"Cogent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... God to all mankind," to which he opposed the Calvinistic tenet of particular and personal predestination; in defence of which indefensible notion he found himself more at a loss than he expected. Edward Burrough said not much to him upon it, though what he said was close and cogent; but James Naylor interposing, handled the subject with so much perspicuity and clear demonstration, that his reasoning seemed to be irresistible; and so I suppose my father found it, which made him willing to ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... into account the large percentage of myopes among the deaf, we believe there are other cogent reasons why, if found practicable, the use of the sense of touch may become an important element in our eclectic system of teaching. We should reckon it of considerable importance if it were ascertained that a portion of the same work now performed by the eye could ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... conversation I am recalling. When I started out it was quite settled in the back of my mind that I must not leave Rawdon's. I simply wanted to abuse my employer to Parload. But I talked myself quite out of touch with all the cogent reasons there were for sticking to my place, and I got home that night irrevocably committed to a spirited—not to say a ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... certain term; but her gallant absolutely refused to comply with this demand; and although Mr. M'Namara, the gentleman who was sent to him, who has a natural eloquence and an excellent understanding, urged the most cogent reasons, and used all the arts of persuasion, to induce him to part with his mistress, and even proceeded so far as to assure him, according to his instructions, that an immediate interruption of all ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... up an opinion held only by a few, condemned by all the schools, and really regarded as a great paradox, it cannot be doubted that he must have been induced, not to say driven, to embrace it by the most cogent arguments. On this account I have become very curious to penetrate to the very bottom ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... communications against the repeal of the election laws and against the right of Congress to deprive the Executive of that separate and independent discretion and judgment which the Constitution confers and requires are equally cogent in opposition to this bill. This measure leaves the powers and duties of the supervisors of elections untouched. The compensation of those officers is provided for under permanent laws, and no liability for which an appropriation is now required ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... is built differently from any other; we get the plans by erecting the structure. In the realm of character it is houses rather than architecture we need. Build but one hour's conduct squarely on the plain, cogent teachings of the man of Nazareth and you will serve the world better than if you gave a lifetime to ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... whether to wait longer or to proceed; my way lay just by him, and it might be dangerous to interrupt so substantial an apparition. However, my curiosity was excited, and my feet were half frozen, two cogent reasons for proceeding; and, to say truth, I was never very much frightened by any thing ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... work of deception is to go forth to the kings of the earth, and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of the great day of God Almighty. Thus all that is revealed of them from beginning to end (and scriptures might be multiplied on the point) furnishes the most cogent reason why all should be keenly awake to their existence and their work, and be ever watchful against their ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... this reasoning seemed, at first, to produce little effect. But to those just behind it appeared more cogent, seconded as it was by a consuming curiosity. Moreover, the masses in the rear were rolling down, and their pressure presently became irresistible. All at once the front ranks realized that they had no choice in the matter. They sagged forward, surged obstinately back again, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... reasons have I, a Worker, deeply interested in the welfare of the fellow-workers who are my countrymen, lent to Truth and Justice what little aid I could, by adapting Bastiat's keen and cogent Essay to the wants of readers on this side ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Lord Brougham excelled in cogent, effective argument. His impassioned reasoning often made ordinary things interesting. He ingratiated himself by his wise and generous sentiments, and his uncompromising ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... Clarendon, Lord Morpeth, now Earl of Carlisle, Lord John Russell, and his friend, Mr. Richard Cobden. Sir Robert Peel, who was at that time Prime Minister, had always adhered to the protective doctrines of Pitt and Wellington; and it was mainly due to the clear and cogent reasoning of Bright and his associates, that the illustrious statesman at the head of the Treasury finally yielded, with a magnanimity never surpassed in the annals of ministerial history, to the enlightened policy of free trade ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... similes show any close observance of nature, and in any case the poetic interest of bulls, lions, and tigers is far from inexhaustible. It is less reprehensible that twenty similes should be drawn from storms, which have a more cogent interest and greater picturesque value. But even here Statius has overshot the mark. This lack of variety testifies to a real dearth of poetic imagination, and this failing is noticeable also in the execution. There is rarely a simile containing anything that ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... an epitome of reasons why 'all humane and thoughtful people' should disapprove of vivisection, and the sinister effects of the existence of this practice in our midst. The statements are cogent, and will find a response in the heart of ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... confined strictly to the female parent, and the procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only, we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female, since our capacity grows by ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... highest talents which their warmest friends could attribute to them would account, so it seemed to me, for the outbursts of uproarious applause which greeted from time to time the one who was now speaking. In the applauded passages I failed to detect anything more cogent or pungent than the general substance of those which were passed by in silence. I could find no explanation of this perplexing fact till I realized that behind the platform was a tall, greased pole, up which successive competitors were doing their ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... the delights of an autumnal tour with his wife and mother-in-law before returning to Holland; in short, was so plausible in his arguments, so specious and pressing, pleading so eloquently the violence of his love and inutility of delay, and overruling objections with such cogent reasoning, that he achieved a complete triumph, and it was agreed that in one week Van Haubitz should lead his adored Emilie to the hymeneal altar. In the interval, he would have abundant time to obtain his father's consent and the necessary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... interfere with his liberty, added redoubled impetus to Wyatt 's desire to be gone. He suddenly devised a cogent necessity. "I be feared my dad mought hear that fool tale. I ain't much loss, but ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Even this cogent reasoning failed in provoking Cosway to reply. He took Stone's hat, and handed it with the utmost politeness to his foreboding friend. "There's only one remedy for such a state of mind as yours," he said. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... among his herds and flocks; and that, though you appear to be travelling for amusement, you are, in fact, a political exile. All these are grounds for a reduced ransom. At present he believes nothing that I say, because his mind has been previously impressed with contrary and more cogent representations, but what I say will begin to work when he has experienced some disappointment, and the period of re-action arrives. Re-action is the law of society; it is inevitable. All success depends upon ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... So cogent is this objection, and so frequently does it appear, not only in ethical discussion but in the minds of the struggling multitude, that he who has not faced it, and taken its truth well to heart, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... matter. The laws of physics, it may be urged, are apparently adequate to explain everything that happens to matter, even when it is matter in a man's brain. This, however, is only a hypothesis, not an established theory. There is no cogent empirical reason for supposing that the laws determining the motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those that apply to dead matter. Sometimes, of course, they are clearly the same. When a man falls from a precipice ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... them, some who ought to have known better, adopted the saying of Mr. Howells in a wider sense than he ever intended it to carry, and, partly as a result of this, we have arrived at a certain tacit depreciation of the greatest emotional master of fiction. There are other and more cogent reasons for the temporary obscuration of that brilliant light. It may aid our present purpose ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... that usage is general both at Oxford and Cambridge, and I rather think that not only an explanation of the fact may be given, but that the fact itself, that in both the Universities the h is sounded, is extremely cogent evidence that it is correct. It cannot be doubted that the fact that a word is spelled with certain letters is clear proof that, at the time when that spelling was adopted, the word was so sounded as to give ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... his wife, De Luynes next caused himself to be appointed lieutenant of the King in Normandy; and this was no sooner done than he entered into a negotiation for one of the principal governments in the kingdom. He appeared suddenly to have forgotten that one of the most cogent reasons which he had so lately given for the necessity of sacrificing the Marechal d'Ancre and his wife was the enormous wealth of which they had possessed themselves at the expense of the state. His ambition as well as his avarice became insatiable; and not contented ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Catherine never showed more political wisdom than in this matter, and it was the one aim of her life in which she wholly failed. We have in the Legenda Minore a racy account of a personal interview with Gregory on the subject, in which she presented cogent considerations to him. She shrewdly suggested that the mercenary troops who ravaged Italy, and were "the very cause and nourishment of war," would gladly turn their arms against the infidel, "For there are few people so wicked that they are not willing to serve God ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... American ballad-monger? He was full of gay irresponsibility. Ever since, on returning to his rooms after some tedious lecture, he announced to his friends that he had lost an umbrella but preserved, thank God, his honour, they augured a brilliant future for him. So, for other but no less cogent reasons, did ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... adding: "If we unite our strength in the second, I think we can produce something worthy of fame, for we shall have plenty of matter to employ talent upon." A later letter, which was written from 7 Museum Street (8th January), told how he had "been obliged to decamp from Russell St. for the cogent reason of an execution having been sent into the house, and I thought myself happy in escaping ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... have twenty-eight lunar stations, the Manzil, and I can see no reason why Mohammed and his Bedouins in the desert should not have made the same observation as the Vedic poets in India, though I must admit at the same time that Colebrooke has brought forward very cogent arguments to prove that, in their scientific employment at least, the Arabic Manzil were really borrowed from ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... last morsel as the feature of No. 3, and still more if you can stretch a point with regard to time (which is of the last importance just now), and make a subject out of it, rather than find one in it. I would neither have made this alteration nor have troubled you about it, but for weighty and cogent reasons which I feel very strongly, and into the composition of which caprice ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... astonishment. They seemed by no means to relish this foretaste of what was before them. Mine, in particular, had conceived a moral aversion to the prairie life. One of them, christened Hendrick, an animal whose strength and hardihood were his only merits, and who yielded to nothing but the cogent arguments of the whip, looked toward us with an indignant countenance, as if he meditated avenging his wrongs with a kick. The other, Pontiac, a good horse, though of plebeian lineage, stood with his head drooping ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... converted into enemies; and the ruthless punishment inflicted on them for each futile effort to recover some of the property stolen from them, had rendered inevitable the continuance and constant extension of the strife all through the five generations of Dutch rule, and furnished cogent precedent for like action afterwards,[7] After 1652, Colonists of the baser sort kept arriving in cargoes, and gradually the Netherlands Company allowed persons not of their own nation to land and settle under severe ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... the last century, love, that most cogent motive of human thought and action, fell from its high estate and came to be regarded as an instinct not differing in any essential from hunger and thirst, and existing, like them, from the beginning, eternal and immutable, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the facts stated are almost superabundantly established by reference to the authorities; and wherever it becomes necessary to demonstrate the misrepresentations of American writers, the author's forcible way of putting the subject-matter in dispute is at once clear and cogent. In short, the narrative is interesting, whilst the arguments that crop up now and again are pointed and convincing. We had some doubts as to the venerable author's age; but he leaves no doubt upon the point in a passage ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Hugh and his father, the commodore and madame, the first mate, the twins, Ramsey, and the committee of seven—who, we shall see, were not taking discomfiture meekly—were scarlet threads in the story's swiftly weaving fabric—cogent reasons, themselves, why these two ladies had helped vote Ramsey to ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... bridling their vagrant propensities by a ring-fence of forts or military posts; to say nothing of the still readier plan for securing their fidelity (a plan already talked of in all quarters) by exacting a large body of hostages selected from the families of the most influential 30 nobles. On these cogent considerations, it was solemnly determined that this terrific experiment should be made in the next year of the tiger, which happened to fall upon the Christian year 1771. With respect to the month, there was, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... in abeyance for maturer deliberation; but promises that, unless he sees cogent reasons to the contrary, he may grant a pardon when eighteen months of the sentence have expired. That will be the last week in August, and almost two years since she was thrown into prison. I should have made application to his predecessor, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... source had been traced south of the Equator, and 2000 miles beyond the limits of the Pharaohs' dominions. Nor was the desire diminished when, without sharing the gratification of the Prince in whose name he acted, General Gordon advanced cogent reasons for establishing a line of communication from Gondokoro, across the territory of Mtesa, with the port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean. As Gordon pointed out, that place was nearly 1,100 miles from Khartoum, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... preferred are imported, 'whilst there is not a single shop in Galatz kept by an Englishman—it seems doubtful whether there be one in the whole of Roumania.' And there is still a third reason, to which he only refers incidentally, but we question whether it is not the most cogent of all. Whilst continental states, and especially Austria, have shown little delicacy in exacting favourable treaties of commerce from the Roumanian Government, England has been at a disadvantage in that respect. We may be told that we are placed on the most favoured ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... their turn growing old in the service of science, will read the roll-call between the lines, and know that none are forgotten here. Years before his own death, he had the pleasure of seeing several of them called to important scientific positions, and it was a cogent evidence to him of the educational efficiency of the Museum, that it had supplied to the country so many trained investigators and teachers. Through them he himself teaches still. There was a ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... advanced matters by this speculation. His first point, that the four camps are coeval, and his reasons for that idea, are mainly taken from Roy—he does not make this clear in his paper. But he has not heeded Roy's warnings that the reasons are not cogent. Actually, they are very weak. At Channelkirk, only two sides of a camp remained in Roy's time; they measured not 1,250 x 1,800 feet but 1,330 x 1,660 feet, and the longer side had one gate in the middle, not two; to-day, ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... course, to furnish a mathematical and final refutation. But the refutation which we draw from the consideration of real time, and which is, in our opinion, the only refutation possible, becomes the more rigorous and cogent the more frankly the evolutionist hypothesis is assumed. We must dwell a good deal more on this point. But let us first show more clearly the notion of life to which we are ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... above the earth, it seems to follow as a necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot possibly fall down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of mistletoe in his pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach. Such a train of reasoning would probably be regarded even now as cogent by a large portion of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... no virtue in itself in mere themal interrelation,—in particular of lesser phrases. One cogent theme may well prevail as text of the whole. As the recurring motives are multiplied, they must lose individual moment. The listener's grasp becomes more difficult, until there is at best a mystic maze, a sweet chaos, without a clear melodic thought. It cannot be ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... one's speech and hampers his standing with cultivated people. You have also been told that slang constantly changes, so that one's accumulations of it today will be a profitless clutter tomorrow. These things are true, but an even more cogent objection remains. Slang is detrimental to the formation of good intellectual habits. From its very nature it cannot be precise, cannot discriminate closely. It is a vehicle for loose-thinking people, it is fraught with unconsidered general ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sent 20l. His cause has been warmly espoused by the provincial journals, more than 20 of which have inserted his appeal gratuitously, with offers to receive and remit subscriptions. The aphorism, "he gives twice who gives quickly," could not receive a more cogent application than in the present instance, for the funds are required to enable Mr. Hone to commence business in his new undertaking, where he is already placed with his family, liable to rent and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... so, and he was there to wait for "naughty boys," said the child, with cheerful self-condemnation. The little boy's voice was somewhat hushed, because of the four ears of the listener, but it did not falter, except when his mother's arguments against the existence of the man seemed to him cogent and likely to gain the day. Then for the first time the boy was a little downcast, and the light of mystery became dimmer in his ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... he fell asleep himself he resolved that he would make the true situation clear next day. He would address that sympathetic mother and that romantic sister in suitably cogent terms; the father, he felt sure, would require no effort and would even welcome his aid with a strong sense ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... the end he may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints." No one will deny that this has reference to his coming at the end of the Jewish age. Now would it not be doing injustice to this powerful and cogent reasoner to say, that he suddenly drops this subject without giving his brethren any warning, and runs off to the end of time, speaks of another coming of' Christ at which he is to raise, at the same instant, all the dead and change the living to immortal beings? And that he should again, as suddenly, ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... rebels, but it follows with arithmetical certainty that if we keep on fighting long enough we will whip them in time. Let x equal time and y equal opportunity. Then when x and y come together we shall have x plus y which will equal success. Does my logic seem cogent to you, Mr. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... took our seats, and saw John Whipple rising to speak. I was exceedingly grateful for the interruption of our purpose, for I never heard an address to a popular assembly so powerful; close, compact, cogent, Demosthenic in simplicity and force, not a word misplaced, not a word too many, and fraught with that strange power over the feelings, lent by sadness and despondency, a state of mind, I think, most favorable to real eloquence, in which all verbiage is eschewed, and the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... paper, and the magazine, we do not expect leaders and statesmen to think for us so much as we did fifty years ago. We do not allow the newspaper to mold us so much as we did. We enjoy reading the opinion of a bright, brave, and cogent editor because we know that he sits where he can acquire his facts in a few hours from all quarters of the globe, and speak truly to his great audience in relation to those facts, but we have ceased to allow even that man to think ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... read your religious treatise with infinite pleasure and satisfaction. The style is fine and clear, the arguments close, cogent, and irresistible. May the King of kings, whose glorious cause you have so well defended, reward your pious labours, and grant that I may be found worthy, through the merits of Jesus Christ, to be an eye-witness of that happiness which I don't doubt he will bountifully bestow ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced "Variation under Nature," which seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for Existence"—a principle which we experimentally know to be true and cogent—bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon Leviathan Hobbess theory of society, is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature is at war, one species with another, and the nearer kindred the more internecine—bringing in thousandfold confirmation and extension ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the latter half of the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B. Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... unnecessary for me to inform a person of so much discernment as your lordship, that education is, by its very nature, a thing of temporary duration. Your lordship's education has been long, and there have been cogent reasons why it should be so. God grant, that when left to walk the world alone, you be not betrayed into any of those unlucky blunders, from the very verge of which my provident hand has often redeemed your lordship! Do not mistake me, my lord, when I talk of the greatness of your talents. It is ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... scribes and pharisees said to his disciples, "How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?" Alas! they did not know the reason: but the Lord renders them one, and such an one as is both natural and cogent, saying, These have need, most need. Their great necessity requires that I should be most friendly, and show my grace first ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... probably arrive before the mischief were irretrievable. It is not likely that so illustrious a house, however they may have previously condescended to the speciousness of your qualities, would persist in their design in the face of so cogent objections. But I am not capable of so weak and poor spirited ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... time of our tale, we were a divided people, and Sarah thought it was no more than her duty to cherish the institutions of that country to which she yet clung as the land of her forefathers; but there were other and more cogent reasons for the silent preference she was giving to the Englishman. His image had first filled the void in her youthful fancy, and it was an image that was distinguished by many of those attractions that can enchain a female heart. It is true, he wanted the personal excellence ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... a work of the Ekanti (singularistic) Vai@s@navas, mentions the Brahma-sutras as having the same purport as its own, giving cogent reasons [Footnote ref 1]. Professor Jacobi in discussing the date of the philosophical sutras of the Hindus has shown that the references to Buddhism found in the Brahma-sutras are not with regard to the Vijnana-vada of Vasubandhu, but with regard ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... pertain to State unity and those which are in their nature common to the whole county, it is right that each small community should regulate its own local matters without interference." It was this sentiment to which popular sovereignty made a cogent appeal. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... "Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric; the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the book; he kept on dictating above the clatter of the rolling weights; his intentness on the matter in hand was that of a business man putting a proposition on paper for the purpose of making it definite and cogent ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... or mystery or wonder, every aspect of reality which cannot be brought under scientific categories, i.e. every aspect which cannot be treated quantitatively and causally and {xviii} arranged in a congeries of interrelated facts occurring according to natural laws. The only cogent criticism is that any psychologist should suppose that his scientific account is the "last word" to be spoken, that his reports contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... this feat Mr. Storey accomplished. I have never heard, in my thirteen years' experience of the House of Commons, a speech more admirable in form. Not a word too much, and every sentence linked tight to the other—reasoning, cogent, unanswerable, resistless. And the point above all other things laid bare—are you Liberals going to help the Tories to postpone, if not finally overthrow Home Rule, or are you not? This, it will be seen, is but the emphasizing ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... take it off my hands at the cost, and in several instances have sold or exchanged to considerable advantage. One thing I am sorry we overlooked: a paper entitled, "Seven Reasons," is generally distributed during the Sale, and more cogent reasons I assure you could not be assigned, both for purchasing and reading in general, had the seven wise men of Greece drawn them up. You may at any time procure a copy, and it will furnish you with an apology for the manner in which you have spent your time and money, for ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... to be a stamp officer in those stormy hours. Most of the stamp officers were forced to resign under pressure which they might well be excused for finding sufficiently cogent. In order to make the new law a dead letter the colonists resolved that while it was in force they would avoid using stamps by substituting arbitration for any kind of legal procedure. With a people in this temper, there were only two things to be done; to meet their ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... jury trial to determine the question of slavery, when an alleged fugitive is seized. This letter has elicited a reply from Hon. HORACE MANN, of the House, also from Massachusetts, which enforces the contrary opinion, with abundant and vehement rhetoric and cogent argument. Prof. STUART, of Andover, has also published a pamphlet in support of Mr. Webster's views on the general subject.—The convention of delegates intended to represent the slave-holding states, called ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... different forms of life, none of which could survive if these habitats were reversed. Now, I think that our imaginary inquirer would be a dull man if, as the result of all this study, he failed to conclude that the evidence of Design furnished by the marine bay was at least as cogent as that which he had previously found in his study ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. but the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... that the victories of Constantine the Great, and both the fear of punishment and the desire of pleasing the Roman emperors, were cogent reasons, in the view of whole nations as well as of individuals, for embracing the Christian religion. Yet no person well informed in the history of this period will ascribe the extension of Christianity wholly to these causes. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the teeth, and immerse himself forthwith. As the Rev. Philip Stimcoe, patriot and martyr, he was obstinately, and with even more passion, refusing to do anything of the kind, and for the equally cogent reasons that he was a Protestant of the Protestants and that the water had ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... service so as not to disturb the congregation. We are catechising and converting our proselytes, and there should be no row. As we get older we must digest more quietly still; our appetite is less, our gastric juices are no longer so eloquent, they have lost that cogent fluency which carried away all that came in contact with it. They have become sluggish and unconciliatory. This is what happens to any man when he suffers from an attack ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... ripples of the air. Only he was irritated and alarmed by the abiding sense of some surrounding danger, which stayed with him, which he fought against in vain. His common sense had not deserted him. On the contrary, it was argumentative, cogent in explanation and in rebuke. It strove to sneer his distress down with stinging epithets, and shot arrows of laughter against his aimless fears. But the combat was, nevertheless, tamely unequal. Common ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and defeat to the parties employing it, for the simple reason that it does violence to reason, nature, and all the laws of man's being. Science cannot be turned aside in her strenuous and ever-successful progress by any such impediments thrown in her way. The clear, calm, cogent facts and inferences of the philosopher cannot be met successfully by the half-suppressed shriek of the mere Biblicist. And it must be at once perceived that any such treatment of science, any such half-concealed ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... who were filled with joy for having been found worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus; by the example of the martyrs, who willingly exposed themselves to torments and death, that they might obtain heaven; and, finally by such cogent reasons, so pathetically set forth, that all the auditors admired the doctrine, and felt what he wished to inspire them with. They found in the preacher something divine, which commanded respect, and ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... fins of his favorite fish. But it was not a selfish desire to secure the prey which the terror of the other might cause him to drop. It was simply to punish the prowler. Poor William could not exactly tell indeed why he wished to shoot Alfred Stevens; but his cause of hostility was not less cogent because it had no name. The thousand little details which induce our prejudices in regard to persons, are, singly, worth no one's thought, and would possibly provoke the contempt of all; but like the myriad threads which secured the huge frame of Gulliver in his descent ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... proximity, and the consequence is that, amongst Mr. ——'s slaves, I wait upon myself more than I have ever done in my life before. About this same personal offensiveness, the Southerners you know insist that it is inherent with the race, and it is one of their most cogent reasons for keeping them as slaves. But as this very disagreeable peculiarity does not prevent Southern women from hanging their infants at the breasts of negresses, nor almost every planter's wife and daughter from having one or more little ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... of the whole business was striking me. Why should anyone want to kill Davies, and why should Davies, the soul of modesty and simplicity, imagine that anyone wanted to kill him? He must have cogent reasons, for he was the last man to give way ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... themselves of this privilege. Lelia J. Robinson, in March, 1881, made her application for admission to the bar. In presenting her claim before the court, April 23, Mr. Charles R. Train admitted that it was a novel one; but in a very effective manner he went on to state the cogent reasons why a woman who had carefully prepared herself for the profession of the law should be permitted to practice in the courts. At the close, Chief-Justice Gray gave the opinion, informally, that the laws, as they now exist, preclude ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... be thought, would have desired the suppression of this letter, but rather its most extended circulation; and that, among other cogent reasons, from the immense moral lesson, enforced by it, in perpetuity, on all consumers of opium; in which they will behold, as well as in some of the other letters, the "tremendous consequences," (to use Mr. Coleridge's ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... asked for and received much good counsel, and in the end determined to withdraw the United States troops from the immediate vicinity of the State House in Louisiana. The Packard government fell, and the Democrats took possession. The lawyers could furnish cogent reasons why Packard was not entitled to the governorship, although the electoral vote of Louisiana had been counted for Hayes; but the Stalwarts maintained that no legal quibble could varnish over so glaring an inconsistency. Indeed, it was one of those illogical acts, so ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... so doing, you only anticipate the step which I intended to take with more cogent motives," replied Casper Eysvogel with cool composure, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. "The city will judge to-morrow which of the two parties was compelled to sever a bond sacred in the sight of God and men. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to give ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... strictest sense of the word a miracle. Therefore, if we are to take our stand upon science—and this is what materialism professes to do—we are logically bound to conclude, not merely that the evidence of causation from body to mind is not so cogent as that of causation in any other case, but that in this particular case causation may be proved, again in the strictest sense of the term, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Smith had come from Burma in pursuit of this advance-guard of a cogent Yellow Peril, the face of Dr. Fu-Manchu rarely had been absent from my dreams day or night. The millions might sleep in peace—the millions in whose cause we labored!—but we who knew the reality of the ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Blake's two letters and the lengthy replies that the editors had composed. These last were as totally unlike as their writers, and Betty thought that none of them hit the point so well as Madeline's suggestions, and none was so cogent as the plea that Eleanor and Jim between them had unconsciously made; but they might all help. From Mr. Blake's two letters she decided that he must be a very queer sort of person, and she devoutly hoped that his conversational style would be less obscure than that of ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... whom can we trust? What is the use of science at all if the conclusions of a man as competent as I readily admit Mr. Darwin to have been, on the evidence laid before him from countless sources, is to be set aside lightly and without giving the clearest and most cogent explanation of the why and wherefore? When we see a person "ostrichising" the evidence which he has to meet, as clearly as I believe Professor Weismann to be doing, we shall in nine cases out of ten ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... unrestricted suffrage; by the supreme judiciary, who proclaimed the future Constitution; by the clergy and the aristocracy, in the most solemn pledges of the electoral period; by the British example, celebrated by Montesquieu and Voltaire; by the more cogent example of America; by the national classics, who declared, with a hundred tongues, that all authority must be controlled, that the masses must be rescued from degradation, and ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... poetry. For whilst he has written exalted poetry, thought-compelling poetry, magnificent in diction and appealing to the deeper emotions, there is in this essay a simplicity which was often lacking in the former, and a passionate pleading which combines the cogent lucidity of a Newman with the other-worldness of a St. Francis. If it has a fault, it is that of being too rich in its imagery, too lavish of its judgments, too overbearing in its vision of beauty, so that some critics ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... establishing it as a nation. Franklin shares with Washington the honors of the Revolution, and of the events leading to the birth of the new nation. While Washington was the animating spirit of the struggle in the colonies, Franklin was its ablest champion abroad. To Franklin's cogent reasoning and keen satire, we owe the clear and forcible presentation of the American case in England and France; while to his personality and diplomacy as well as to his facile pen, we are indebted for the foreign alliance ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... form in which this prevalent vice stalks abroad, and it more clearly stamps the character of a community than does its more open and brazen manifestations. Many causes may lead to a woman's becoming a professional harlot, but if a girl "goes wrong" without any very cogent reason for so doing, there must be something radically unsound in her composition and inherently bad in her nature to lead her to abandon her person to the other sex, who are at all times ready to take ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... talents are in company with a disposition that allows the little prudences of the hour incessantly to obscure the persistent laws of things. These persistencies, if a man has once satisfied himself of their direction and mastered their bearings and application, are just as cogent and valuable a guide to conduct, whether he publishes them ad urbem et orbem, or esteems them too strong meat for people who have, through indurated use and wont, lost the courage of ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the fact that the deaf form, educationally, a special class, very small in most communities, who have to be reached by unusual methods. To them the large institution offers advantages not likely to be had outside. For this reason the case against the institution, however cogent and logical it may be ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... its multiplicity of industries not dreamed of a generation ago, should have demands to make in respect to a better adaptation of ancient formularies to present wants, such as thoughtful people count both reasonable and cogent. That a Prayer Book revised primarily for the use of a half-proscribed Church planted here and there along a sparsely inhabited sea-coast, should serve as amply as it does the purposes of a population now swollen from four millions to fifty, and covering the whole ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... with the cogent reasons he gave for secrecy in not apprising her father of their marriage, and shedding tears at the nonchalant manner in which he alluded to a honeymoon "some time in a year or so when the old man comes ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... the other. The jury may believe it will be a fine day to-morrow, but that does not justify me in condemning a man to death on the assumption that it will be a fine day. The question is whether the jury are justified in coming to their verdict by cogent and decisive evidence. In this case I can see nothing of the sort. An eccentric old lady, with a mania for hoarding jewels, has disappeared in the night, carrying her jewels with her. A hand, identified as hers, because of the ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... Necho declared himself an implacable enemy of their foe, their principal aim was to come to terms with Egypt. Jeremiah, on the contrary, and those who remained faithful to the teaching of the prophets, saw in all that was passing around them cogent reasons for rejecting worldly wisdom and advice, and for yielding themselves unreservedly to the Divine will in bowing before the Chaldaean of whom Jahveh made use, as of the Assyrian of old, to chastise the sins of Judah. The struggle between ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... charges would be paid by the county; otherwise I should be responsible for the amount. I then went out to see the grave-diggers, and used such convincing arguments that they willingly agreed to disinter the body. My arguments were brief, but cogent, and were presented to them about ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... the contents of the opinion which I am preparing, wherein may be found a more extensive treatment of what I have here set down. In that document your Lordship will find complete proofs of what is contained in this summary, accompanied by arguments so cogent and convincing that there is neither room nor possibility for doubt ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... pastors of another. It is a good deal to suppose that even the present Castle would nominate bishops for the Irish Catholic Church with a religious regard for its welfare." If this was the case under Grattan's Parliament, its application thirty years later was very much more cogent. Behind the scenes, however, the wires continued to be pulled, as is seen by what Melbourne told Greville in 1835, after the latter had expressed the opinion that the sound course in Irish affairs was to open a negotiation with Rome.[11] ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... costume of the stage differed essentially from that of private life, and was the reverse of modest, or if the actresses indulged in meretricious airs which dared not be shown in domestic society, there was a very just pretence, or rather indeed there was the most cogent reason for preaching against the theatre. But at this day, no hypothesis of the kind can be allowed. That beautiful young women ornamented with every decoration which art can lend to enhance their charms will perhaps excite admiration and licentious desires, is true; but that those arts are ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... no doubt had cogent reasons for failing to apply for Navy commissions, but the fact that only one applied called attention to a phenomenon that first appeared about 1946. Black Americans were beginning to ignore the Navy. Attempts ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... conquerors against odds, and partly because their demand for independence was thought too natural to be resisted at the sword's point by a Government founded on the right of insurrection only. To these merely sentimental and not very cogent considerations was added the more potent and weighty reflection that what the Southerners had done no Power, whether American or European, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with the circumstances of the case, when Carneades proved by thesis and counter-thesis that exactly as many and as cogent reasons might be adduced in praise of injustice as in praise of justice, and when he showed in the best logical form that with equal propriety the Athenians might be required to surrender Oropus and the Romans to confine themselves once ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... plunged Greek society into every kind of moral evil, and honesty, which is the chief constituent of idealism, was laughed out of existence in the prevailing atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. No argument was cogent enough and no pledge solemn enough to reconcile opponents. The only argument that appealed to the party momentarily in power was the unlikelihood of their remaining there long and the consequent advisability of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... be undertaken without the most cogent reasons. In the first place, there must be a right to make war, and just grounds for making it. Nations have no right to employ force any further than is necessary for their own defense, and for the maintenance of their rights. Secondly, it should be made from proper motives, ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... body, nor can he himself assume a bodily form, nor has he any power save that granted him by God for vengeance. This being true, the whole belief in the Devil's intercourse with witches is undermined. Such, very briefly, were the philosophic bases of Scot's skepticism. Yet the more cogent parts of his work were those in which he denied the validity of any evidence so far offered for the existence of witches. What is witchcraft? he asked; and his answer is worth quoting. "Witchcraft is in truth ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... write but just now a few lines. I cannot tell how to bear the sound of that Mr. Belford for your executor, cogent as your reasons for that measure are: and yet I am firmly of opinion, that none of your relations should be named for the trust. But I dwell the less on this subject, as I hope (and cannot bear to apprehend the ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... reserving the bill for the consideration of the British government must be regarded as equally cogent by every student of our system of government, especially by those persons who believe in home rule in all matters involving purely Canadian interests. In the first place, the bill for the relief of a corresponding class of persons ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... of the first book of his studies.] and some of Op. 25; and these works prove decisively the inconclusiveness of the lady's argument. The twelfth study of Op. 10 (composed in September, 1831) invalidates all she says about fire, passion, and rushing torrents. In fact, no cogent reason can be given why the works mentioned by her should not be the outcome of unaided development.[FOONOTE: That is to say, development not aided in the way indicated by Miss Ramann. Development can never be absolutely unaided; it always presupposes conditions—external or internal, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Hence no argument, however cogent, can be expected to produce much effect: only here and there one may be influenced. As in an actively militant stage of society it is impossible to make many believe that there is any glory preferable to that of killing ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... we are far from approving of it as a substitute for death. In the first place, it is equally irrevocable; and it is one, and perhaps the most cogent argument against death-punishment, that it admits of no recall in case of error, no remission or compensation in the event of sentence having been passed upon an innocent man. Our author, indeed, seems to think otherwise; for he reckons it amongst the advantages of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... in a MASTERLY MANNER. It might well have taken twenty years to produce it. It is crammed full of most interesting matter—thoroughly digested—well expressed—close, cogent, and taken as a system it makes out a better case than I had ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... gravity when nothing is left but resignation. The face of a physician, like that of a diplomatist, should be impenetrable. Nature is a benevolent old hypocrite; she cheats the sick and the dying with illusions better than any anodynes. If there are cogent reasons why a patient should be undeceived, do it deliberately and advisedly, but do not betray your apprehensions ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... their continuing firmly united under one federal government, vested with sufficient powers for all general and national purposes. The more attentively I consider and investigate the reasons which appear to have given birth to this opinion, the more I become convinced that they are cogent and conclusive. Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their SAFETY seems to be the first. The SAFETY of the people doubtless has relation to a great variety of circumstances ...
— The Federalist Papers
... of any benefit, or have rendered any aid, to woman in her efforts to obtain her rights in either the social, the business, or the political world; and unless she is able to present stronger or more cogent reasons to justify that conclusion than any which are therein specified, I shall be compelled to adhere to my present conviction, which is, that this book always has been, and is at present, one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the emancipation ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... evanescence of the special claims of all. Nor can we find any sharp and defined line of argument to convince them that they are wrong. The objections, however, to which this position is open are, I think, none the less cogent because they are somewhat general; and to all practical men, conversant with life and history, it must be plain that the necessity of doing God's will being granted, it is a most anxious and earnest question whether ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... sufficient evidence for the truth of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... was acted before Queen Lianor in the Convent of Enxobregas at Lisbon the Auto da Sibila Cassandra, hitherto placed ten years earlier. Senhor Braamcamp Freire points out that the Convent was only founded in 1509[46]. A scarcely less cogent argument for the later date is the finish of the verse and the exquisiteness of the lyrics, although the action is simple and the reminiscences of Enzina are many[47] (a fact which does not necessarily imply an early date: Enzina's echo verses are imitated in the Comedia de Rubena, 1521). ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... self-will, but after due consideration of his rights. It was true that, in biblical phrase, necessity was laid upon him. He could no more shut his ears against that entrancing song than he could shut his eyes against the daylight. This was not, however, the argument that he found most cogent, as it was not the impulse from which he meant to act. If he could make this girl his wife it would be something more than a case of getting his own way; it would be an instance—probably the highest instance—of the assertion of himself against a world organized to destroy him. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... the Civil Service Estimates furnished Mr. HOPKINS with an opportunity of delivering an appeal, doubtless cogent but mainly inaudible, for the restoration of the exchange value of the pound sterling. Mr. A.M. SAMUEL, on the other hand, was more audible than orthodox. At least it rather shocked me to be told that we were getting too much for the pound before the War. Mr. BALDWIN, for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... philosopher, Anaximander. As a doctrine in our modern thought, it owes its influential reappearance to certain evolutionary hypotheses of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, which in turn stimulated Mr. John Fiske to that further inquiry which resulted in those first cogent and extended statements of the doctrine which have been the basis of ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... of the degree of probability that is presented by the hypothesis of metaphysical teleology, comprising an examination of the Theistic objection to the scientific train of reasoning on account of its symbolism, and showing that a no less cogent objection lies against the metaphysical train of reasoning on account of its embodying the supposition of unknowable causes. Distinction between "inconceivability" in a formal or symbolical, and in a material or realisable sense. Reply of a supposed Atheist to the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the figure of two hundred francs a month; and in case I was in some immediate pinch, it enclosed an introductory draft for forty dollars. There are a thousand excellent reasons why a man, in this self-helpful epoch, should decline to be dependent on another; but the most numerous and cogent considerations all bow to a necessity as stern as mine; and the banks were scarce open ere the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... quoted above. The reason for this is assigned by some to the fact that by continency man overcomes a foe within himself, or to the fact that by continency man is perfectly conformed to Christ in respect of purity of both body and soul. But this reason does not seem to be cogent since the goods of the soul, such as contemplation and prayer, far surpass the goods of the body and still more conform us to God, and yet one may be dispensed from a vow of prayer or contemplation. Therefore, continency itself absolutely considered seems no reason why the solemn vow thereof cannot ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... subject in the nineties between Herbert Spencer and myself. I should like to return to the matter in detail, if the space at my disposal permitted, because it seems to me that the arguments I advanced at that time are equally cogent to-day, notwithstanding all the objections that have since been urged against them. Moreover, the matter is by no means one of subordinate interest; it is the very kernel of the whole question of the reality and value of the principle of selection. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... is the very condition of the possibility of Progress, it is obvious that the idea would be valueless if there were any cogent reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is likely to reach a limit in the near future. If there were good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... There are cogent reasons for the affinity of the vocal node for certain fixed positions on the cords. They can be explained by the trick of the vibrating string and bit of paper. If the paper is laid upon the string at a certain point, it will be flirted ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... controlling consideration is rather moral than artistic beauty; but that moral beauty and artistic beauty, so far from being distinct or opposed, are convergent and mutually helpful. This thesis he upholds in the following eloquent and cogent passage: "Permit me to recall to you in the first place that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... with Mexico; but the United States, in the treaty made with Mexico subsequent to the war with that country, received from Mexico not merely a cession of the territory that was claimed by Texas, but much that lay beyond the asserted limits. Shall we, then, acting simply as the cogent of Texas in the settlement of this question of boundary, take from the principal for whom we act that territory which belongs to her, to which we asserted her title against Mexico, and appropriate it to ourselves? Why, sir, it would ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... down their arms. Baron d'Aygaliers was summoned to this consultation, and described his plan to the two gentlemen. As he expected, both were opposed to it; however, he tried to bring them over to his side by presenting to them what seemed to him to be cogent reasons for its adoption. But de Lalande and de Baville made light of all his reasons, and rejected his proposals with such vehemence, that the marechal, however much inclined to the side of d'Aygaliers, did not venture to act quite ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lift the discussion on to a higher plane, to waft his hearers on to the serene hill-tops of thought, to awaken sublime sensations in all present such as the spectacle of some noble mountain panorama will summon up in the meditations of the most phlegmatic. Mr. Churchill, ever lucid, ever cogent, ever earnest, ever forceful, was wont to be so convincing that he would almost cause listeners to forget for the moment that, were the particular project which just then happened to be uppermost in his mind to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... with the elective will, on advertence and consultation with reason, to decide whether or not it shall be won to consent. But were it not for the channel of passion, this will could never have been approached at all even by reasons the most cogent. Rhetoric often succeeds, where mere dry logic would have been thrown away. God help vast numbers of the human race, if their wills were approachable only through their reasons! They ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition of British "Liberalism" to-day still wriggles unstably because of these conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now seems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but that seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they do not say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, it would seem that the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells |
