"Reasoner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eloquent, and went out of the usual course of a chairman, by requesting, almost as a personal favour to himself, that the delegates would adopt the recommendation of the Hampden Club. Mr. Cobbett then rose, and, in a speech replete with every argument which this most clear and powerful reasoner could suggest, proposed the first resolution, that the meeting should adopt the recommendation of the Hampden Club, and agree to recommend the reformers to petition to the extent of householder suffrage only; urging, as ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... of their "first disobedience" and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it. The extent to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his teaching,—and he was a reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the premises of the faith he accepted,—man inherits the curse of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it added great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... very plain—to a deductive reasoner—from the girl's attitude toward him that she had fallen into relations of uncommon friendliness with this Maitland, young as Anisty believed their acquaintance to be. There had plainly been a flirtation—wherein lay the explanation of Maitland's forbearance: he had been fascinated ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... vulgar; his cadences false, his voice unharmonious, and his action ungraceful. Nobody heard him with patience; and the young fellows used to joke upon him, and repeat his inaccuracies. The late Duke of Argyle, though the weakest reasoner, was the most pleasing speaker I ever knew in my life. He charmed, he warmed, he forcibly ravished the audience; not by his matter certainly, but by his manner of delivering it. A most genteel figure, a graceful, noble air, an harmonious voice, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed my uncle Toby's deportment—what great attention he gave to every word—and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it—surveying it transversely as he ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Society says by that law: "If you kill one of us you die," just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly reasoner among the gallows-downing unfortunates would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded. Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind of aggression, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... peculiar way of thinking himself into his idealism has given to the term a richer and more spacious meaning, which combines excellently the Greek and the Hebrew elements. His great ideal is that of manhood. Be a man, he cries aloud, not an artist, not a reasoner, not any other kind or detail of humanity, but be a man. But then that means, Be a creature whose life swings far out beyond this world and its affairs—swings dangerously between heaven and hell. Eternity is in the heart of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... London days. His skepticism in fact became acute, and sought relief in public expression. As a compositor Franklin was engaged in setting up one of the many religious treatises then pouring out against the deists, and as the author's arguments seemed insufficient to the young reasoner, he wrote and printed a rejoinder. This is the pamphlet called "A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," which he inscribed to his friend Ralph, and whose printing he afterwards regretted as one of the errata of his life. It is a disquisition quite after the manner ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... consequently the prudence of his conduct, entirely depend. Not to mention, that, to a young beginner, the general observations and maxims occur not always on the proper occasions, nor can be immediately applied with due calmness and distinction. The truth is, an unexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely unexperienced; and when we assign that character to any one, we mean it only in a comparative sense, and suppose him possessed of experience, in a smaller ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... inferred the remedy immediately. By many measurements of triangles, one might find their area always equal to their height multiplied by half their base, and one might formulate an empirical law to that effect. But a reasoner saves himself all this trouble, by seeing that it is the essence (pro hac vice) of a triangle to be the half of a parallelogram whose area is the height into the entire base. To see this he must invent additional lines; ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... together, was, "some how or other," to work out something good: in short, there is nothing so convenient as this "some how or other" way of accommodating one's self to circumstances; it is the main-stay of a heedless actor, and tardy reasoner, like Dolph Heyliger; and he who can, in this loose, easy way, link foregone evil to anticipated good, possesses a secret of happiness almost ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... amiable. But do not the Abbe de la R—— and the Abbe M—— visit her?" "Certainly they do; not one of your friends has dropt her acquaintance." "If you had gained the Abbe M—— with a bribe of good coffee and cream perhaps you would have succeeded; for he is as deep a reasoner as Dun Scotus or St. Thomas; he arranges and methodizes his arguments in such a manner that they are almost irresistible. Or if by a fine edition of some old classic you had gained the Abbe de la R—— to speak against you, that would have been still better, as I always observed that when ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations, phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the most intense action, of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... special prominence, by reason of their unusual mental qualities. They differed widely from each other. One was a born actor and imitator, who loved human partnership in his daily affairs. The other was an original thinker and reasoner, with a genius for invention, and at all times impatient of training and restraint. The first was named Rajah, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... a very keen and cogent reasoner. Like a powerful logician who is confident that he has the truth upon his side, and like a pureminded man who has no sinister ends to gain, he often takes his stand upon the same ground with his opponent, adopts his ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... lewdness. Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger Crebillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist, introduced, through the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable livers. He engrosses the conversation, directs the orgy, or in the contagion or on a wager, says more filthy things, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... find Shakespeare saying, that death is only sleep, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the Negro. You believe firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both inexplicable, incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply the logical dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from believing in God. Powerful reasoner that you are, you do not need that I should prove to you that the Infinite must everywhere be like unto Itself, and that, necessarily, it is One. God alone is Infinite, for surely there cannot be two Infinities, two Ones. If, to make use of human terms, anything demonstrated to you here ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... of progressive modification which are cited from among the Invertebrata appear to me to have a foundation less open to criticism than these; and if this be so, no careful reasoner would, I think, be inclined to lay very great stress upon them. Among the Vertebrata, however, there are a few examples which appear to be far ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... become known and adopted by the Arabs." With due respect for the astronomical knowledge of those who hold this view, all I can say is that this is a novel, and nothing but a novel, without any facts to support it, and that the few facts which are known to us do not enable a careful reasoner to go beyond the conclusions stated many years ago by Colebrooke, that the "Hindus had undoubtedly made some progress at an early period in the astronomy cultivated by them for the regulation of time. Their calendar, both civil and religious, was governed chiefly, not exclusively, by the moon and ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... tears, and "so did she, almost," he declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with Catherine. "It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a tiresome reasoner," wrote the King of Prussia to D' Alembert in January, 1774; "he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that I couldn't stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am; there is a self-sufficient ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... farthing is paid to the last creditor, I will appear on my knees at the bar of the Pennsylvanian Senate in the plumeopicean robe of American controversy. Each Conscript Jonathan shall trickle over me a few drops of tar, and help to decorate me with those penal plumes in which the vanquished reasoner of the transatlantic world does homage to the physical superiority of ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... called presence. He has that strange something known as magnetism. He must have a flexible, musical voice, capable of expressing the pathetic, the humorous, the heroic. His body must move in unison with his thought. He must be a reasoner, a logician. He must have a keen sense of humor —of the laughable. He must have wit, sharp and quick. He must have sympathy. His smiles should be the neighbors of his tears. He must have imagination. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... though he were sharpening his tongue for thrust and counter-thrust; his brow was furrowed and worn as though with fruitless thought, his eyes glowered like those of a serpent watching for its prey. That was the Sophist, Protagoras, the reasoner for hire, who for a few figs or a pair of obols, could make black seem white, but was tolerated in this brilliant society, because he could carry on a dialogue. They used him to enliven their meetings, and pitted him in argument ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... of reasoning leads the minds of many ignorant and unsuspecting persons away from the right ways of God. The guilty reasoner justifies taxation, fines, imprisonment and wars in the history of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... boldest and most creative reasoner of his time. As a wandering teacher he drew after him thousands of enthusiastic students. He gave a strong impetus to learning. He was a marvelous logician and an accomplished orator. Among his pupils were men who afterward became prelates of the church and distinguished ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... struck with the idea of his being chosen by God to answer Bert's prayer. It was quite a new thought, and made a deep impression upon him. He was a clear and strong, if not very rapid, reasoner, and his reasoning in this case led him to the conclusion that if God thought that much of him he certainly ought to think more of God. He did not talk about it to anyone, but for many days his mind was occupied with thoughts of this ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... not I who differ from him. I am only a monad—a thing of no moment. The whole tendency of the highest plane of modern thought differs from him. He defends the indefensible. He is an excellent observer, but a feeble reasoner. I should not recommend you to found your conclusions ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time which displays Mr Campbell's character for discernment and candor. Aaron Pardee, a gentleman residing in the vicinity, an unbeliever in the gospel, attracted by Campbell's abilities as a reasoner, and won by his fairness in argument, resolved to obtain an interview and propose freely his difficulties. Mr. Campbell received him with such frankness that he opened his case at once, saying, 'I discover, Mr. Campbell, you are well prepared in ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... him, and at once his audacity gives way; he speaks; shrug your shoulders and he is silent. You must not discuss with him; however good a reasoner you may be, you will be worsted, for he is ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Charles. His contempt for Salmasius's pedantry is quite genuine; and he revels in ecstasies of savage glee when taunting the apologist of tyranny with his own notorious subjection to a tyrannical wife. But the reviler in Milton is too far ahead of the reasoner. He seems to set more store by his personalities than by his principles. On the question of the legality of Charles's execution he has indeed little argument to offer; and his views on the wider question of ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... reproach, and the misery of all deviations from it. Yet it is to be remembered, that the laws of mere morality are of no coercive power; and, however they may, by conviction, of their fitness please the reasoner in the shade, when the passions stagnate without impulse, and the appetites are secluded from their objects, they will be of little force against the ardour of desire, or the vehemence of rage, amidst the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... sense. It must be allowed that he is deficient in depth; that he skims over rather than dives into the subjects of which he treats; that he had too great command of the plausible to be a patient investigator or a sound reasoner. Yet if he has less originality of thought than others, if he does not grapple with his subject, if he is unequal to a regular and lengthened disquisition, if he is frequently inconsistent in his opinions, we must remember that mere soundness ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... from a first-class carriage. We all three shook hands, and I saw at once from the reverential way in which Lestrade gazed at my companion that he had learned a good deal since the days when they had first worked together. I could well remember the scorn which the theories of the reasoner used then to excite ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... Bishop Morehouse said. "It seems to me that all things of the mind are metaphysical. That most exact and convincing of all sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is metaphysical. Surely ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... the actual transformation of one element into another, Professor Ramsay himself was by no means ready to declare the absolute certainty of this. Yet the presumption in favor of this interpretation of the observed phenomena is very strong; and so cautious a reasoner as Professor Rutherford has declared recently that "there can be no doubt that helium is derived from the emanations of radium in consequence of changes of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... mind," pursued the reasoner; "we are all mind, un moulin a raisonnement. Our ideas are derived from two sources, sensation or memory. That neither our thoughts nor passions, nor our ideas formed by the imagination, exist without ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... M'Donnell, of course, pleases me greatly. But I am very curious to know who wrote the Protozoa article: I shall hear, if it be not a secret, from Lubbock. It strikes me as very good, and, by Jove, how Owen is shown up—"this great and sound reasoner"! By the way, this reminds me of a passage which I have just observed in Owen's address at Leeds, which a clever reviewer might turn into good fun. He defines (page xc) and further on amplifies his definition that creation means "a process he knows not what." And in a previous sentence ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... light of the universal; the fact in connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... promises to afford either leisure or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next. But with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,—to have reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world's pleasures, and see nothing but "clouds and darkness" beyond, was the doom, the anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and powers, inflicted ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have written a Hamlet. Neither could Iago have written an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Megaera," and even such a strategist as Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically draw such conclusions or ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... inspired Seasoning," (as the same writer elsewhere remarks,) "each new premiss may have been supernaturally communicated; and thus, in point of fact, the inspired reasoner but connects the different threads of the Divine Counsels; exemplifies how 'deep answereth to deep' in the mysteries of Revelation; and presents, in one connected train of argument, those words of GOD which had been uttered 'at sundry times and ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... friend the reasoner, 'but the constitution of an Esquimaux is peculiarly adapted to the climate and food: what he enjoys would poison a European; and he also possesses skill to capture wild animals and fish, which the civilised man cannot ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of realization. But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet. The images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are so evidently brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that, grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a faculty strictly ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... show, from the brevity of the interval between Marie's disappearance and the finding of the floating corpse, that this corpse cannot be that of Marie. The reduction of this interval to its smallest possible dimension, becomes thus, at once, an object with the reasoner. In the rash pursuit of this object, he rushes into mere assumption at the outset. 'It is folly to suppose,' he says, 'that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight.' We ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... can do other than admit the irreconcilable divergences between the synoptists and the author of the Fourth Gospel, and between the synoptists Compared with one another. For us rationalists this is not of much importance; but the orthodox reasoner, compelled to be of opinion that his book is right in every particular, finds himself involved in endless subtleties. Silvestre de Sacy was very much perplexed by the quotations from the Old Testament which are met with in ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... an educated person might have done. Egremont's zeal in his various undertakings made no plea for his character, in her mind. To be sure, a more subtle reasoner might have given it as little weight, but that would have been the result of conscious wisdom. Lydia could only argue from her predisposition regarding the class of 'gentlemen.' We know how she had shrunk ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... process of reasoning adds nothing to knowledge (in the reasoner). It only displays what was there before, and brings to conscious possession what before was unconscious." And again: "Mind can do its work without knowing it. Consciousness is the light that lightens the process, not ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... mother, or the mother her child. Is one tempted to commit a wrong in thought or action, his friend, though absent, appears at his side and begs him not to do it. If one is in doubt or uncertainty, he summons his friend, who become a patient reasoner, and an impartial judge. Who does not find himself, daily, looking through other people's glasses, weighing on other people's scales, sounding other people's voices? It is a habit that friends have with one another. You can not deprive friends of one another, any more than ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... maritime member of the Israelitish confederacy, and calling forth from Deborah the rebuke that the sons of Dan tarried in ships when the land stood in need of defenders. And now comes the most extravagant of the vagaries of the etymological reasoner: he suggests a connection between Dan, Danube, Danai, and Danes, and so establishes the English nation's descent from the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... blown his brains out during the night. The upper ranks of society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event, and each person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities of each reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices, explained the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812. Two men alone, a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician, knew that Philippe de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has given the ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... pays the amount of one day's work, has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, why should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other who only pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had little weight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with the throng in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence gradually came to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and who was ready with a deduction ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... like those of all truly great men, was open to conviction. He was a quick and powerful reasoner; and a moment's reflection sufficed to remind him of the impotency of his rage. It subsided as quickly as it had been roused. He panted for breath, and looked benignantly round upon ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... bishops, so justly celebrated for their magnanimous resistance to arbitrary power, were yet nonjurors." Only five of the seven were nonjurors; and anybody but Boswell would have known that a man may resist arbitrary power, and yet not be a good reasoner. Nay, the resistance which Sancroft and the other nonjuring bishops offered to arbitrary power, while they continued to hold the doctrine of nonresistance, is the most decisive proof that they were ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is fruitful. Nothing grows on the mountain of curses, which frowns black over against the sunny slopes of the mountain of blessing with its blushing grapes. The indolence was illogical, for, if the master was such as was thought, the more reason for diligence; but fear is a bad reasoner, and the absurd gap between the premises and the conclusion is matched by one of the very same width in every life that thinks of God as rigidly requiring obedience, which, therefore, it does not give! Still another error is in the indolent ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... an arch smile, shaking her finger at her nephew, "you are a fallacious reasoner. Do you know what that means? I can't help laughing still at the trouble I used to have in trying to find out the meaning of that word fallacious, when I was at Miss Dullandoor's seminary for young ladies—hi! Hi! Some of us were excessively young ladies, and we were taught ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... should not reason correctly as well as a young man. And yet I must confess that, some how or other, a masculine seems to be often attached to the thought of strong reasoning powers in the female sex. To say of such or such a young woman, She is a bold and powerful reasoner—would it not be a little uncommon? Would it be received as a compliment? Would it not be regarded as a little out of the way—and, to coin ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... certainty with those of the mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than, to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations, we should be disposed to allow them. The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject. Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties. How else could it happen (if we admit the objectors to be sincere ...
— The Federalist Papers
... those who have read it may easily determine. It consists of a series of dialogues: in each of these a person is introduced who has experienced some happy or some adverse event: he gravely states his case; and a reasoner, or rather Reason personified, confutes him; a task not very difficult, since the disciple defends his position only by pertinaciously repeating it, in almost the same words at the end of every argument of his antagonist. In this manner Petrarch solves an immense ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the wickedness of Durazzo will be thought a proper parallel to Richard's. But parallels prove nothing: and a man must be a very poor reasoner who thinks he has an advantage over me, because I dare produce a circumstance that resembles my subject in the case to which it is applied, and leaves my argument just as strong as it was before in ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... weekly newspaper, "The Reasoner," published by Bradlaugh was paying expenses, and there was a fair demand for his intellectual wares. When he lectured in the provinces, there were the usual warnings from pastors to their flocks which served to lessen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... A reasoner among the troop, more daring than the others, and shocked that someone might doubt his soul, observed the interlocutor with sight-vanes pointed at a quarter circle from two different stations, and at the third spoke thusly: "You believe then, Sir, that because you ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... which I most love, the point becomes less difficult of decision. I would prefer each in its season, or rather the two united, with a gradual change in their influence. Let the youth commence with the first in the ascendant, and close with the last. He who begins life too cold a reasoner may end it a calculating egotist; and he who is ruled solely by his imagination is in danger of having his mind so ripened as to bring forth the fruits of a visionary. Had it pleased heaven to have left me the dear son I possessed for so short a period, I ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... guarding unitarians by the arguments that had (or perhaps I should say had not) guarded Irish catholics, Peel and Gladstone made political speeches lofty and sound, and Macaulay the speech of an eloquent scholar and a reasoner, manfully enforcing principles both of law and justice with a luxuriance of illustration all his own, from jurists of imperial Rome, sages of old Greece, Hindoos, Peruvians, Mexicans, and tribunals beyond the Mississippi.[196] We ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... general topic of "discovery". Indeed, we are still on the topic of perception; we come now to that form of perception which is different from sense perception. The reasoner is an explorer, and the culmination of his explorations is the perception of some fact ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... forward by various newspapers or private individuals, there were one or two which were feasible enough to attract the attention of the public. One which appeared in The Times, over the signature of an amateur reasoner of some celebrity at that date, attempted to deal with the matter in a critical and semi-scientific manner. An extract must suffice, although the curious can see the whole letter in the issue of the 3rd ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the Bible who wanted to inherit eternal life, unless, indeed, he merely wanted to know whether there was not some way by which he could avoid dying, and even so he is hardly worth considering. Principles are like logic, which never yet made a good reasoner of a bad one, but might still be occasionally useful if they did not invariably contradict each other whenever there is any temptation to appeal to them. They are like fire, good servants but bad masters. As many people or more have been wrecked on principle as ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... writes simply and easily in choice and varied English, instead of pompously ringing the changes on a set of formulae which beg the question, and dinning into our ears the most extravagant assertions of foreign ecclesiastical arrogance. We may not always think him fair, or a sound reasoner, but he is conciliatory, temperate, and often fearlessly candid. He addresses readers who will challenge and examine what he says, not those whose minds are cowed and beaten down before audacity in proportion to its coolness, and whom paradox, the more extreme the better, fascinates and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... superior to every civil and political consideration. But no man who enters into the genius of that age can reasonably doubt of this prelate's sincerity. The spirit of superstition was so prevalent, that it infallibly caught every careless reasoner, much more every one whose interest, and honour, and ambition were engaged to support it. All the wretched literature of the times was enlisted on that side: some faint glimmerings of common sense might sometimes pierce through ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... nor fanned by the breeze of fancy! This is the effect of all bold, original, and powerful thinking, that it either discovers the truth, or detects where error lies; and the only crime with which Mr. Godwin can be charged as a political and moral reasoner is, that he has displayed a more ardent spirit, and a more independent activity of thought than others, in establishing the fallacy (if fallacy it be) of an old popular prejudice that the Just and True were one, by "championing it to the Outrance," ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... you this general statement doubtfully, and only as that towards which an impartial reasoner will, I think, be inclined by existing data. But I shall be able to show you, without any doubt, in the course of our studies, that the achievements of art which have been usually looked upon as the results ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... argument. If however there was anything weak or ridiculous in what another said, he always laid hold of it and played upon it with success. He looked at everything with a view to pleasantry alone. This being his grand object, and he being no reasoner, his best friends were at a loss to know whether his book upon Christianity was serious or ironical.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in the American preface to this volume, that while it exhibits Henry Rogers as the peer of Butler as a reasoner, it also shows him not inferior to Lamb as a humorist. Much as we are inclined to echo the critical decisions of prefaces, we regret being unable to indorse this confident statement. In amplitude, vigor, and fertility of thought we must think the author of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... "Ah, prosaic reasoner," retorted Bearwarden, who saw that this, like so many other things, had reminded Ayrault of Sylvia, "that is but small consolation for having lost it now, though I suppose our lot is not so hard as if we were never to see it again. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Parson, "although that is a melancholy conclusion, yet if you mean it to apply universally, and not to the family of the Dales in particular, it is not one which my candor as a reasoner, and my Humility as a mortal, will ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... reasons why the Beauvoir estate should not be sold. Many of them contradicted each other. She was not what may be called a close reasoner, but she was roughly effective. Many a general has won a victory not by the accuracy, but by ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... living things, in our isle of terror and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes'—God forbid it should be man that wearies in welldoing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bewildered manuscripts, written strangely as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... of which the Court was convicting and taking the lives of innocent persons. No such piece of reasoning has come to us from that age. Its author must be acknowledged to have been an expert in dialectic subtleties, and a pure reasoner of unsurpassed acumen and force. It requires, but it will reward, the closest attention and concentration of thought in following the threads of the argument. It reaches its conclusions on a most difficult subject with ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... may imagine with what candour and fairness his arguments were received. I am, it is certain, a friend to him, and not to Charles, but all partiality or prejudice laid aside, I think my friend as good a reasoner as the other; but one employs his faculties in the search of truth, and the other in disguising it and substituting falsehood in its room, to serve the purpose ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... seems very willing to pass eldest. The Attorney-General(528) seems cowed, and unwilling to support a war, of which the world gives him the honour.(529) Nugent alone, with an intrepidity worth his country, affects to stand up against the greatest orator, and against the best reasoner of the age. What will most surprise you is, that the Duke of Newcastle, who used to tremble at shadows, appears unterrified at Gorgons! If I should tell you in my next, that either of the Gorgons has kissed hands for secretary of state, only smile: snakes are as easily ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... or his own guards, who I supposed would not deceive him. In this manner I dealt with him, because I knew him to be a scholar."—TURNER'S MEMOIRS, p. 80. The English officer allowed the strength of the reasoning; but that concise reasoner, Cromwell, soon put an end to the dilemma: "Sir James Turner must give his parole, or be ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... insolent since I had seized the money; and being desirous to shake off the yoke of a governor, 'Do you know, Mr. Brinon,' said I, 'that I don't like a blockhead to set up for a reasoner? Do you go to supper, if you please; but take care that I have post-horses ready before daybreak.' The moment he mentioned cards and dice, I felt the money burn in my pocket. I was somewhat surprised, however, to find the room where ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... so like one of my father's—so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)—that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... times can be gained by quoting at length a paper of Galileo's, in which he details his own experiments with floating bodies and controverts the views of his opponents. The paper has further value as illustrating Galileo's methods both as experimenter and as speculative reasoner. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... may not commend themselves as strictly accurate to a scientific reasoner, but which have as much truth as one can demand from an epigram. And besides many sayings which share in some degree their merit, there are occasional passages which rise, at least, to the height of graceful rhetoric if they are scarcely to be called poetical. One ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... to appear, only to the Parliament would he dedicate it. But, while dedicated to the Parliament, it was intended for the Assembly. It was a challenge to them. The Reverend gentlemen had refused to consider the Doctrine of Divorce when propounded by their contemporary, a private layman and reasoner. They had thought it worthy only of denunciation as an impious paradox, destructive of morality and social order. What would they now say to the same Doctrine exhibited to them, chapter and verse, as the doctrine of one of the great European Reformers and Divines, whose name ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of the logical faculties. In HIS generation, people didn't apply the logical faculties to the grounds of belief; they took those for granted; but within his own limits, my father is still an acute reasoner. And then he had always the ethical and social interests. Those two things—a love of logic, and a love of right—are the forces that tend to make us what we call religious. Worldly people don't care for fundamental questions of the universe at all; they accept passively whatever is told ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Senate; Philip P. Barbour, of the House. They were brothers, and both from Virginia. They were both men of great abilities, but their style and manner were very different. James was a verbose and ornate declaimer; Philip was a close, cogent reasoner, without any attempt at elegance or display. He labored to convince the mind; James, to control and direct the feelings. A wag wrote upon the wall of the House, at the conclusion of a masterly argument ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and philosopher, thus nobly speaks[XIII-5]—continued through succeeding ages, and illuminated by the Light which has come into the world—may still express the worthiest thoughts of the modern scientific investigator and reasoner. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Hume. An accomplished reasoner and a profound thinker, he lacked the invaluable quality of imagination. This is the underlying defect of his history. Important and novel as are Hume's doctrines, his method was also deductive, and, like Adam Smith, he rests little on experience. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... Navarre had meanwhile been looking on at a distance. Too keen an observer, too subtle a reasoner to doubt the secret source of the movements then agitating France to its centre, he was yet unable to foresee the turn that all these intrigues were about to take. He could hardly doubt that Spain was playing a dark and desperate game with the unfortunate Henry III.; for, as we have seen, he ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... passions, but of their minds; and those who do it the least are their furious partisans. Most people are contented with the argument that tells, and are apt to be bored with the argument which refutes; but a true reasoner despises even his success, if he feels that two persons, himself and his opponent, know that he is in the wrong. And the strain on the whole being in this contest of intellect with intellect, and the reluctance with which the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... objection and reply meeting face to face, the stronger may break down the weaker, and shiver it to atoms. By that method only can you boast of having conquered, and compel me to regard you as an honest reasoner, and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... at this. There was not a jot of romance in Dave Brainerd's make-up, and not a great depth of imagination; but he was the keenest man on a trail, and the clearest reasoner among a large number of picked and tried detectives. It amused me to think that both had been similarly impressed by this man as he had been set before us; but I made no comment, and to draw away from a subject which I felt it beyond our province to ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... power divine. For he who, justly, deems the Immortals live Safe, and at ease, yet fluctuates in his mind How things are swayed; how, chiefly, those discerned In heaven sublime—to SUPERSTITION back Lapses, and fears a tyrant host, and then Conceives, dull reasoner, they can all things do, While yet himself nor knows what may be done, Nor what may never, nature powers defined Stamping on all, and bounds that none can pass: Hence wide, and wider errs he as ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker |
