"Confounding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been wholly wanting, and others which were feebly represented in the Tertiary period, are now rich in species, and appear to be in such perfect harmony with the present conditions of existence that they present us with countless varieties, confounding the zoologist or botanist who undertakes ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms, he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of character, and to establish the great principle that character can be indefinitely modified. The ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... "there has been a great mistake. This man," pointing to Barkswell, "is the outlaw, and by confounding him with Mr. Bordine an innocent man has been ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community may exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but in order to exist, it must be comprest and hedged in by another ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... date of the King's voyage round the Isles has been mistaken by most of the older writers, such as Buchanan, Lesley, and others. This may have partly arisen from confounding it with his previous voyage in 1536. (See note 186.) James purposed to have sailed on the 14th of May 1540, but he deferred setting out till after the birth of his son, who was born at St. Andrews on the 22d of May. This happy event James ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... generation the foundation of further technical distinctions. Both in Plato and Aristotle we note the illusion under which the ancients fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of its unreality, and of confounding the permanence of the intellectual pleasures with the unchangeableness of the knowledge from which they are derived. Neither do we like to admit that the pleasures of knowledge, though more elevating, are not more lasting than ...
— The Republic • Plato
... wrinkles; when his youthful morn Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night; And all those beauties whereof now he's king Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight, Stealing away the treasure of his spring; For such a time do I now fortify Against confounding age's cruel knife, That he shall never cut from memory My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life: His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, And they shall live, and ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... But he could not make up his mind which of the two women he would prefer as the centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield robed in imperial purple, or Maria Ferres robed in ermine. And as he lingered pleasurably over this uncertainty of choice, he ended by mingling and confounding his two anxieties—the real one for Elena and the imaginary ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... spindle-shanked and used to bank on his physical weakness when lessons were to be evaded. He was two years at the Edinburgh Academy, where he reduced the cutting of lectures and recitations to a system, and substituted Dumas and Scott for more learned men who prepared books for the sole purpose of confounding boys. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... identity. We have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, ...
— The American • Henry James
... (117). Child tries and laughs at his failures, if others laugh; parrot-like repetition of some syllables (118). Gain in understanding of words heard; association of definite object with name (119). More movements executed on hearing words (120). Confounding of movements occurs, but grows rare; begging attitude seen to be ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... they are, how small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are they gods, as all but his own nation believed? No,—"the work of Thy fingers," "which Thou hast ordained." The consciousness of God as their Maker delivers from the temptation of confounding bigness with greatness, and wakes into new energy that awful sense of personality which towers above all the stars. He is a babe and suckling—is that a trace of the early composition of the psalm?—still he knows that out of his lips, ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... fact the next Pope. Galileo showed cardinals and others his telescope, and to as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter's satellites and his other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked, he harangued, he held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at once, confounding his opponents and putting them ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... inhabitants of New England, who besieged this town of Quebec, and who threatened to renew the attack this year, constructed, at the charge of the King, this citadel, with the fortifications therewith connected, for the defence of the country and the safety of the people, and for confounding yet again a people perfidious towards God and towards its lawful king. And he ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... form them entirely in that stile. All that he can do is to take a great part of his attitudes from the serious stile, but to give them another turn and air in the composition; that he may avoid confounding the two different stiles of serious and half-serious. For this last, it is impossible to have too much ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most happy accident now favored us; a fog the most intense now prevailed; nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the poor only and the wretched ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the superstition-ridden heathen, showering missiles of all descriptions upon the body-guard, confounding all with the one to whose javelin their head priest owed his death,—only to recoil once more, in fierce awe, as another victim of high rank paid forfeit his life for the death of Ixtli, sole offspring of Aztotl, the ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... queried the auctioneer, looking at her dubiously, "might I ask if you mean sestertii or sestertia?[*] Your pardon, but it has occurred to me that you might be confounding the two sums." ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and divisions of the middle ages—the one, that old dualism of the inner man, the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have so often alluded—the other, a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... egotism,—and it takes much experience or an extraordinary nature to counteract this unhealthy stimulus. For the ordinary nature it is impossible to live day after day, year in and year out, under the powerful external stimulus of riches, without confounding the outer source of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... chamber, and, wearing the aspect of that arbitrary court, summoned Wentworth to appear before them, and answer for his behavior. But though the commons had discovered so little delicacy or precaution in thus confounding their own authority with that of the star chamber, Wentworth better understood the principles of liberty, and refused to give these counsellors any account of his conduct in parliament, till he were satisfied ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Count Rechberg that if Germany persists in confounding Schleswig with Holstein, other Powers of Europe may confound Holstein with Schleswig, and deny the right of Germany to interfere with the one any more than she has with the other, except as a European Power. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... Spirit no more changes its species, by evolving matter from Spirit, than natural 24 science, so-called, or material laws, bring about altera- tion of species by transforming minerals into vegetables or plants into animals, — thus confusing and confounding 27 the three great kingdoms. No rock brings forth an apple; 1 no pine-tree produces a mammal or provides breast-milk ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy
... the Catholic Faith, that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance. For the Person of the Father is one, of the Son another, of the Holy Ghost another. But the divinity of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost is one, the ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... explain the niceness of the organs by which man discerns the numberless savours and odours of bodies? But how is it possible for so many different voices to strike at once my ear without confounding one another, and for those sounds to leave in me, after they have ceased to be, so lively and so distinct images of what they have been? How careful was the Artificer who made our bodies to give our eyes a moist, smooth, and sliding cover to close them; and ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... be wrong, and a symptom of spiritual disease, he ought to hear it all the more. But I cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, till I know what you mean by religion; for there is a great deal of very truly confounded and confounding religion abroad in the world just now, as there has been in all ages; and perhaps you may be ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... Fulvia's glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision of the truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an immense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw it clearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter slowly through ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... following century. The angels nearly always occur in couples, as in the case of Antoine Vrard, one of the earliest printers to adopt this form; but a few exceptions may be mentioned where only one appears, namely, in the Mark of Estienne Baland, Lyons (1515), in which an angel is represented as confounding Balaam's ass; and in that of Vincent Portunaris, of the same place and of about the same time, in which an angel figures holding an open book; in the four employed by G.Silvius, an Antwerp printer (1562), in three of which the figure is also holding a book; in ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... paid they should be. "Pay us now, for we are women," they still cried. Fanny opened the doors for these persons as wide as possible when they came, and shut them with a bang when they went, astonishing them with a satirical politeness, or confounding them with an impertinent silence. The important creditors held meetings to agree what should be done, and effected an arrangement by which his property was left in his hands for three years, to arrange for the benefit of his creditors. The arrangement proved that his integrity was ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... a woman, as the over-sensitive Jean Christophe once remarked. Men are without those confounding emotions which women seem to be both cursed with and blessed with. When I announced to Dinky-Dunk my willingness to part with Alabama Ranch, he took it quite as a matter of course. He betrayed no tendency to praise me for my sacrifices, for my willingness ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... replied. 'I told you at the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a nightmare to myself, just now—must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care", and became food for lions—a grander kind of going to the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the horrors, have been creeping over me from head to foot. I have been afraid ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... class of philosophers, if philosophers they may be called, reject the origin of government in the people individually or collectively. Satisfied that it has never been instituted by a voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and confounding government as a fact with government as authority, maintain that government is a spontaneous development of nature. Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... St. Thomas plainly establishes that reason, distinct from the intellect, with which we must beware of confounding it, proceeds from it as effect proceeds from cause. Therefore, intellect surpasses reason as its principiant and guiding faculty; and reason only figures in the intelligential sphere, despite the important part it plays in virtue of its ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... intervals of ease (which become of shorter duration as the case progresses), the violent pain, the normal temperature and pulse during the intervals of ease, the frequent attempts to urinate, etc., should be kept in mind, and there is then but little danger of confounding this ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... not yet become a distinct dialect; and it would even be difficult to fix at present the varieties in which it occurs. One of its prominent peculiarities, however, is easily perceived: it consists in the constant confounding of the soft and hard consonants; and the reader must well bear it in mind when translating the language that meets his eye into one to become intelligible to his ear. Thus to the German of our poet, kiss becomes giss; company - gompany; care - gare; count - ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... she fly me confounding modesty with fear! I pass slowly by (one would think me quite uninterested), draped in my splendid coat. She's struck by its stripes. Oh, she'll come back, a little love-sick kitten, and putting aside all constraint she'll ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... want your wife and mother for?" asked Canny. "That's mere foolishness, my lad. It's the devil confounding you, damn his soul! Don't you listen to him, the cursed one. Don't let him have his way. He is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, 'I don't want them!' He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him and say: 'I don't want it!' I want nothing, neither father nor ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with the word motive, in speaking of human volitions. A motive power in mechanics is one that produces motion; and hence the application of the word to the occasion or reason of any particular act of choice, with the all but inevitable fallacy of confounding the idea of a mechanical force with that of an influence upon the mind. That there is some analogy must be admitted; but that there is such similarity as is often assumed, we are obliged to deny. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post as the night advanced began to make larger demands on his attention: and I left him at two in the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... was very remarkable. Travellers having observed the difficulty of judging heights and distances amidst lofty mountains, have generally attributed it to the absence of objects of comparison. It appears to me, that it is fully as much owing to the transparency of the air confounding objects at different distances, and likewise partly to the novelty of an unusual degree of fatigue arising from a little exertion,—habit being thus opposed to the evidence of the senses. I am sure that this ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... confounding divine and human laws, permitted no dual overlapping spheres of mundane and celestial rule as had all previous religious and, social orders since Christ had commanded his disciples to "Render unto Caesar—" There could be no conscientious objection to German law on religious ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... as an hero of romance, somewhat of the type of Sinbad the Sailor, if not of that of Gulliver, has even injured him as a subject of serious study. There has been a sort of custom, to which may be applied a celebrated phrase of Newman, 'aged but not venerable,' of confounding the hero of the romance with the real man. It would be just as proper to identify the hero of the Pickwick Papers with a certain Mr. Pickwick, whom it was, oddly enough, the duty of one of Dickens' sons to call as a witness in an English law-suit not many years ago. Even Homer sometimes ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... prophet Micheas,[20] several ages before. How sweet and adorable is the conduct of divine providence! He teaches saints his will by the mouths of impious ministers, and furnishes Gentiles with the means of admonishing and confounding the blindness of the Jews. But graces are lost on carnal and hardened souls. Herod had then reigned upwards of thirty years; a monster of cruelty, ambition, craft, and dissimulation; old age and sickness had at that time exasperated his jealous mind in an ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... sponsor. Go talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by 'circumstances,' and complacently regarding himself as the victim of ill-luck. Go visit the incarcerated criminal, who has imbued his hands in the blood of his fellow-man, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... have an exact portrait of the great general who was brought to Washington to command all our armies, and to keep us from making any more military mistakes. He is presented to you just as he sat in his easy chair, confounding the rules of war and bringing confusion on the army. This great general, though he had never fought a battle, except on paper, brought with him from the West a new and much enlarged plan for ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... Courte, if a yong Ientleman will ventur him self into the companie of Ruffians, it is ouer greate a ieopardie, lest, their facions, maners, thoughtes, taulke, and deedes, will verie sone, be euer like. The confounding of companies, breedeth confusion of good maners // Ill compa- both in the Courte, and euerie where else. // nie. And it maie be a great wonder, but a greater shame, to vs Christian men, to vnderstand, ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... ostentatious devotion, simply a clever manœuvre to excite interest and obtain unmerited praise. It is useless, however, to hope that things will change. So long as this giddy old world goes on waltzing in space, so long shall we continue to be duped by shams and pin our faith on frauds, confounding an attractive bearing with a sweet disposition and mistaking dishevelled hair and eccentric appearance for brains. Even in the Orient, where dogs have been granted immunity from other labor on the condition that they organized an effective street-cleaning ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... too close, and see only the details and not the vast and dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... of suggestiveness, some undercurrent, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of theme—which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... he has bidden defiance to all chronology, by confounding the inconsistent manners of different ages; but the dialogue has often the air of Dryden's rhyming plays; and the songs are lively, though not very correct. This is, I think, far the best of his works; for, if it has many faults, it has, likewise, passages which are, at least, pretty, though they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... accessory circumstances which may fully justify the assumption of such synchrony. But the moment the geologist has to deal with large areas, or with completely separated deposits, the mischief of confounding that "homotaxis" or "similarity of arrangement," which can be demonstrated, with "synchrony" or "identity of date," for which there is not a shadow of proof, under the one common term of "contemporaneity" becomes incalculable, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... setting up type had not much more to do with the study of new books than Stephen's turning the grindstone had with fighting in the lists; and the mistakes he made in spelling from right to left, and in confounding the letters, made him despair, and prepare for any amount of just indignation from his master; but he found on the contrary that Master Hansen had never had a pupil who made so few blunders on the first trial, and augured well of him from ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... where is the solution to be found? for some solution there must be, unless we will either condemn a most true principle, or defend a most false conclusion. The error lies in confounding God's moral law with his law of ordinances; precisely the same error which led the Jews to stone Stephen. The law had undoubtedly commanded that he who blasphemed God should be stoned; the Jews called ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... themselves, they must accuse those of their own blood and house, and they were not mean enough to do such a thing as that. Oh, no! Sophia Sandal had always done her duty, and always would do it forever." And broad statements are such confusing, confounding things, that for one miserable hour the mother and sister felt as mean and remorseful as Sophia and Julius could desire. Then the rector read the letter aloud, and dived down into its depths as if it was a knotty ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... this was an abuse of the poet's art: but they never aimed at disturbing their moral perceptions, at presenting wickedness in an attractive form, exciting sympathy with guilt, and admiration for villainy, thereby confounding the distinctions between right and wrong. This has been done in our days; and it has accorded so well with the tendency of other things, that the moral drift of a book is no longer regarded, and the severest censure which can be passed upon it is to say that it is in bad taste; such is the phrase—and ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... mass was really not a fishing-line but, in its untangled state, an apparatus for confounding and enraging pedestrians. Stretched across the sidewalk between two tin cans its function was to catch in the feet of passersby, thus pulling the clamorous cans about the ankles of the victim. Keekie Joe had always found this game diverting and he was wont to vary its surprises by filling ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and sink down, lost in sensual pleasure and excess, till the Siren grows tired and destroys them. Other men wed Art, and from the union beget them fair, lovely, ay, immortal children, as Raphael did. Some again, confounding Art with their own inordinate vanity, grow stern and harsh with making sacrifices to the stone idol, grinding down their own hearts in vain experimenting after properer pigments, whereby themselves may attain to a chill and profitless immortality. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... were occupied by Grecian colonies, and all remembrance of AEne'as and his followers lost. When the narrative of the Trojan war, with other Greek legends, began to be circulated in Lati'um, it was natural that the identity of name should have led to the confounding of the AEne'adae who had survived the destruction of Troy, with those who had come to La'tium from the Pelasgic AE'nus. The cities which were said to be founded by the AEne'adae were, Latin Troy, which ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... he invited Fraeulein to the opera or theater. The parent must attend. As she was equally occupied, it did not appear easy for him to arrange for the two. Besides, Frau Bucher killed everything under these confounding and confounded circumstances. She sat between him and her daughter and ruled the conversation. It was little better than taking her alone, so he ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... been a very good man to exhale some of your satisfaction in writing two notes to me; you could not have taken a better line in my opinion; but as for showing your satisfaction in confounding my experiments, I assure you I am quite enough confounded—those horrid seeds, which, as you truly observe, if ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... anti-non-restraint opinion among the French physicians, in an interesting discussion at the Societe Medico-Psychologique. I wish here only to chronicle the fact, and would urge the necessity of not confounding honest differences of opinion with differences of humane feeling. The non-restrainer is within his right when he practises the system carried to its extremest lengths. He is within his right when he preaches its advantages to others. But he ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... 1729. He seems to have returned for a week in March 1730, and again for a week in the following September. On three other weeks there is a charge against him of fivepence in the books. Mr. Croker has made that darker which was already dark enough by confounding, as I have shewn, two John Taylors who both matriculated at Christ Church. Boswell's statement no doubt is precise, but in this he followed perhaps the account given by Hawkins. He would have been less likely to discover Hawkins's error ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... confounding. Even a collector's conscience is sometimes stirred, and Dennistoun's conscience was tenderer than ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... is well known, but not how. By the accounts we have, he was by the Act of Indemnity only incapacitated for any public employment. This is a notorious mistake, though Toland, the bishop of Sarum, Fenton, &c, have gone into it, confounding him with Goodwin; their cases were very different, as I found upon enquiry. Not to take a matter of this importance upon trust, I had first recourse to the Act itself. Milton is not among the excepted. If he was so conditionally pardoned, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... what the philosophic theory of theology was in Greece and Rome, because the wide difference between the esoteric and exoteric doctrines, between the belief of the learned few and the popular superstition, makes it very difficult to avoid confounding the two, and lending to the former some of the grosser errors with which the latter abounded. Nevertheless, we may rely upon what has been just stated, as conveying, generally speaking, the opinion of philosophers, ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... man, in presence of their opposite shores, to the perpetual exchange of his productions. An arm of the sea is not a barrier, but rather a tie between the nations. Appearing to separate, it in reality draws them together without confounding them.[16] On such a theatre we may expect that commerce will be developed on an extensive scale.[17] And, along with commerce, there will be increased activity in all departments of productive industry, and an enlarged diffusion ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the English king is said to have lain "in their rear," can only be conjectured. It is a small blunder that the French king's brother is called "Francis" instead of Charles, since we must not suspect Mr. Green of confounding him with the duke of Brittany, who bore the former name. But the whole passage, in connection with what follows it, indicates that the author has mixed up the state of affairs at two very close, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... mistake of confounding conversation on "religion" with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but well-trained children learn much about ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... follow; a seconding of that; a breach of order by some individual of warm temperament; half a dozen would rise to set him right; a dozen to put them down; and the vociferation and gesticulation would become loud and confounding." ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... from the clear perception of evil and its cause, and which is much more powerful than passion and enthusiasm. My hatred of privilege and human authority was unbounded; perhaps at times I have been guilty, in my indignation, of confounding persons and things; at present I can only despise and complain; to cease to hate ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... to fear the opinion of people one despises Camors refused, hesitated, made objections, and consented Confounding progress with discord, liberty with license Contempt for men is the beginning of wisdom Cried out, with the blunt candor of his age Dangers of liberty outweighed its benefits Demanded of him imperatively—the time of day Do not get ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was. Still, I am far from wishing to hold up this imported minister as a model of Christian graces for my descendants to admire. No one can be more convinced than myself how much sectarians are prone to substitute their own narrow notions of right and wrong for the Law of God, confounding acts that are perfectly innocent in themselves with sin; but, at the same time, I am quite aware too, that appearances are ever to be consulted in cases of morals, and that it is a minor virtue to be decent in matters of manners. The Rev. Mr. Worden, whatever might ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... not the clergy. It is an institution more governmental, according to the genius of the country, than our London University, to which, however, its organization bears some resemblance. To speak of it in one breath with Oxford or Aberdeen is to commit the ... error of confounding two things, or placing them on the same line, because they have the same name." —E.Oswald, in The English Leader, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... part the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement—beginning over again, with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... because feeling does not discover it anywhere. The governing authorities find themselves compelled to classify, and thereby simplify, the multiplicity of citizens, and only to know humanity in a representative form and at second hand. Accordingly they end by entirely losing sight of humanity, and by confounding it with a simple artificial creation of the understanding, whilst on their part the subject classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that address themselves so little to their personality. At length society, weary of having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to lighten, falls to ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... related, leaving them as it were in the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about. He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with clearness. They needed no commentary ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... he said, smiling; "we shall have the roses in your cheeks again, I hope, in a few weeks. What I want you to do is to distinguish between God's and man's religions. You have erred from confounding the two. Our loving Father wants a joyous, willing obedience; He allows no one to come between Him and us poor sinners, but our one Mediator and great High Priest, to whom we must confess our sins. He invites ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... natives some account of the origin and history of the ruined city, they could tell him nothing about it. To them the ruins were entirely mythical and mysterious. With the facts so accessible, and the antiquity of the ruins so manifest, it is very singular that Mr. Stephens fell into the mistake of confounding this ruined city, situated in an old forest that was almost impenetrable, with the town captured by the Spaniards. The ruins here were discovered accidentally; and to approach them it was necessary, as at Palenque, ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... that Booth frequently cut his adversaries upon the stage in sheer wantonness or bloodthirstiness. This is a mistake, and is attributable to his father, the elder Booth, who had the madness of confounding himself with the character. Wilkes was too good a fencer to make ugly gashes; his pride was his skill, not ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... things were occupying the public; the world was not at leisure to heed him, and the book did not penetrate into the great circle of readers. But a savage critic has seized on it, and mangled, distorted, deformed it, confounding together defect and beauty in one mocking ridicule; and the beauties have not yet found an exponent, nor the defects a defender; and the publisher shakes his head, points to groaning shelves, and delicately hints that the work which was ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sometimes three at a time would thus aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust took them, and the spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave. And yet the spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than impressive by its force. Thought was beaten down by the confounding uproar; a gleeful vacancy possessed the brains of men, a state akin to madness; and I found myself at times following the dance of the Merry Men as it were a tune upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mooi River, Boers at Willow Grange; British at Estcourt, Boers at Ennersdale; British within Ladysmith, and Boers without. To the Commander this complicated sandwich of friend and foe must have been most confounding, and the upshot of the war, even by experts, could ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... proved to be too warm work for the season, the young folk naturally took to the water. Swimming and boating became the order of the day, and the night too; for, indeed, boats shot hither and thither through many a boy's sleep, confounding him with startling surprises and dreamland defeats and victories. But the lake sports of their waking hours were more under control. Donald and Ed Tyler, as usual, were among the most active in various contests with the oars; and ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... intelligence to the passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with 'the exact summary of human Worth,' as in one place he defines it. Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism, or it may be that cynical rage which, confounding the good and the bad in existing opinions, breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness and antipathy."—Works of P. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... night, what time I was wedged into my berth by a wooden bar, or I must have rolled out of it, 'what errand was I then upon, and to what Abyssinian point had public events then marched? No matter as to me. And as to them, if the wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly confounding in its inscrutable unreason) I had not then lighted on a poor young savage boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first off by the hair of his princely head to "inspect" the British volunteers, and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... the country was too not and damp. In his account of Calabria, Duret de Tavel [Footnote: An English translation of his book appeared in 1832.] sometimes speaks of killing the fallow-deer, an autochthonous Tyrrhenian beast which is now extinct on the mainland in its wild state. Nor can he be confounding it with the roe, since he mentions the two together—for instance, in the following note from Corigliano (February, 1809), which must make the modern Calabrian's ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... better stated than by Coleridge, in a passage justifying the form of Shakespeare's dramas against a mode of criticism which has now, happily, gone out of use. "The true ground," says he, "of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... thing—the town of Bui—the well being French, the ton Saxon, and the by Danish; they are half- brothers of Bovil and Belville, both signifying fair town, and which ought to be written Beauville and Belville. The Gypsies, who know and care nothing about etymologies, confounding bos with buss, a vulgar English verb not to be found in dictionaries, which signifies to kiss, rendered the name Boswell by Chumomisto, that is, Kisswell, or one who kisses well—choom in their language signifying to kiss, and misto well—likewise by choomomescro, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... the divels due) He shall imbrew his greedie griping hands In the dead bosome of the bloodie boy, And winde himselfe, his sonne, and harmlesse wife, In endlesse foldes of sure destruction. Now, Homicide, thy lookes are like thyselfe, For blood and death are thy companions. Let my confounding plots but goe before, And thou shalt wade up to the ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... must be free from bicarbonate of soda. This should be remembered, since when titrating arsenic assays with iodine it must be present; and students must avoid confounding the two titrations. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... are Mahomedan Negroes who have made, or affect to have made, the laws of the Prophet their peculiar study; and if I may judge from their harangues, which I frequently attended, I believe that in the forensic qualifications of procrastination and cavil, and the arts of confounding and perplexing a cause, they are not always surpassed by the ablest pleaders in Europe. While I was at Pisania a cause was heard which furnished the Mahomedan lawyers with an admirable opportunity of displaying their professional dexterity. The case was this: An ass belonging to a Serawoolli ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... be merely coquetting or playing with the truth. At all events, since you have finished with this Vanel; since you have deprived yourself of the happiness of confounding him by repudiating your word; and since you have given up, for the purpose of being used against yourself, the only weapon ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... From confounding signs with causes came the worship of the sun and stars. "If," says Job, "I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon progressive in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand, this were an iniquity to be punished by the Judge; for I should have denied ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hypothesis often put forward with more or less plausibility that Druidism had an Eastern origin. At all magical rites spells were uttered. Druids often accompanied an army, to assist by their magical arts in confounding ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client in foro conscientiae has no right to do for himself; as, for a gross example, to put in evidence a forged deed or will, knowing it to be so forged. As to mere confounding of witnesses by skilful cross-examination, I own I am not disposed to be very strict. The whole thing is perfectly well understood on all hands, and it is little more in general than a sort of cudgel-playing between the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Blume., better known to English naturalists by its more correct designation of Mylodon robustus Owen; and if so, why is the proper appellation not painted on the label? If that had been done, A Foreign Surgeon would not have fallen into the error of confounding the remains of two distinctly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... active of the pair was Miaslas, and by confounding his machinations and those of other Hungarian adherents von Thurn overthrew the Hungaro-Croatian party. Thenceforward his greatest care was diligently to suppress those aspirations of the people of Dalmatia for a union with their brothers. He had to ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... expressions to this or the like effect: "My lords, if clergymen be suffered," &c. wherein they seem to have reason; and I am pretty confident, that a great majority of the clergy were heartily inclined to disown any relation they had to the managers in lawn. However, it was a confounding argument against Presbytery, that those who are most suspected to lean that way, treating their inferior brethren with haughtiness, rigour, and contempt: Although, to say the truth, nothing better could be hoped for; because, I believe, it may pass for a universal rule, that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... scribbling on paper and poring over books, etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the earlier part, of the century will revel in the invective which he hurls against Mr. Rhodes and the Capitalists of the Rand. If happier times return to South Africa, Mr. Reitz may yet find the mistake he has made in confounding Mr. Rhodes with the mere dividend-earning crew, who brought about this war in order to diminish the cost of crushing gold by five or six shillings a ton. In the realisation of the ideal of Africa for the Africanders Mr. ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... frown when they are in any way perplexed in thought, as I infer from the answers which I have received to my queries; but I framed them badly, confounding absorbed meditation with perplexed reflection. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Australians, Malays, Hindoos, and Kafirs of South Africa frown, when they are puzzled. Dobritzhoffer remarks that the Guaranies of South America on like ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... grossest form, and with its worst effects. It is to reward or punish me for what I had nothing to do with; for which, therefore, I cannot, without the greatest injustice, be held responsible. It is to poison the very fountains of justice, by confounding all moral distinctions. What, then, so far as the authority of the New Testament is concerned, becomes of slavery, which cannot be maintained under any form nor for a single moment, without "respect of persons" the most aggravated and unendurable? And what would become of that most pitiful, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 'You now seem to me to be confounding the limits of the several arts.' 'What!' I continued, 'is the drama but emotion presented in its most external forms as action? And what is music but emotion, in its most genuine essence, expressed by sound? Where then can a more ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... curiously at these specimens of the Musulungu or Musurungu, a wilder race than that of Shark Point: the English, of course, call them Missolonghi, because Lord Byron died there. Here the people say "le" for "re," and "rua" for "lua," confounding both liquids, which may also be found in the Kibundo tongue. In Loango, according to the Abbe Proyart, the national organ does not admit the roughness of the r, which is changed to l. Monteiro and Gamitto assert (xxii.) that the "Cazembes or Lundas do not pronounce ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... see Lane (M. E. Chapt. xvii.) It is usually played on a checked cloth not on a board like our draughts; and Easterns are fond of eating, drinking and smoking between and even during the games. Torrens (p. 142) translates "I made up some dessert," confounding "Mankalah" with "Nukl" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of night are rang'd o'er head! Confounding darkness o'er the earth is spread. The clouded moon her cheering count'nance hides; And feeble stars, between the ragged sides Of broken clouds, with unavailing ray, Look thro' to mock the trav'ller on ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... made one miserable attempt to advance, halted, and then wheeling round, dashed wildly in every direction. Nor could Hamilton's dragoons on the other wing stand the heavy rolling fire of the advancing Macdonalds. Mad with terror, man and horse fled in blind confusion, some backwards, confounding their own ranks, some along the shore, some actually through ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... 15. They are to possess Palestine, and invite their brethren of Judah to return. And thus I might repeat some sixty positive marks and distinctions setting forth Israel; and yet men wilfully persist in confounding them with the Jews, or looking for this great and favoured people of the Lord among the lowest of human kind, Indians, Africans, and ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... country nothing seems to have escaped him, either in the masters or the minor poets.[5] To apply the term plagiarism to Tennyson's use of his predecessors would be as absurd as to resolve some noble fabric into its stones and bricks, and confounding the one with the other to taunt the architect with appropriating an honour which belongs to the quarry and the potter. Tennyson's method was exactly the method of two of the greatest poets in the world, Virgil and Milton, of the poet who stands second to Virgil ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... indissolubly bound up with cognizance of the enemy. He may be hiding in the bowels of the earth, defying the attempt to tame the soil to our advantage; he may be mocking our efforts to find scientific solutions to the riddles of nature; he may be encamped in our own souls, confounding our goodness and demolishing our moral defences. But he must be there. Without him life would be ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... represented as, without any intermediate circumstance to facilitate their witchcraft, having the ability to assume the form of any one they please, and in consequence to take the shape of one actually present, producing a duplication the most confounding that can be imagined.—Mocbel, the son of an artificer of Damascus, but whose father had bequeathed him considerable wealth, contrived to waste his patrimony and his youth together in profligate living with Dilnouaze, a woman of dissolute manners. Finding themselves at once poor and despised, they ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... beauty and the value of charity; of that large-hearted humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, generous, earnest thought and endeavour, in whatsoever shape they may have appeared; a charity which, without weakly or lazily confounding the eternal laws of right and wrong, can make allowances for human frailty; can separate the good from the evil in men and in theories; can understand, and can forgive, because it loves. Who can read Sir James Stephen's ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Christianity and patriotism. She toiled untiringly, in season and out of season, when others flagged, she supplied the lack by giving more time, and redoubling her exertions; as the war wore wearily on, and disasters came, enfeebling some, and confounding others, she rose to sublimer efforts, and supplied the ranks of the true and faithful who gathered round her, with the proper watchwords and fresh resources. I both admired and wondered at her in this regard; and when success came, crowning the labors and ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... worth our while to pay a little attention to the extent of genius required by these legislators, that we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus, blending theft with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to his city. He seemed ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... youngest student on these benches will not commit the childish error of confounding a presumption against a particular class of agents with a condemnation of them. Mercury, for instance, is alien to the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence. Yet its efficacy in certain forms of specific disease is acknowledged by all but ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sages teach— That passion sways not with repose, That love, confounding these with those, Is ever welding ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... that in divers of these Receipts there are Directions for two or three several Things in one, not confounding the Brains with multitudes of Words, to little or no purpose, or vain Expressions of things with are altogether unknown to the Learned as well as to the Ignorant: This is really imparted for the good of all ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley |
