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More "Incontrovertible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poets may say, it is incontrovertible that the great majority of men look upon the beauties and glories of Nature that surround them with almost entire indifference. We shall not inquire whether this is the result of a natural incapacity to perceive and admire ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... around them, and will them and their increase as property to their children forever.—Levit. xxv: 44, 45, 46. All these nations were made of one blood. Yet God ordained that some should be "chattel" slaves to others, and gave his special aid to effect it. In view of this incontrovertible fact, how can I believe this passage disproves the lawfulness of slavery in the sight of God? How can any sane man believe it, who believes ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Court, which had already decided the question at issue by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in principle identical with incontrovertible logic. In giving the views of the dissenting minority on the action I had brought, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... conclusions. These were in his own mind controlled by the theory which he had adopted, and which he continuously maintained, that Freemasonry was a Christian institution, and that the connection between it and the Christian religion was absolute and incontrovertible. He followed in the footsteps of Hutchinson, but with a far more expanded view of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... duties of man thus simplified, it seems almost impertinent to attempt to illustrate truths that appear so incontrovertible: yet such deeply rooted prejudices have clouded reason, and such spurious qualities have assumed the name of virtues, that it is necessary to pursue the course of reason as it has been perplexed and involved in error, by various adventitious circumstances, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... it broke out over him in a cold sweat—he sat there and shook, his eyes hidden in his icy hands. But gradually, as he began to rehearse his story for the thousandth time, he saw again how incontrovertible it was, and felt sure that any ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... make its own coin, money will be plenty, everybody will be happy, and there never will be any more war. It may be asked how this currency can be redeemed? I would have an incontrovertible bond, made of Limburger cheese, which is stronger and more durable. When this is done you can tell the rich from the poor man by the smell of his money. Now-a-days many of us do not even get a smell of money, but in the good days which are coming the gentle zephyr will ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... his suits, nor be responsible for his legacies, and required only his father's estates, according to the legal will, which I produced; that is to say, the three lordships of Pakratz, Prestowacz, and Pleneritz, without chattels or personal effects. Nothing could be more just or incontrovertible than this claim. What was my astonishment, to be told, in open court, that Her Majesty had declared I must either wholly perform the articles of the will of Trenck, or be excluded the entire inheritance, and have nothing further to hope. What could be done? I ventured ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... that many worthy persons unfamiliar with the true facts of history have believed that Joseph was a purely apocryphal infant, or, as some have suggested, merely an adopted child; but that Napoleon did upon this occasion content himself with second place is an incontrovertible fact. Nor is it entirely unaccountable. It is hardly to be supposed that a true military genius, such as Napoleon is universally conceded to have been, would plunge into the midst of a great battle without first having acquainted ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... these voyages, and of the countries he and his brother had visited, on a map, which he brought with him to Venice, and which he hung up in his house as a sure pledge and incontestible proofs of the truth of his relations, and which still remained as an incontrovertible evidence in the time of Marcolini. Many have been inclined to reject the whole of this narrative because the names which it assigns to several of the countries are nowhere else to be found. After having carefully examined, and made a translation of the whole, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... either of men or of governments otherwise than as he found them, and he writes with such skill and insight that his work is of abiding value. But what invests "The Prince" with more than a merely artistic or historical interest is the incontrovertible truth that it deals with the great principles which still guide nations and rulers in their relationship with ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... man or woman has spent in Japan the more pronounced his or her views in regard to the country. The matter is hardly worth referring to were it not that these opinions, hastily arrived at and apparently as hurriedly rushed into print, have been accepted by some people as incontrovertible facts. Another class of work that I think a reader should be warned against is the book of the man who has lived in Japan for a time and seen life only from a certain standpoint. The book of a bishop or a missionary may be and often is of undoubted value in reference ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... mental suffering are the mysterious sorrows that we must experience and pay to a tyrant God for the existence we bear. It is incontrovertible that no realization is given us by Nature of the fearful pains and tortures that we are capable of suffering and still sustain ourselves, only to repeat over and over again the unending torment in exchange for the consciousness ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed appear to be incontrovertible. ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... reflected their views, and the passions of the day. That it was, in view of the events then transpiring, the best policy to turn back the southern army, after the great battle, and not insist too closely on following up the advantage gained, seems now incontrovertible.—R. G. T. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... inflicted upon them. Mr. Weld thought the state of the abolition cause demanded a work which would not only prove by argument that slavery and cruelty were inseparable, but which would contain a mass of incontrovertible facts, that would exhibit the horrid brutality of the system. Nearly all the papers, most of them of recent date, from which the extracts were taken, were deposited at the office of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, and all who thought the atrocities described ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... of 20 June 1777 and to Dr. Dodd of 26 June were of the sort that an enterprising lady might well have wheedled copies from the Doctor. The important point is that the inclusion of the letters in the 1789 printing of the Enquiry provides incontrovertible proof of Miss Reynolds' connection ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... this as an incontrovertible truth impossible to dispute; but then he had never until lately felt the smallest desire to travel through life accompanied by any one person. He had fallen in and out of love as often as was wholesome or possible for so hard-working a young man, and always looked upon the experience as an agreeable ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... given up social and political satire, and devoted themselves to the then comparatively new field of book illustration and etching on copper, that the superiority, originality, and genius of the younger brother became so manifest and incontrovertible. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... hair erect with a general aspect of confidence that could hardly have been surpassed, if he had had the amount in his pocket. These incontrovertible figures had been the occupation of every moment of his leisure since he had lost his money, and were destined to afford him consolation to the end of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... was ungenerous in the extreme, I own it—and yet, believe me, dear Clara, I did not doubt you lightly; proofs, that to my short-sightedness appeared incontrovertible, were brought against you; the letters I wrote, entreating you if but by a line or message to relieve, my anxiety, remaining unanswered—letters which I was assured you had received—your sudden intimacy with ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... deep and placid thought, took the letter out of its receptacle, and read it over and over again. It was very bad Spanish, and very absurd, but she thought it delightful, poetical, classical, sentimental, argumentative, convincing, incontrovertible, imaginative and even grammatical; for if it was not good Spanish, there was no Spanish half so good. Alas! Agnes was indeed unsophisticated, to be in such ecstasies with a midshipman's love letter. Once more she hastened to her room to weep, but it was from excess of joy and delight. The reader ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... on the artificial style," continued Ellison, "are less objectionable. A mixture of pure art in a garden scene adds to it a great beauty. This is just; as also is the reference to the sense of human interest. The principle expressed is incontrovertible—but there may be something beyond it. There may be an object in keeping with the principle—an object unattainable by the means ordinarily possessed by individuals, yet which, if attained, would lend a charm to the landscape-garden far surpassing that which a sense of merely human interest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the Belgian population did transgress, there still remains incontrovertible evidence that almost unheard-of kindness was shown to the invading army, and that Germans had displayed brutal insolence to Belgians before a state of war had been declared. Nearly every single letter from soldiers, published in German papers, records the fact that in the villages through ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... opinion, but a corrected opinion in which such accidents of locality cancel one another. The following justification of democracy, formulated by Matthew Arnold, lays bare its insistent and wholly incontrovertible motive: ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... of fossils is to a large extent imaginary, and some of the Lower Cambrian beds of the Longmynd Hills would appear to have been laid down in shallow water; as they exhibit rain-prints, sun-cracks, and ripple-marks—incontrovertible evidence of their having been a shore-deposit. The occurrence, of innumerable worm-tracks and burrows in many Cambrian strata is also a proof of shallow-water conditions; and the general absence of limestones, coupled with the coarse mechanical nature ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... summers, Mr. Port—after a month spent for the good of his liver in taking the waters at the White Sulphur—of course went to Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very probably would ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... methods—and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had been made—and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there was the letter! If he, Jimmie Dale, had ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was his mistress a week before he sailed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... for the nature of a people can never undergo a sudden and entire change. But I can myself vouch for the lenity which they displayed when they have had the power, and to wit great provocation, to have acted otherwise. The incontrovertible facts, too, remain that Mussulman Turkey has been the first to relinquish the unchristian custom of decapitating prisoners, and other inhuman practices, which the so-called Christians appear little inclined to renounce. This will, of course, meet with an indignant ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one in the company oblige me? I take that now for an incontrovertible"—he stammered over this word—"proof of the truth of the Bible. But I am wandering from my subject, which error, I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, to excuse, for I am no longer what I was in the prime of youth's rosy ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,—which Hannah had not. But she kept the little flat with its worn furniture,—which had known so many journeys—as clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to her satisfaction ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... towns, and also of the various counties, should be truly represented within the House of Commons. Of this fact the recent history of electoral legislation on the Continent and in the Colonies furnishes incontrovertible proofs. Proportional representation has been embodied in the laws of several countries, and these laws work with ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... from fire only as they are seen when fire is present and are not seen when fire is absent; so, as the Materialists also admit, only intelligent bodies are observed to be the movers of chariots and other non-intelligent things. The motive power of intelligence is therefore incontrovertible.—But—an objection will be raised—your Self even if joined to a body is incapable of exercising moving power, for motion cannot be effected by that the nature of which is pure intelligence.—A thing, we reply, which is itself devoid of motion may nevertheless move other things. The magnet ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... [Greek: ho de echthros ho speiras auta estin ho diabolos.] The children of the wicked one, or of the devil, who are spoken of in this passage, are the seed of the serpent who is mentioned in Gen. iii. 15, and to whom allusion is made in the words [Greek: ho speiras auta] also. Less incontrovertible is the passage in St Matthew xxiii. 33, where the Lord addressed the Pharisees as [Greek: opheis, gennemata echidnon]. (Compare Matt. xii. 34, iii. 7.) Olshausen, in his commentary on Matt. iii. 7, gives it as his opinion ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... will demolish an infamous privilege. She affirms that an institution which might have been excusable under a landgrave, with a few thousand acres of territory, is inconsistent with the dignity and, to quote continental phraseology, the mission of a first-class state. Here again the reasoning is incontrovertible. Of one other thing, moreover, we may feel perfectly sure, that Prussia having determined to suppress these centres and sources of corruption, they will gradually disappear from Europe. Concede to them a temporary breathing-time ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... on the Negro question. He even went so far as to sympathize with and offer excuses for some white Southern points of view. I asked him what were his main reasons for being so hopeful. He replied: "In spite of all that is written, said, and done, this great, big, incontrovertible fact stands out—the Negro is progressing, and that disproves all the arguments in the world that he is incapable of progress. I was born in slavery, and at emancipation was set adrift a ragged, penniless ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... this statement, for its truth was incontrovertible, and showed that the father's ill-will was too tangible a thing to ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... is not the God of the dead but of the living was an unanswerable denunciation of the Sadducean perversion of scripture; and with solemn finality the Lord added: "Ye therefore do greatly err." Certain of the scribes present were impressed by the incontrovertible demonstration of the truth, and exclaimed with approbation: "Master, thou hast well said." The proud Sadducees were confuted and silenced; "and after that they durst not ask him any question ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Commines, finding some comfort and strength in the bald platitude: it was incontrovertible and at least gave him firm ground under his feet. "Nor can treason go unpunished, or how would the throne be safe for a day? But what the father cannot do, though a king, another can and must; and must," he reiterated, steeling ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... matter of contagion which has given rise to it, so, therefore, must the breath of the affected have been poisonous in this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible, that owing to the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and houses, but whole cities were infected, which, moreover, in the Middle Ages, were, with few exceptions, narrowly built, kept in a filthy state, and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... single dominant power in the world is the being who revealed himself to our ancestors, and who, in particular, guided Joseph into Egypt, protected him there, and raised him to an eminence never before or since reached by a Jew. It can also be proved, by incontrovertible facts, that this being is a moral being, who can be placated by obedience and by attaining to a certain moral standard in life, and by no other means. That this standard has been disclosed to me, I can prove to you by sundry miraculous signs. Therefore, be obedient and obey the law which I shall ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... of this last remark was so self-evident and incontrovertible that it elicited no reply, and the three friends rode on for a considerable time ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... lit up the flame; but more and more do the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties removable.' As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and carping tones. There has probably never existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the setting ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... for himself, for grief at parting and at giving him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... The facts are incontrovertible. They are not sought to be controverted, except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, the violation of Belgian territory as a first ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the United States representatives, announced that it ran where no one had ever suggested it could run, north of two and south of two, thus dividing the land in dispute. The islands were of little importance even strategically, but the incontrovertible evidence that instead of a judicial finding a political compromise had been effected was held of much importance. After a time the storm died down, but it revealed one unmistakable fact: Canadian nationalism was growing fully as fast ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... gentleman; "I don't like your plot, sir," repeated he with an air of authority, which he had long assumed, from supposing because people would not be at the trouble of contradicting his opinions, that they were incontrovertible—"there is ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... one court whose "findings" are incontrovertible, and whose sessions are held in the chambers of ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... Education League made definite inquiry, in 1915, of teachers and schools. They pronounced the results to be disappointing, though they comforted themselves with the incontrovertible dictum that "the people who are doing most have least time to talk about it." As the result of their inquiry, they drew up a statement of the aims of civics which in general and in detail differed little from the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... or to question, concerning the grounds of this great hope. From the first moment that she comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so incontrovertible did ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... not always find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... absolutely incontrovertible conclusion is that this theory of successive ages must be a gross blunder, in its baleful effects on every branch of modern thought deplorable beyond computation. But it is now perfectly obvious that the ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... action can be greater than this, and at the same time more incontrovertible? But it has nothing to do with memory; on the contrary, it is just because the clerk has no memory that his action of the second day so exactly resembles that of the first. As long as he has no power of recollecting, he will day after day repeat the same actions in exactly the same way, until ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... surgeons of France, Germany, and Switzerland; a leading physician testified to the recovery of a hopeless patient of his own; a burned foot, which was about to be amputated to prevent impending death, was healed without means. The evidence was incontrovertible, and the cases numerous. The cure was often contemporaneous with the confession of Christ by the unbelieving patient; but duration of the sickness varied with each case. Lunatics were commonly sent forth cured in a brief while." Nothing miraculous was claimed and no war ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed. But it may amuse you, to show when, and by what means, they stole this law in upon us. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... an unsuitable climate are especially shown in nervous disorders, and are therefore likely to tell most heavily on those who engage in intellectual pursuits, and perhaps on women rather more than on men. The sterilising effects of women's higher education in America are incontrovertible, though this inference is hotly denied in England. At Holyoake College it was found that only half the lady graduates afterwards married, and the average family of those who did marry was less than two children. At Bryn ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... with certainty, were willed likewise unqualifiedly to "my adopted daughter, Elizabeth Landor." That was all. A single sheet of greasy note paper, a collection of pedantic antiquated phrases, penned laboriously with the scrawling hand of one unused to writing; but incontrovertible in its laconic directness. Save these three no other names were mentioned. So far as the Indian Ma-wa-cha-sa, commonly called How Landor, was concerned he might never have existed. In a hundred words the labour was complete; and at its end, before the ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... low wages, the discouraging result of excessive fines, long hours, and unwholesome sanitary conditions, not only the physical system is injured, but—the result we most deplore, and of which we have incontrovertible proof—the tendency is to injure ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... sacred responsibility! Those hymn-books and holy writings handed to the jury were not, as his Honor surmised, for the purpose of enabling the jury to indulge in—er—preliminary choral exercise! He might, indeed, say "alas not!" They were the damning, incontrovertible proofs of the perfidy of the defendant. And they would prove as terrible a warning to him as the fatal characters upon Belshazzar's wall. There was a strong sensation. Hotchkiss turned a sallow green. His lawyers assumed ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... can't knock that into people's heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away." ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... George Dyer's phrenitis has come to a crisis; he is raging and furiously mad. I waited upon the Heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... been the butt of all their witticisms, but now Anton was very sorry to see that he was universally disliked. Even the quartette had given him up—at least there was decided enmity between him and both basses. Whenever Specht ventured upon an assertion that was not quite incontrovertible, Pix would shrug his shoulders and ejaculate "Pumpkins." Indeed, almost all that Specht said was met by a whisper of "pumpkins" from one or other; and whenever he caught the word, he fell into a towering passion, broke off the discourse, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... that Dr. Lindley combats very eagerly the doctrine that varieties of the apple and pear, or indeed of any tree, die naturally of old age; but the only incontrovertible fact which he adduces in support of his argument, is the existence of the French White Beurre pear, which has flourished from time immemorial. His denial of the decay of the Golden Pippin, the Golden {437} Harvey, and the Nonpareil, will not, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... give direct support to Longstreet, he could have had him there in under three hours. The staff officer was not sent, and the evidence is that General Lee believed Longstreet strong enough to defeat the Federals without direct aid from Jackson."* (* Letter to the author.) Such reasoning appears incontrovertible. Jackson, be it remembered, had been directed to guard the left flank of the army "until further orders." Had these words been omitted, and he had been left free to follow his own judgment, it is possible ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... calmly continued. "I have looked at the question in all its bearings, I have resolutely attacked it, and by incontrovertible calculations I find that a projectile endowed with an initial velocity of 12,000 yards per second, and aimed at the moon, must necessarily reach it. I have the honor, my brave colleagues, to propose a trial of ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... respectability (Dr. Ingenhousz), informing me that, on making an inquiry into the subject in the county of Wilts, he discovered that a farmer near Calne had been infected with the smallpox after having had the cow-pox, and that the disease in each instance was so strongly characterized as to render the facts incontrovertible. The cow-pox, it seems, from the doctor's information, was communicated to the farmer from his cows at the time that they gave out an offensive stench from ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates—and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... product has not kept pace with the growth of the world's business; the law of supply and demand is irrevocable; ergo, gold HAS appreciated and the debtor HAS been despoiled. The temporary rise in price of one or two or a score of American products in obedience to the laws of trade cannot obscure these incontrovertible facts. WHILE THE PRICE OF WHEAT HAS ADVANCED THE PRICE OF LABOR HAS DECLINED. The wage-worker now receives LESS than formerly, while it costs him MORE to feed his family. And this is what the Republican press and its mugwump echo call prosperity! ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... digression; the question before us is whether Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as incontrovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto to be the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of to-day. If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in Florence, finding himself bored by all the poets I have named, we can yet believe he would be unwilling to ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... and on the plane of purely physical science, and we may therefore be assured that it is not the way in which the memory of the Logos acts; yet it is neatly worked out and absolutely incontrovertible, and as I have said before, it is not without its use, since it gives us a glimpse of some possibilities which otherwise ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... that incontrovertible fact, have you? Then I hope you will permit me to drive you home, especially since these packages are much too numerous and too weighty for you to carry in your arms. As a matter of fact, I have been hoping for an opportunity to meet our new neighbors. Neighbors ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... Catholics themselves. In 1870 a Roman Catholic clergy man in England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had come to tell the truth, published a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth. This Catholic clergyman showed from the original record that Pope Paul V, in 1616, had presided over the tribunal ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a corner. Hundreds of people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father himself, would have confirmed their story. My father, then, could understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people, but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had been of equal amount with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... and his reduction of Christianity to what he called its "natural" and hence incontrovertible basis carried with it a corollary, that of man's absolute right to religious enquiry and profession. Here he became specific, borrowing from Lockean empiricism his conditions of intellectual assent. "Evidence," he said, "ought to be the sole ground of Assent, and Examination is the ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... said I, subridently, "you seem to be very wise." And he did. So far as I knew anything about humans, male and female, his proposition was incontrovertible. "But where did you gather ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... to the narrow limits of the title of the essay, I must urge the special injury done to mankind by disfranchising the whole clerical class; that is to say, by depriving their authority of its proper weight in matters of faith. It is an incontrovertible rule of evidence, that the authority of an interested party is devoid of worth. Reasons are good in themselves, whoever utters them; but in trusting to authority, apart from reason, we need a disinterested authority. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where his view was not ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... young fanatic," said she, "we can't convert each other. We are both incontrovertible. Let us be friends. One needs more time than we have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-favored French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... no call for any hock'erdness, mum,' said Mr. Weller with the utmost politeness; 'no call wotsumever. A lady,' added the old gentleman, looking about him with the air of one who establishes an incontrovertible position, - 'a lady can't be hock'erd. ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... positively determined, except we had the power of looking into the hearts of those, who have incurred the charge. We may form, however, a reasonable conjecture, whether it does or not by presumptive evidence, taken from incontrovertible outward facts. ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... and the a, became Lunar, meaning "of the Moon!" Yet Lunar was unmistakably a word derived from the language of the Earth! It was possible, of course, that this was mere coincidence; but, taken in connection with the suspicions of Jaska, and the incontrovertible fact that Luar resembled people of the Earth, Sarka did not believe in this particular ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... whole; and, whilst the author avoids every thing that is ridiculous or contemptible, he, at the same time, never rises to any thing that we can commend or admire. He says what is incontrovertible, and what has already been said over and over, with much gravity, but says nothing new, sprightly, or entertaining; travelling on in a plain, level, flat road, with great composure, almost through the whole long, and rather tedious volume, which is little better ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Congregationalists owned the territory granted by the charter of Charles I. as though it were a private estate, has been considered in an earlier chapter; and if the legal views there advanced are sound, it is incontrovertible, that all peaceful British subjects had a right to dwell in Massachusetts, provided they did not infringe the monopoly in trade. The only remaining question, therefore, is whether the Quakers were peaceful. Dr. Ellis, Dr. Palfrey, and Dr. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... here have adduced another incontrovertible argument in favour of this view by appealing to the statement, given in the above quotation, of the existence on Inchcolm, in Boece's time, of Danish sepulchral monuments, provided we felt assured ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... may be, this at least is undeniable: the opinion current of the Irish character is demonstrated to be altogether an erroneous one by the incontrovertible facts cursorily narrated above. Determination of purpose, adherence to conscience and principle, consistency of conduct, are terms all too weak to convey an idea of the magnanimity displayed by the people, and of their heroic bearing ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... been commissioned; but, as has justly been remarked of some of the victories of our own ships over those of the British in the War of 1812, although there was disparity of forces, the precision and rapidity with which the work was done bore incontrovertible testimony to the skill and training of the captain and crew. Single combats, such as this, were rare between vessels of the size of the Foudroyant and Pegase, built to sail and fight in fleets. That one occurred here was due to the fact that the speed ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... (which in the third century before Christ was converted to scepticism) and in the sceptical school, we see the first confession of incapacity to discover truth. Instead of certainties they offer probabilities sufficient to guide us through life; the only axiom which they assert as incontrovertible being the fact that we know nothing. Thus instead of proposing as the highest activity of man a life of speculative thought, they came to consider inactivity and impassibility [13] the chief attainable good. Their method of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Guy Seton gave themselves up to the pleasures of the hunt, blissfully forgetful of the young brothers and sisters who were following on wheels; and, indeed, of everything and everyone but just their own two selves. There seemed always to be some incontrovertible reason why they should keep by themselves, a little apart from the rest of the field. Rowena's hunting experiences had been few, and her escort was too anxious about her safety to allow her to try any but the very simplest and smallest of jumps. This excess of precaution necessitated ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... discoveries may surely expect to be reckoned among those whose writings are secure of veneration: yet it often happens that the general reception of a doctrine obscures the books in which it was delivered. When any tenet is generally received and adopted as an incontrovertible principle, we seldom look back to the arguments upon which it was first established, or can bear that tediousness of deduction, and multiplicity of evidence, by which its author was forced to reconcile it to prejudice, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... relation to us and about the relation of sin and death. But the important thing, to begin with, is not to define these relations, but to look through the words to the broad reality which is interpreted in them. What they tell us, and tell us on the basis of an incontrovertible experience, is that the forgiveness of sins is for the Christian mediated through the death of Christ. In one respect, therefore, there is nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins: it is in the same position as every other blessing of which the ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... labourer gets less than he would if the products of the soil were equally distributed. Both wages and profits must fall as more is left to rent, and that this actually happens, he says, with unusual positiveness, is an 'incontrovertible truth.'[285] The fall enables the less fertile land to be cultivated, and gives an excess of produce on the more fertile. 'This excess is rent.'[286] He proceeds to expound his doctrine by comparing land to a set of machines for making corn.[287] If, in manufacture, a new ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... secondly, that they (the late Government) had done a great deal, without doing too much; and thirdly, that there really had occurred no circumstances in the Cabinet, or with the King, sufficient to account for their summary dismissal. There is no denying that his first position is incontrovertible, that he makes out a very fair case for his second, and his argument on the third throws great doubt upon the matter in my mind, having previously had no doubt that the King had a good case to show to the world. It is not so much the Duke's opposition to this or that particular measure, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... prognostications was sublime, though not unusual. It has been within the compass of our experience to meet and know undaunted women who, day after day, could, with equal positiveness, announce their theories as incontrovertible facts, or flatly contradict the assertions of those whose very position enabled them to be well informed. When Mrs. Turner was confronted with the proof of her error, and gently upbraided by the placid captain for being so positive ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Wonderful varying expressions had marked his features and the tones of his voice, while he was uttering that sharp, succinct confession; so that, strange as it sounded, every sentence fixed itself on her with incontrovertible force, and the meaning of the whole flashed through her mind. It struck her too awfully for speech. She held fast to his nerveless hand, and kneeling before him, listened ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... done with a painstaking thoroughness, and the committee's final report was very unpleasant reading. But the names signed to it were so unassailable, the facts so incontrovertible, that Dabney thought best to print it in full, and later to issue it in pamphlet form. It has become a classic for this sort of thing now, and it is always quoted when ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... in her triple house that the Christmas story happened; and it was there where I picked up the incontrovertible facts from the gossip of many roomers and met Stickney—and saw ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... is incontrovertible," Messner agreed. "When three bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time, ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Galilee, who, with his naked hands, convinced in thirty-five minutes nine larger men than himself of the incontrovertible fact that you cannot ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... unconditioned right to have this superiority recognized at the ballot-box. Indeed, the injustice of this is so monstrous, that the Johnson orators find it more convenient to decry all conditions of representation than to meet the incontrovertible reasons for exacting the condition which bases representation on voters. Not to make it a part of the Constitution would be, in Mr. Shellabarger's vivid illustration, to allow "that Lee's vote should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... It is an incontrovertible fact that no great idea ever rests in its own accomplishment. There are offshoots from it, ideas generated in other minds entirely different from the original, yet dependent upon it for life. For instance, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... Michaelis' freedom. It was a deep, calm, convinced infatuation. She had not only felt him to be inoffensive, but she had said so, which last by a confusion of her absolutist mind became a sort of incontrovertible demonstration. It was as if the monstrosity of the man, with his candid infant's eyes and a fat angelic smile, had fascinated her. She had come to believe almost his theory of the future, since it was not repugnant ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... its aid was established nothing less than the inconstancy of matter. Hitherto science, dealing not with knowledge, but with opinions, had held the belief that the atom is the ultimate form of matter and that no chemical or physical force can divide it, a teaching held to be incontrovertible. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... based on the principle that in this degenerate age the Veda is difficult to understand,[440] and that therefore God in His mercy has revealed other texts containing a clear compendium of doctrine. Thus the great Vishnuite doctor Ramanuja states authoritatively "The incontrovertible fact then is as follows: The Lord who is known from the Vedanta texts ... recognising that the Vedas are difficult to fathom by all beings other than himself ... with a view to enable his devotees to grasp the true meaning of the Vedas, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the small appropriation of ten thousand dollars. Great fear was expressed by the public authorities that the baths would not be used, and the old story of the bathtubs in model tenements which had been turned into coal bins was often quoted to us. We were supplied, however, with the incontrovertible argument that in our adjacent third square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs and that this fact was much complained of by many of the tenement-house dwellers. Our contention was justified by the immediate and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... a thousand evidences of a Creator denied to a blind man; and in the same way the man who knows most of the material world should see the most conclusive evidences of design and a Designer. The humblest blade of grass preaches an incontrovertible sermon. What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth? Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals? What a gap would it have ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... how vicious or how ignorant that majority may be. In some cases this leads to a slight alteration of the Latin axiom, Salus populi est suprema lex, which may be read, "the will of the people is the supreme law." The American constitution is admirable in theory; it enunciates the incontrovertible principle, "All men are free and equal." But unfortunately, a serious disturbing element, and one which by its indirect effects threatens to bring the machinery of the Republic to a "dead lock," appears not to have entered into the calculations ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... longing for better days, seemed seconded by a phalanx of ghostly beings, who had untimely passed away by means of fearful treatment, and by the living miseries of multitudes of shapeless deformed ones, who ever stood unpleasant and incontrovertible witnesses of the cruelties and barbarities of the ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... the six first centuries, the prodigies of the Lives of the Saints are noticed by numerous authors of all countries, whose talents, learning, probity, holiness, and dignity, render them respectable to the most searching critics. They are supported by incontrovertible evidence, by juridical depositions, by authentic acts, and by splendid monuments which have been erected to their memory by bishops, princes, magistrates, cities and kingdoms to perpetuate the recollections of these splendid achievements. We find that ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... centuries. They contain theogonies, accounts of the creation, philosophical speculations, fragmentary history, and may be brought to support any sectarian view, having never been intended as one general body, but they are received as incontrovertible authority. In former times great efficacy was attached to sacrifice and religious austerities, but the objects once accomplished in that way are now compassed by mere faith. In the Baghavat Gita, the text-book of the modern school, the sole essential for salvation is dependence on ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... This was incontrovertible logic, and the two outlaws drawing apart conferred with each other softly, while I debated what I should do. The casement was a double one, but I felt sure I could drive a bullet through one of them. Still, even in the circumstances ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... and a complaisant judiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on the Continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were to propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, he would see the days of his statesmanship ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of sympathetic emotion. That was why the butler himself stood on the steps waiting. All these spectators in the background had watched for a long time past; and a simultaneous thrill had run through the household, which no one was conscious of being the cause of, which was instinctive and incontrovertible. If not yesterday, then to-day; or to-morrow, if anything should come in the way to-day. Things had come to such a pitch that they could go no farther. Of this every one in Markland was sure. There is something that gets into the air when excitement and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... not often stop to analyse the reasons of prolonged popular favour; yet nothing is more certain than that there is reason, and good reason, for fidelity in public taste. Popular liking, if continued, is always founded upon certain incontrovertible virtues. If a manufacture cannot hold its own for ever in public favour, it is because it fails in some important particular to be what it should be. Products of the loom must have lasting virtues if they would secure lasting esteem. Blue denim had its hold upon public ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... her eyes in wonder and indignation at a proof so incontrovertible of his falsehood, but made ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... is of necessity, because of the very character of the vessels employed and the very methods, of attack which their employment of course involves, utterly incompatible with the principles of humanity, the long established and incontrovertible rights of neutrals and the sacred ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... here!" Jerry was still trying to grasp that incontrovertible fact. "And you were going to take me ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... nature of a cultivated selfishness, and had lost much of its primal grace. The remaining chance for such a woman, so to speak, seems—that she should either fall in love with a worthy man, if that be still possible to her, or, by her own conduct, be brought into dismal and incontrovertible disgrace. ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... whose tomb you have been standing; at his instance, and in the beginning of the reign of his successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This is not disputed; it is only disputed that the sea facade is earlier; of which, however, the proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea facade being purely Giottesque, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... they produce one effect here and a different one there, since the dullest mind cannot blankly receive a dead statement without some effort to give it life. Borrow was not going to commit himself to incontrovertible statements such as are or might be made to a Life Insurance Company. He had no command of a tombstone style and would not have himself circumscribed with full Christian name, date of birth, etc., as a sexton or parish clerk might have done for him. Twenty years later indeed—in 1862—he ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and did not lose sight of his sister's lover until the last farewell was said, and Frederic bestowed inside the vehicle. There was nothing offensively officious or malicious in all this. Having declared as an incontrovertible dogma, that a ward could form no engagement without the formal sanction of her legal guardian, he saw fit to put the seal upon the decision at this, their adieu, in a manner they were not likely to forget. An hour's harangue would not have imbued them with the sense of his authority, his determination ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... much ground in Mr. Galsworthy's mind. I hope that this ground may slowly be recovered by the opposite idea. Anyhow, the Forsyte is universal. We are all Forsytes, just as we are all Willoughby Patternes, and this incontrovertible statement implies inevitably that Mr. Galsworthy is a writer of the highest rank. I re-read "A Man of Property" immediately after re-reading Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment," and immediately before re-reading Bjoernson's "Arne." ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling. But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds. Not even at Alan Seeger's bidding can we quite persuade ourselves that, when he took up ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... unsupported charges hurled against Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her to work ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... of viewing the best Cezannes, Gauguins, and Van Goghs. I did not see the exhibition several years ago at the Armory, which was none the less an eye-opener. But I have been told by those whose opinion and knowledge are incontrovertible that this trinity of the modern movement was inadequately represented; furthermore, Henri Matisse, a painter of indubitable skill and originality, did not get a fair showing. It would be a superfluous ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the great value of having among us a body of keen, versatile, and well-trained men ready for duty of any sort, and ever alert for their country's welfare in peace or in war. The American Soldier well deserves Mr. Hennessey's tribute, and the present essay adds one more to the already incontrovertible array of arguments in favour of an adequate military system. As printed, the article is marred by a superfluous letter "s" on the very last word, which should read "citizen". "Sowing the Good", a brief bit of moralizing by Horace Fowler Goodwin, contains a serious ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... acquaintance with, {p.092} the profession in its general aspect. To this unimpeachable generalization the settled practice of the nation, whose experience in this matter transcends that of all others combined, gives incontrovertible support. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... brother had visited, on a map, which he brought with him to Venice, and which he hung up in his house as a sure pledge and incontestible proofs of the truth of his relations, and which still remained as an incontrovertible evidence in the time of Marcolini. Many have been inclined to reject the whole of this narrative because the names which it assigns to several of the countries are nowhere else to be found. After having carefully examined, and made a translation of the whole, I am fully convinced that the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Whether they look amongst the most highly civilized peoples or amongst the lowest savages; whether they look into the past history of mankind or into its present condition, there is the stupendous fact of sin, and there is the incontrovertible fact that everywhere men are conscious ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... What has been lost by this action of Lady Burton's? After carefully weighing the pros and cons we have come to the conclusion that the loss could not possibly have been a serious one. That Burton placed a very high value on his work, that he considered it his masterpiece, is incontrovertible, but he had formed in earlier days just as high an opinion of his Camoens and his Kasidah; therefore what he himself said about it has not necessarily any great weight. We do not think the loss serious ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... war—General Sherman's formula—is substantially correct. All the while it is to be admitted that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed, no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the pacifists' quest ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... this vitally important question, we shall most of us, I take it, agree upon certain points. In the light of recent knowledge upon, and extended experience of the subject, one such point which now appears incontrovertible is that there are thousands die annually—directly or indirectly—through overfeeding where one dies through insufficient nourishment. And it may at once be said that, as regards these thousands, the death certificates ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... Creator denied to a blind man; and in the same way the man who knows most of the material world should see the most conclusive evidences of design and a Designer. The humblest blade of grass preaches an incontrovertible sermon. What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth? Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals? What a gap would it have been in nature if there had been ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... said Malcolm, with the calm earnestness of one who is merely stating an incontrovertible fact, and for a moment his eyes, at once troubled and solemn, kept looking wistfully in hers, as if searching for a comfort too good to be found, then slowly sank and sought the floor ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... lungs. Moreover it can be felt that the lungs fill more readily when air is taken in through the nostrils than when inspiration takes place through the mouth. That breath should be taken in through the nostrils is, like all rules in the correct physiology of voice-production, deduced from incontrovertible physical facts. It is, moreover, preventive of many affections of the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... The Prince paid us two visits, but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such entire reliance on your faith, such confidence ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... can be greater than this, and at the same time more incontrovertible? But it has nothing to do with memory; on the contrary, it is just because the clerk has no memory that his action of the second day so exactly resembles that of the first. As long as he has no power of recollecting, he will day after day repeat the same actions in exactly the same way, until ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... are as little logical or argumentative as nature; they can offer no reason or "guess," but they exhibit the solemn and incontrovertible fact. If a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. Their silent and practical logic convinces the reason and the understanding at the same time. Of such sort is always the only pertinent question ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... planet, has apparently gained much ground in Mr. Galsworthy's mind. I hope that this ground may slowly be recovered by the opposite idea. Anyhow, the Forsyte is universal. We are all Forsytes, just as we are all Willoughby Patternes, and this incontrovertible statement implies inevitably that Mr. Galsworthy is a writer of the highest rank. I re-read "A Man of Property" immediately after re-reading Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment," and immediately before re-reading Bjoernson's "Arne." It ranks well ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... self-devotedness and true Christian martyrdom. Under the mask of Protestant candour, he actually gained admission for his treatise into a London weekly paper, not particularly distinguished for its zeal towards either religion. But, admitting Catholic principles, his arguments are shrewd and incontrovertible. [Then follows a quotation from Hazlitt setting forth the Catholic standpoint.] It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of this reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... incontrovertible. They are not sought to be controverted, except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, the violation of Belgian territory as a first step on her road to Germany. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... But while these incontrovertible allegations gave the Republicans a logical advantage of which they properly made the most, the South claimed a right to make other collateral and equally undeniable facts the ground of action. The only public matter in connection with which Mr. Lincoln had won any reputation ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... from the postern a group of human beings—beings with immortal souls, and possibly some reasoning faculties; but to me the grand point was this, that they had real, substantial, and incontrovertible turbans. They made for the point towards which we were steering, and when at last I sprang upon the shore, I heard, and saw myself now first surrounded by men of Asiatic blood. I have since ridden through the land of the Osmanlees, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... deluded; that the poisonous and venomous doctrine of State rights might have been kept aloof; that so many gallant spirits, such as Jackson, might still have lived. [Great applause and loud cheers, again and again renewed.] The force of these facts, historical and incontrovertible, cannot be broken, except by diverting attention by an attack upon the North. It is said that the North is fighting for Union, and not for emancipation. The North is fighting for Union, for that ensures emancipation. [Loud cheers, "Oh, oh!" "No, no!" and cheers.] A ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... assumed as an incontrovertible principle, that in this country the people are the superintendants of the conduct and measures of those by whom government is administered; of the beneficial effect of which the present reign afforded ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his political bias; or should there be nothing uttered by any speaker that may suit his purpose, these ear-trumpets will change the sounds of words and the construction of sentences in such a way as to be incontrovertible, although every syllable should be diverted from its original meaning and intention. They have also the power of larding a speech with "loud cheers," or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... attack. There was only a day left—perhaps two days. It was then I wrote you two letters, I think those of the 13th and 14th; and really, as I was writing, I had within my heart such a plenitude of conviction, such a sweetness of feeling, as give incontrovertible assurance of the reality of the beautiful and the good. The bombardment of our position was violent; but nothing that man can do is able to stifle or silence what Nature has to say to ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... pleasure of such unjust and Cruel Men were declared Rebels, and accu's of that Crime before our Lord the King; and blindess or ignorance of those who were set over the Indians as Rulers did so darken their understanding that they did not apprehend that known and incontrovertible Maxim in Law, That no Man can be called a Rebel, who is not first proved to be a subject. I omit the injuries and prejudice they do to the King himself, when they spoil and ravage his Kingdoms, and as much as in them lies, diminish and impair ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... there is any disposition, overt or acknowledged, to differentiate on the score of sex. It is not right to yield on these points, for an important principle is at stake. On the other hand the time and place for insistence must be wisely selected, and any claim made must be incontrovertible on the score of justice and practicability. Lastly, women on committees and elsewhere are not justified in keeping unduly in the background. When they have something worth contributing to the discussion, it is not modesty but lack of business ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... of days of thought on the subject, I am obliged to repeat my assertion. Your own convictions in the matter, and your story of the shadow and the peaked cap may appeal to the public and assure you some sympathy, but for an entire reversal of its opinion you will need substantial and incontrovertible evidence. You must remember—you will pardon my frankness—that your husband's character failed to stand the test of inquiry. His principles were slack, his temper violent. You have suffered from both and must ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the state of the blacks in the island of Cuba (del arreglo de este delicado asunto.) Further, we are far from adopting the maxims which the nations of Europe, who boast of their civilization, have regarded as incontrovertible; that, for instance, without slaves there could be no colonies. We declare, on the contrary, that without slaves, and even without blacks, colonies might have existed, and that the whole difference would have been comprised in more or less profit, by the more or less rapid increase of the products. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... was agreed that Echo should proceed forthwith to Golgotha, and there, with undaunted front, meet his accusers; while I was to proceed to Transit and Lionise, and having instructed them in the story we had planned, meet him at the place of skulls, fully prepared to establish, by the most incontrovertible and consistent evidence, that we were not the aggressors in the row. A little persuasion was necessary to convince both our friends that their presence would be essential to Echo's acquittal; they had too many ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... men and women consecrated to God by vows of chastity forms but an imperceptible fraction of the human family, their proportion in the United States, for instance, being only one individual to about every four thousand. Moreover, it is an incontrovertible fact that the population increases most in those countries in which the Catholic clergy exercise the strongest influence; for there married people are impressed with the idea that marriage was instituted not for the gratification ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... some other phraseology. He begins thus: "Grammarians differ in opinion, respecting the propriety of the following modes of expression: 'The arguments advanced were nearly as follows;' 'the positions were, as appears, incontrovertible.'"— Murray's Gram., 8vo, p. 146. Then follows a detail of suggestions from Campbell and others, all the quotations being anonymous, or at least without definite references. Omitting these, I would here say of the two examples given, that they ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... instance, that girls were girls, and bygones bygones, and that, so long as young people were young and thoughtless, they would probably conduct themselves like young and thoughtless persons: with two or three other positions of a no less sound and incontrovertible character. She then remarked, in a devout spirit, that she thanked Heaven she had always found in her daughter May a dutiful and obedient child: for which she took no credit to herself, though she had every ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the Great Indian Company of course affected very much the credit of that Company in this country. Sedative announcements were issued by the Directors in London; brilliant accounts of the Company's affairs abroad were published; proof incontrovertible was given that the B. B. C. was never in so flourishing a state as at that time when Hobson Brothers had refused its drafts; there could be no question that the Company had received a severe wound and was deeply if not vitally injured by the conduct ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the greatest advantage all the vicissitudes of life; an intellect developed along the lines of its greatest possibilities; and an occupation chosen in accordance with the tastes and talents of the individual; it becomes an incontrovertible fact that the education is the controlling factor in the physical life ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... 'Reliance cannot be placed on her testimony.... It would be unjust to found on it a decree against any man, save in so far as what she has sworn to may be corroborated by written documents, or unimpeached witnesses, or incontrovertible facts.' ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... weakened as to do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents are preventable; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old aoe, and that if death cannot ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Roman Catholic clergy man in England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had come to tell the truth, published a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth. This Catholic clergyman showed from the original record that Pope Paul V, in 1616, had presided ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... delegated to the devil, yet he was, in the course of providence, permitted to exercise a certain supernatural influence over the minds of men, whereby he could persuade them that they really saw a form that had no material objective existence.[1] Here was a position incontrovertible, not on account of the arguments by which it could be supported, but because it was impossible to reason against it; and it slowly, but surely, took hold upon the popular mind. Indeed, the elimination of the diabolic factor leaves the modern sceptical belief ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... follow up this statement, for its truth was incontrovertible, and showed that the father's ill-will was too tangible a thing to be concealed; so ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Legislatures have directed, but an appointment and a certificate are different things. The latter is, at the very best, only evidence of the former. The fact to be determined is the appointment; the certificate is produced as evidence; it may be controvertible or incontrovertible, as the law may have provided, but there is nothing in the nature of a certificate which forbids inquiry into its verity; it is not a revelation from above; it is a paper made by men, fallible always, and sometimes dishonest ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... tones. They gave it as their opinion that no terms of peace could be agreed upon. But the demands of the English Plenipotentiaries were met in a manner so decided, and reasons were offered for non-compliance so cogent and incontrovertible, that they were compelled to recede, and come to terms of a more reasonable description. Moreover the British nation was heartily sick of foreign wars, which plunged the Government into debt, sacrificed the lives of its subjects, crippled their manufactories, and secured ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... with the simplest elementary substances, we should be able to follow the process of combination and division, leading by numberless and imperceptible changes from the lowest Bathybios to the highest Hypsibios, and that we should succeed in establishing by incontrovertible facts what old sages had but guessed, viz., that there is nowhere anything hard and specific in nature, but all is flowing and growing, without an efficient cause or a determining purpose, under the sway of circumstances only, or of a ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... our consideration, but we are immediately confronted by a difficulty which seems insurmountable when we attempt to formulate any definite estimate of the value and influence of Edison's pioneer work and inventions. There is one incontrovertible fact—namely, that he was the first man to devise, construct, and operate from a central station a practicable, life-size electric railroad, which was capable of transporting and did transport passengers and freight at variable speeds over varying grades, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... faith in the justice of her prognostications was sublime, though not unusual. It has been within the compass of our experience to meet and know undaunted women who, day after day, could, with equal positiveness, announce their theories as incontrovertible facts, or flatly contradict the assertions of those whose very position enabled them to be well informed. When Mrs. Turner was confronted with the proof of her error, and gently upbraided by the placid captain ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... boy," said I, subridently, "you seem to be very wise." And he did. So far as I knew anything about humans, male and female, his proposition was incontrovertible. "But where did you ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... crime and outrage. Ireland is idle, and therefore she starves; Ireland starves, and therefore she rebels. We must choose between industry and anarchy: we must have one or the other in Ireland. This proposition I believe to be incontrovertible, and I defy the House to give peace and prosperity to that country until they set in motion her industry, create and diffuse capital, and thus establish those gradations of rank and condition by which the whole social fabric ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... nature of the man that many worthy persons unfamiliar with the true facts of history have believed that Joseph was a purely apocryphal infant, or, as some have suggested, merely an adopted child; but that Napoleon did upon this occasion content himself with second place is an incontrovertible fact. Nor is it entirely unaccountable. It is hardly to be supposed that a true military genius, such as Napoleon is universally conceded to have been, would plunge into the midst of a great battle without first having ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... those few instances, (admitting there were some, though in point of strict fact he believed there were none,) did not in any manner or degree affect his general argument, which he held upon the authorities he had cited to be altogether incontrovertible. He was not before their lordships to show where the right which he asserted in behalf of the queen-consort had been claimed and refused. In every instance, in which it was actually possible for a coronation of a queen to take place, he had shown that it had been solemnized. There ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... part though. The incontrovertible part was that things came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80's when the two Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile away to ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... with grave forebodings—frightened by terrors that are of the mind and that put at naught all that my mind has ever conceived. Form is mutable. This is the last word of positive science. The dead do not come back. This is incontrovertible. The dead are dead, and that is the end of it, and of them. And yet I have had experiences here—here, in this very room, at this very desk, that—But wait. Let me put it down in black and white, in words simple ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... been heard to comment in resentful and carping tones. There has probably never existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of its unintentional ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... recently been commissioned; but, as has justly been remarked of some of the victories of our own ships over those of the British in the War of 1812, although there was disparity of forces, the precision and rapidity with which the work was done bore incontrovertible testimony to the skill and training of the captain and crew. Single combats, such as this, were rare between vessels of the size of the Foudroyant and Pegase, built to sail and fight in fleets. That one occurred here was due ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... It will not do to treat it lightly. It is a statement of what international law is on this point from an authority; and the reasons for the doctrine are clear and incontrovertible. Neutrality depends on the fact of war; when, for any cause, that fact no longer exists, neutrality ceases likewise, of course. It is only the application of a well-known maxim of law, that when the reason of a rule fails, the rule itself fails. Let there be 'a cessation of hostilities,' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Hinduism. Much of it is avowedly based on the principle that in this degenerate age the Veda is difficult to understand,[440] and that therefore God in His mercy has revealed other texts containing a clear compendium of doctrine. Thus the great Vishnuite doctor Ramanuja states authoritatively "The incontrovertible fact then is as follows: The Lord who is known from the Vedanta texts ... recognising that the Vedas are difficult to fathom by all beings other than himself ... with a view to enable his devotees to grasp the true meaning of the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... but the case appears to me one of the simplest. If my uncle wished the bitterest revenge on you, what could be more terrible than cause you to be the executioner of your own son? The vengeance, however, to be complete, depends on his being able to place before you incontrovertible proof that you were the father of the victim. Send, therefore, a messenger to him, one from Gudenfels, who knows nothing of what has happened in this castle of Schonburg, and who is therefore unable to disclose, even if forced to confess, that Wilhelm is alive. Let the messenger inform ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... agreement with the United States representatives, announced that it ran where no one had ever suggested it could run, north of two and south of two, thus dividing the land in dispute. The islands were of little importance even strategically, but the incontrovertible evidence that instead of a judicial finding a political compromise had been effected was held of much importance. After a time the storm died down, but it revealed one unmistakable fact: Canadian nationalism was growing fully as fast ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... unsettle faith in the existing order than to settle it in any other; similarly, missionaries are more valuable as underminers of old faiths than as propagators of new. Miracles are not impossible; nothing is impossible till we have got an incontrovertible first premise. The question is not "Are the Christian miracles possible?" but "Are they convenient? Do they fit ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... series of arguments, which he had thought incontrovertible. As each was brought forward, the Captain turned to his Bible, and produced a text, which with its context clearly refuted it. Text after text was brought forward. At first the General had been very confident of success; by degrees ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... wherever it existed. He won many of his lawsuits by the straightforward method of showing that the one or two vital statements on which the whole case of the opposition rested were false, inasmuch as they were inconsistent with well-established and incontrovertible facts. An instance of ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... your mother will feel anxious, I will send and inform her where you are," said Mrs. Anderson, "but you must stay, my dear." There was about her a soft, but incontrovertible authority. It was all gentleness, like the overlap of feathers, but it was compelling. It was while Mrs. Anderson was insisting and the girl protesting that Anderson, with Eddy at his heels, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... given; the very question of her portrait has its own vexed (and until now unrecognized) dilemmas. In fine there seems no point connected with our first professional authoress which did not call for the nicest investigation and the most incontrovertible proof before it could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather cumber our path with the trash of discredited Memoirs. Pearson's reprint (1871) ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... conceptions not brought into form; but as these are open to endless misconceptions, they will doubtless give rise to a number of crude criticisms: for in these things, every one thinks, when he takes up his pen, that whatever comes into his head is worth saying and printing, and quite as incontrovertible as that twice two make four. If such a one would take the pains, as I have done, to think over the subject, for years, and to compare his ideas with military history, he would certainly be a little more guarded in ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... which, as before has been said, they are very right, for there can only be in the world body and the space which bodies occupy. But granting this great workman to have done so much, is it not quite an incontrovertible proposition, that whoever first made a thing, as, for example, a chair or a table, must have had an adequate idea of it's nature and use. Dr. Priestley speaks more correctly in another part, by saying, he must have been capable of comprehending it. The nature and use of things ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... faith in medicine. He spoke of it as an art entirely conjectural, and his opinion on this subject was fired and incontrovertible. His vigorous mind rejected all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... gauze azure scarf twisted in her hair!!" No lady, we understand, when suddenly roused in the night, would think of hurrying on "a frock." They have garments more convenient for such occasions, and more becoming too. This evidence seems incontrovertible. Even granting that these incongruities were purposely assumed, for the sake of disguising the female pen, there is nothing gained; for if we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... harmonises with human nature. It may be, of course, that even when we have such a criterion we may, for want of "light" or of logic, fail to solve this problem of the best legislation. Errare humanum est, but it seems incontrovertible that this problem can be solved, that we can, by taking our stand upon an exact knowledge of human nature, find a perfect legislation, ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... Maine story, Mrs. Stowe found it necessary to take notice in some manner of the cruel and incessant attacks made upon her as the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and to fortify herself against them by a published statement of incontrovertible facts. It was claimed on all sides that she had in her famous book made such ignorant or malicious misrepresentations that it was nothing short of a tissue of falsehoods, and to refute this she was compelled to write a "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which should appear the sources ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... Titanic instruments of your Government's ambitious Caesarian policy and find it difficult to effectively resist their courageous onslaught. Limited are our warlike resources, but we will continue this unjust, bloody, and unequal struggle, not for the love of war—which we abhor—but to defend our incontrovertible rights of Liberty and Independence (so dearly won in war with Spain) and our territory which is threatened by the ambitions of a party that is trying to ...
— True Version of the Philippine Revolution • Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy
... convince her that she was Somebody; and the girl herself was so easily persuaded of it that she quite forgot that anybody had ever told her so, and took it for a fundamental, innate, primary, first-born, self- evident, necessary, and incontrovertible idea and principle that SHE WAS SOMEBODY. And far be it from me to deny it. I will even go so far as to assert that in this odd country there was a huge number of Somebodies. Indeed, it was one of its oddities ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... diabolos.] The children of the wicked one, or of the devil, who are spoken of in this passage, are the seed of the serpent who is mentioned in Gen. iii. 15, and to whom allusion is made in the words [Greek: ho speiras auta] also. Less incontrovertible is the passage in St Matthew xxiii. 33, where the Lord addressed the Pharisees as [Greek: opheis, gennemata echidnon]. (Compare Matt. xii. 34, iii. 7.) Olshausen, in his commentary on Matt. iii. 7, gives it as his opinion that the serpent ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... said, mournfully, as if quietly accepting the incontrovertible fact. "I told you once, and I yet trust, that the day may dawn wherein my Lady's heart shall come ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial. The murder of the Mayor of Senlis ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... the only rational procedure is to begin by determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... is materialistic enough, and on the plane of purely physical science, and we may therefore be assured that it is not the way in which the memory of the Logos acts; yet it is neatly worked out and absolutely incontrovertible, and as I have said before, it is not without its use, since it gives us a glimpse of some possibilities which otherwise might ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... sincerity. No writer of the present day, save perhaps Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon literary history. Every argument he brings forward is supported by an array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with dates to the point of handling them as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, whose evidence, depending on our organization and relative situations, must remain acknowledged as satisfactory so long as man is man. It is an incontrovertible fact, the consideration of which ought to repress the hasty conclusions of credulity, or moderate its obstinacy in maintaining them, that, had the Jews not been a fanatical race of men, had even the resolution of Pontius Pilate been ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "These are incontrovertible facts, and they find their application to the existing European situation in various ways, the most important of which will appear in the discovery that, valuable as conventions and covenants of nation with nation may be, and intolerable as any violation ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel's fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney's face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney's face, refined, sharpened, tried ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself—illuminating like the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... is scanty, and milk rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and Northern travellers drink boiled tea au natural. Cows are the eternal feminine and will not ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... credit to his young pupil. The first point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Foerster's attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Foerster's evidence appears incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light: this very archaic treatment ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... own signature, but for reasons of his own he did not sign. What he did do was to pass the book round to be countersigned by all who had formed the court in this mock trial, his object being to implicate every one there present in the judicial murder by the direct and incontrovertible evidence of his sign-manual. Now, Boers are simple pastoral folk, but they are not quite so simple as to be deceived by a move like this, and hereon followed a very instructive little scene. To a man they had been willing enough to give ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... the theological opinions of the earlier periods of Grecian civilization. That the ancient Greeks believed in one Supreme God has been conclusively proved by Cudworth. The argument of his fourth chapter is incontrovertible.[391] However great the number of "generated gods" who crowded the Olympus, and composed the ghostly array of Greek mythology, they were all subordinate agents, "demiurges," employed in the framing of the world and all material things, or else the ministers of the moral ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... his life. Wonderful varying expressions had marked his features and the tones of his voice, while he was uttering that sharp, succinct confession; so that, strange as it sounded, every sentence fixed itself on her with incontrovertible force, and the meaning of the whole flashed through her mind. It struck her too awfully for speech. She held fast to his nerveless hand, and kneeling before him, listened for his long ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... he said, "a discreditable but incontrovertible fact that saints have always been reviled. I suppose it's jealousy." He turned to his wife. "By the way, did you pack my aureola? I left it ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... ignorant that majority may be. In some cases this leads to a slight alteration of the Latin axiom, Salus populi est suprema lex, which may be read, "the will of the people is the supreme law." The American constitution is admirable in theory; it enunciates the incontrovertible principle, "All men are free and equal." But unfortunately, a serious disturbing element, and one which by its indirect effects threatens to bring the machinery of the Republic to a "dead lock," appears not to have entered into the calculations ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Wilts, he discovered that a farmer near Calne had been infected with the smallpox after having had the cow-pox, and that the disease in each instance was so strongly characterized as to render the facts incontrovertible. The cow-pox, it seems, from the doctor's information, was communicated to the farmer from his cows at the time that they gave out an ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... quibble, or to question, concerning the grounds of this great hope. From the first moment that she comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so incontrovertible did it seem. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... coldly. "I have evidence the most incontrovertible, that he has conspired against the life of the king, your brother, by the foulest acts of sorcery. A wax figure, fashioned as a king, pierced to the heart by his very hand, has been laid before me. Your brother's illness, his mortal pains, his malady so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Zionism with arguments that are incontrovertible, but totally irrelevant; it busies itself with destroying claims which the Zionists have never made. A trio may be taken as representative. It is pointed out with cogency that Palestine is not capable of supporting the twelve million of Jews ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... his summers, Mr. Port—after a month spent for the good of his liver in taking the waters at the White Sulphur—of course went to Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very probably would ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... primal grace. The remaining chance for such a woman, so to speak, seems—that she should either fall in love with a worthy man, if that be still possible to her, or, by her own conduct, be brought into dismal and incontrovertible disgrace. ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... the circumstances of the marriage of Violet Dalston, then only eighteen years of age, with a Mr. Grainger; the birth of a son; and subsequent disappearance of the husband; concluding by an assurance to the jury that I should prove, by incontrovertible evidence, that Grainger was no other person than the late Sir Harry Compton, baronet. This address by no means lessened the vague apprehensions of the other side. A counsel that, with such materials for eloquence, disdained having recourse to it, must needs have a formidable ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... the inconstancy of matter. Hitherto science, dealing not with knowledge, but with opinions, had held the belief that the atom is the ultimate form of matter and that no chemical or physical force can divide it, a teaching held to be incontrovertible. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... Thus we gradually paint portraits of each other. For the opponent presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme. Rarely in politics or industrial disputes is a place made for him by the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen another aspect ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... and announced that we had one of his horses. He said that five animals had been stolen from him and that the little brown pony for which I had traded with the lama was one of them. His proof was incontrovertible and according to the law of the country I was bound to give back the animal and accept the loss. However, a half dozen hard-riding Mongol soldiers at once took up the trail of the lama, and the chances are that there will be one less thieving priest before the ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... contrary, some definite good, as far as I can judge; and that I republish the whole now, letter for letter, as originally printed, believing it likely to be still serviceable, and, on the ground it takes for argument, (Scriptural authority,) incontrovertible as far as it reaches; though it amazes me to find on re-reading it, that, so late as 1851, I had only got the length of perceiving the schism between sects of Protestants to be criminal, and ridiculous, while I still supposed the schism between Protestants ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... upon him by various observations which he made in the village. One was incontrovertible proof that these people were man-eaters; the other, the presence in the village of various articles of native German uniforms and equipment. At great risk and in the face of surly objection on the part of the chief, the ape-man made a careful inspection ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the shorter the period a man or woman has spent in Japan the more pronounced his or her views in regard to the country. The matter is hardly worth referring to were it not that these opinions, hastily arrived at and apparently as hurriedly rushed into print, have been accepted by some people as incontrovertible facts. Another class of work that I think a reader should be warned against is the book of the man who has lived in Japan for a time and seen life only from a certain standpoint. The book of a bishop or a missionary ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... somewhat familiar to the champions of Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... This statement being incontrovertible, I let the argument lapse, and sat quiet, luxuriating in the warmth, in the fresh breeze, in the feeling of bodily well-being that came with my returning strength. I got up and stretched, and my eyes fell on the small ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... them which appeals to the minds of men, we must assume that every error contains a kernel of truth, however small it be. No one of opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as entirely false. To discover the incontrovertible fact which lies at their basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree, and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent manifestations. No antagonism is older, wider, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... was the least symptom of mental disturbance in him after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters (in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense and kind heart, some of them, indeed, being tinged with ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
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