, or deeper reverence for His will, than among Christians who love and honour the Son even as they love and honour the Father? But how is this to be accounted for if they believe a lie? How has an idolatry, a baseless and profane hero-worship, had this remarkable moral power of producing such true and spiritual views of God, as all men must admit to be most worthy? and producing, too, we dare to add, such strong faith and affectionate reverence towards this God, as exist in no other human bosoms? Is it possible ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... of America; may the aristocracy of wealth founded upon the virtues, the toils, and the blood of her revolutionary armies soon vanish, and like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... this unknown sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of the 'Ancient Mariner.' The first is gross enough to fancy all the imagery of the mariner's visions delivered by the poet for actual facts of experience; which being impossible, the whole pulverizes, for that reader, into a baseless fairy tale. The second reader is wiser than that; he knows that the imagery is not baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium; really seen, but not seen as an external reality. The mariner had caught the pestilential fever, which carried off all his mates; he only ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... without any fear of serious attempt at refutation—that he was not, and that, in consequence, the whole scheme of sacerdotal religion as prevalent in the Roman and Oriental Christian Churches, and to a moderate extent in the Anglican Church, is entirely baseless, grounded, not on the institution of Jesus their reputed founder, but on an infantine superstition which the third century of Christianity took over from the Jewish and Pagan traditions which had preceded it. Hence the whole protracted controversy, which has ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... essayed, until things came to such a pass that every odd bit of dry good lying round the house was, in the absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of my nightcaps; an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later stages of abstract idealism. However, prejudice is stronger than truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not give an account of itself was ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Bow Indians, where they would massacre the women and children. They would listen to no remonstrances from the two Frenchmen, who perforce had also to travel back, either alone or with the Bow Indians, in the direction of their war camp, where the idea of a Shoshone attack was found to be baseless. Eventually, the two La Verendrye brothers were obliged to make their way to the Missouri River, and abandon any idea of finding a way to the Western Ocean ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... his power in Ireland to make himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and even to the Queen herself. He intrigued with Tyrone; he intrigued with James of Scotland; he plunged into a whirl of angry and baseless projects, which came to nothing the moment they were discussed. How empty and idle they were was shown by his return against orders to tell his own story at Nonsuch, and by thus placing himself alone and undeniably in the wrong, in the power of the hostile Council. ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... exclaimed Matilda, as carefully closing the door after her lover, she threw herself into his embrace. Alas, weak man! Like the baseless fabric of a dream, disappeared all the lately formed ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... prey of unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... that the reading public has just cause to complain, not (as I said on a former occasion) because the editor of such a book as Hoveden's Annals does not know everything necessary to elucidate his author, but because baseless conjectures are put forward as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... but was not so; for it fell in with prevailing opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they at its creation guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution. It was not intended by its framers to be the baseless fabric of a vision, which at the touch of the enchanter would vanish into thin air, but a substantial and mighty fabric, capable of resisting the slow decay of time and of defying the storms of ages. Indeed, well may the jealous patriots of that day have indulged fears that ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... kind of extra-logical Fallacy lying in the premises, consists in offering as evidence some assertion entirely baseless or nugatory, but expressed in such a way as to seem like a general truth capable of subsuming the proposition in dispute: it is generally known as petitio principii, or begging the question. The question may be begged in ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... is to sneer at such anticipations of a better future as baseless and visionary. The shrewd but narrow-eyed man of the world laughs at the suggestion that there car: be any stronger motive than selfishness, any higher morality than that of the broker's board. The man who relies for salvation from the consequences of an evil and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... equally by the biographer and the historian, is the fact that the life of the Emperor has been blameless from the moral standpoint. On two or three occasions early in the reign accounts were published of scandals at the Court. They may not have been wholly baseless, but none of them directly involved the Emperor, or even raised a doubt as to his respectability or reputation. Take from history—or from biography for that matter—the vices of those it treats of, and one-third, perhaps one-half, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the Count strove to encourage, although none knew better than he how baseless it was. Beatrix, with a mother's fondness, kept little Wilhelm's room as it had been when he left it, his toys in their places, and his bed prepared for him, allowing no one else to share the task she had allotted ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... who, in himself and his external circumstances, shall be equally and totally false: his fortune resting on baseless credit,— his patriotism assumed,—his domestic affections, his honor and honesty, all a sham. His own misery in the midst of it,—it making the whole universe, heaven and earth alike, all ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... conviction. And I would have set aside the verdict if the jury had found the defendant guilty. I do not know the lady who was so wantonly charged with this crime, and I do not know of any case in the annals of criminal jurisprudence which, from the evidence submitted in the case, had so baseless a foundation for so grave ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... The trees and buildings, the spectators and their crowded equipages, and finally, the earth itself, at first distinctly seen, gradually became obscured by the thickening mist, and growing whiter in their forms, and fainter in their outlines, soon faded away 'like the baseless fabric of a vision,' leaving us, to all appearance, stationary in the cloud that still continued to involve us in its watery folds. To heighten the interest and maintain the illusion of the scene, the shouts ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... and casuistry so exquisite as to contrive such assertions, and a faith so robust as to accept them, certainly leave nothing to be desired. But how baseless these contentions are is shown, first, by the simple history of the attitude of the Church toward this question; and, secondly, by the fact that comparative philology now reveals beyond a doubt that not only is Hebrew ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabrick of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant, faded, Leave not a rack behind."—Tempest, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... knew in his heart that all his logic was false, and his arguments baseless. Cease to love Florence Burton! He had not ceased to love her, nor is the heart of any man made so like a weathercock that it needs must turn itself hither and thither, as the wind directs, and be altogether beyond ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... the huge-heaved wave Beneath the keel turns more intensely blue; And vaster rolls the surge, that sweeps the shores 250 Of Cerne, and the green Hesperides, And long-renowned Atlantis,[172] whether sunk Now to the bottom of the "monstrous world;" Or was it but a shadow of the mind, Vapoury and baseless, like the distant clouds That seem the promise of an unknown land To the pale-eyed and wasted mariner, Cold on the rocking mast. The pilot plies, Now tossed upon Bayonna's mountain-surge, High to the north his way; when, lo! the cliffs ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... fishing, he should beware lest he be mistaken for the bait. Gaily I cast my fly over K. and now he has snapped off my head. That story about a second French Division was false. K. merely quotes the number of my question and adds, "The rumour is baseless." Well, "tant pis," as Guepratte would say with a shrug of his shoulders. Our first step won't have the weight behind it we had permitted ourselves for some hours to hope. Everywhere the first is the step that counts but nowhere more so ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... the hoary registers of time, Unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disdains the word, nor holds society With those who own it. 'Tis Fancy's child, and Folly is its father; Wrought of such stuff as dreams are, and as baseless As the fantastic visions ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... neither in the mountains of Samaria, nor in the temples of Jerusalem, or Rome, or London. 'The cloud-capt towers-the gorgeous palaces-the solemn temples-yea, the great globe itself, shall dissolve, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.' Or in language far more solemn and striking, because they are the unerring words of truth, 'The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... obtrudes— 'never to be again'. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has 'melted into air, into thin air', and, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision', only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from God the same— the very same. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... went, and Cicely, her school-books tucked away under her arm for the protection afforded by her mackintosh, the rain coming on faster and faster, walked the pavement, or waited on the doorstep, and now and again crossed the road in the baseless hope that she might not find the other side so wet, for a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, would serve at least to keep love generous and greathearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other lovers are hugely interested. They strike the nicest balance between pity and approval, when they see people aping the greatness of their own sentiments. It is an understood thing in the play, that while the young gentlefolk ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... circulation, it was said that a resolution had been passed that the works of the novelist should be taken from the library and publicly burned. This was caught up by the press and repeated everywhere throughout the country. To this day the baseless tradition lingers in Cooperstown itself, that this act was not only determined upon but actually done. The matter doubtless was discussed among the other sage proposals that were brought forward at this meeting; and it may ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... slavish, and superstitious manner, they have often been so egregiously misunderstood that many entire systems of interpretation—which were believed in for generations, and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion— are clearly proved to have been utterly baseless. Colossal usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built, like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... creed which demanded an anti-slavery restriction on every inch of soil owned by the United States. They viewed with abhorrence the legislation which had placed freedom and slavery on the same plane in the Territories of Utah and New Mexico. They believed that Texas had been paid for a baseless claim ten millions of dollars, one-half of which, as a sharp critic declared, was hush-money, the other half blood-money. They regarded the cruel law for the return of fugitive slaves as an abomination ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... daughters, of the club and social world of New York, old Poultney Masters, in the apoplectic rages into which the slightest thwart to his will plunged him. To Enderby's adroitness the financier (one of whose pet vanities was a profound and wholly baseless faith in himself as a connoisseur of art) owed it that he had not become a laughing-stock through his purchase of a pair of particularly flagrant Murillos, planted for his special behoof by a gang of clever Italian swindlers. Rumor had it that when Enderby had privately summed up his client's case ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... best part of the world's wealth, and love is spoken of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are baseless. The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect, an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude of science. The main forces which operate in it are sympathies, aspirations, ardors; ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Republic—as though the Old World had never heard of shoddy. But, indeed, they are in no better case than that unfortunate lady at Earlswood who esteems newspapers stitched with unravelled carpet and trimmed with orange peel, the extreme of human splendour. In truth, their pride is baseless, and this slang of theirs no sort of distinction whatever. Let me assure them that in our heavier way we in this island are just as busy defiling our common inheritance. We can send a team of linguists to America who will murder and misunderstand the language ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... leave the two worlds, or the two 'judgments,' that of existence and that of value, contrasted with each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience. A value-judgment which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision. Existence is itself a value, and an ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value. And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can dispense with ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... scene that might shape for him the whole course of his future life. He had been aware, once or twice before, of such a premonition, and, as with most men, half of him had rejected and half of him received the warning. To-day, however, there were reasons enough for thinking this no mere baseless superstition. With Maggie, with his father, with his sister, with his own life the decision had got to be taken, and it was with an abrupt determination that he would end, at all costs, the fears and uncertainties of these last weeks that he pushed back the hall-door ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... is not likely to be until the war is over. They have been taught that in a time of profound peace England, France, and Russia deliberately initiated a war of aggression to destroy the commercial power of Germany. The documents hereinafter analyzed will show how utterly baseless this fiction is. Even if the truth were known, no one can blame the German, who now rallies to his flag with such superhuman devotion, for whether the cause of his country is just or unjust, its prestige, and perhaps its very ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... his own individual life, but of life in general, had assumed an aspect so empty, vain, and colourless, that he felt he would not rise from his bed for anything existence had to offer. He recalled his usual frame of mind, in which these things seemed attractive, with a dull wonderment that so baseless a delusion should be so strong and so general. He wondered if it were possible that it should ever again ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... as far as the two separate expeditions are concerned, but he makes a number of reckless statements apparently on no better authority than the traditions current among the border people, sixty or seventy years after the event. These stand on the same foundation with the baseless tale that makes Isaac Shelby take part in the battle of Island Flats. The Tennessee historians treat Sevier as being the chief commander; but he was certainly under Campbell; the address they sent out to the Indians is ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... that rolls Between the shores of this and other worlds; Have gazed upon and scanned those worlds, or shades That wear the lineaments of such; have seen The damned in their own place, and marked the deep, Terrific retribution Error brings To such as are her votaries in life. And now I feel how baseless was my hope That Peace, the solitary boon I crave, Might spring from knowledge. Tis a fatal tree, Which ever hath borne bitter fruit, since first 'Twas set in Paradise. But I must seek The cottage of some honest mountaineer, Who may afford me nurture and repose, For ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... concatenation of events—that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... angels, which they are not,)—but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the combination, by a painter or a sculptor, of real flesh-and-blood creatures ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... fault too, which wrought like yeast on the passions of his wild sons. The long- sleeved garment which he gave to the lad probably meant to indicate his purpose to bestow on him the right of the first-born forfeited by Reuben, and so the violent rage which it excited was not altogether baseless. The whole miserable household strife teaches the rottenness of the polygamous relation on which it rested, and the folly of paternal favouritism. So it carries teaching especially needed then, but not out of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... errors. The law of Spirit may be more complex than that of electricity, because, as expressed in us, it is the law of conscious individuality; but it is none the less a purely natural law, and follows the universal rule, and therefore we may dismiss from our minds, as a baseless figment, the fear of any Divine power treasuring up anger against us on account of bygones, if we are sincerely seeking to do what is right now. The new causes which we put in motion now will produce their proper effect as surely as the old causes did; and thus by inaugurating ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... charge of murdering his wife, he solaced himself and perfected his art by the constant use of his beloved instrument, and this story must serve as the artist's excuse. Doubtless as many believers were found for this baseless tale as ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... did not like to admit that her pretensions to both were baseless. She was not willing to admit it now, even ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... till there was a dim sense of want; want stimulating power, and power stimulating want; and both so based upon each other that no one can say which is the true foundation, but rather that they must be both baseless and, as it were, meteoric in mid air. They have seen very little ahead of a present power or need, and have been then most moral, when most inclined to pierce a little into futurity, but also when most ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... finding Mrs. Legrand himself, or, failing that, would go to some other medium. There would be no solace for the fever that had now got into his blood, until experiment should justify his daring hope, or prove it baseless. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... sinking heart, what this meant, I saw in a moment that all the hopes I had raised on Simon Fleix's discovery were baseless. Mademoiselle had dropped the velvet bow, no doubt, but not from a window. It was still a clue, but one so slight and vague as to be virtually useless, proving only that she was in trouble and in need of help; perhaps that she had passed through this lane on her way from one ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... impossible task of driving water uphill. Therefore I claim, not only to have refuted Dr. Hort, whose theory is proved to be even more baseless than I ever imagined, but by excavating more deeply than he did, to have discovered the cause of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the Tribune, "and gloomy fantasy, that man's fate is pre-ordained—irrevocable—unchangeable, from the moment of his birth! Yet, were the dream not baseless, fain would I know which of yon stately lights is my natal star,—which images—which reflects—my career in life, and the memory I shall leave in death." As this thought crossed him, and his gaze was still fixed above, he saw, as if made suddenly more distinct than ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... himself and of his stewardship to God.—From our connextion here, there will probably be some interest in each other in that day; and I cannot bear the thought of your being able to say when the scheme of Universalism shall all vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision, and all the hopes built upon it will be like the spider's web and like the giving up of the ghost, that you should be able to say, I never warned you of this issue, nor ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou |
