"Irrefragable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inspiration. And it was the disproof of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris by the learned Bentley,(410) which first threw solid doubts on the value attaching to traditional titles of books, and showed the irrefragable character belonging to an appeal to internal evidence; a department which has been called the higher criticism. This latter branch, so abundantly developed in German speculation, is only hinted at by the English deists of the eighteenth age, as by Hobbes and Spinoza earlier; but we shall soon see ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... how true this was. When the mining first began, several rebels toward the East had tried profitlessly to buck this irrefragable game and had found they had battered their unyielding heads against an equally unyielding stone wall. These men had demanded more and Robinson's company, true to its threat, had urbanely gone around their farms, travelled on and left them behind, their coal untouched and certain to so remain. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... supports," said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as the observations of learned men of all ages have been ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable truths of modern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended, has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... name of grammar. I have, certainly, no intention to say more than is due to the uninformed and misguided. For some who are ungenerous and prejudiced themselves, will not be unwilling to think me so; and even this freedom, backed and guarded as it is by facts and proofs irrefragable, may still be ingeniously ascribed to an ill motive. To two thirds of the community, one grammar is just as good as an other; because they neither know, nor wish to know, more than may be learned from ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... irrefragable opinion—I want your love, and I give you mine. In love I recognise solely the principle of reciprocation, as it obtains in Nature. The law that I acknowledge is to follow unfettered our strong impression, to exchange happiness for ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... living forms are. Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just like living forms. They support one another as plants and animals do; they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... stately mansion that I was familiar with appeared to me a desert, even with all its fairy-land splendors? Jack Holt's father was too rich a man not to allow his wife all the good things which she coveted, and her parlors, halls and bedrooms were irrefragable proof of the enormities which may be committed with an utter want of taste and tens of thousands of dollars. Both Harry and Jack hated the house, and spent every available moment out of school in our comfortable, well-worn nooks inside and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... very surface of the matter, the question presents itself to the biologist why it should not be so. The irrefragable philosophy of modern biology is that the most complex forms of living creatures have derived their splendid complexity and adaptations from the slow and majestically progressive variation and survival from the simpler and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... inference that the same species of witches were meant as those against whom modern legislation had, in most European nations, directed the punishment of death. These two circumstances furnished the numerous believers in witchcraft with arguments in divinity and law which they conceived irrefragable. They might say to the theologist, Will you not believe in witches? the Scriptures aver their existence;—to the jurisconsult, Will you dispute the existence of a crime against which our own statute-book, and the code of almost all civilized countries, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Undoubtedly, however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting material of any except the first. Here is The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character. Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret, in which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... year had elapsed since that bright spring morning on which she had beheld the irrefragable proof of her lover's perfidy, when she received an offer of marriage from a gentleman, of good family and large property. He had been struck by her beauty at a party where he had seen her; and after ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... innocent; but will the world believe it? You may have only intended to play with the heart of the poor artless Irish gentleman who adored and confided in you. But who will believe the stories of your innocence, against the irrefragable testimony of your own handwriting? Who will believe that you could write these letters in the mere wantonness of coquetry, and not under ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Letter of Pope Stephen, adapted to the foregoing Fable; by which we may make a judgment of the Madness and folly of that old crafty Knave. This Letter is extant in Rhegino, a Benedictine Monk, and Abbot of Prunay, [Footnote: Abbot Pruniacensis] an irrefragable Testimony in an Affair of this Nature; 'tis in Chron. anni 753.—"Stephen the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God, &c. As no Man ought to boast of his Merits, so neither ought the wonderful Works of God which are wrought upon his Saints without their Desert, to be buried ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society—one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate its rational sides, not overlooking nature for the sake of culture, or vice versa" (p. 566). Property, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... I can bring irrefragable proofs. Among the papers which your old servant Hib brought with him in a small box, there must be some letters from a certain Sonnophre, a celebrated accoucheur, your own ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... worst. The sooner it is over, the better; and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world and die, so they must take it out of somebody. Therefore Jerry "gets it in the neck." Men under the irrefragable compulsion of a common spell, who are selected for sacrifice in the fervour of a general obsession, but who are cooly awake to the unreason which locks the minds of their fellows, will burst into fury at the bond they feel. The obvious obstruction is the obstinate "blighter" ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas;—these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith.—In short, Sir, except Euclid's Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father's fire-side, in the winter evening of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... reasoning is irrefragable. And therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative. Indeed, upon this point Locke does, practically, go as far in the direction of idealism, as ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... (1540) than the story of the dispensation became public. Luther was at first inclined to deny it entirely as an invention of his enemies, but he changed his mind when he found that the proofs were irrefragable and determined to brazen out ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... real cause of the desolation of the Campagna stands revealed in the clearest light, and on the most irrefragable evidence. It is not cultivated for grain crops, because remunerating prices for that species of produce cannot be obtained. It is exclusively kept in pasturage, because it is in that way only that a profit can be obtained from ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... sepulchre The seminary of being, and extinction The Ceres of existence: it discovers Life in putridity, vigour in decay; Dissolution even, and disintegration, Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder, Finds in God's thoughts irrefragable order, And admirable the manner of our corruption As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress The tree of Life—Death dies on his own dart Promising to our ashes perpetuity, And to our perishable elements Their proper imperishability; extracting Medicaments from out mortality Against too mortal ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... genius, however, was condemned to "the pelting of a merciless storm." Lowth told him—"You give yourself out as demonstrator of the divine legation of Moses; it has been often demonstrated before; a young student in theology might undertake to give a better—that is, a more satisfactory and irrefragable demonstration of it in five pages than you have done in five volumes."—Lowth's "Letter to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... glory of their country—Lux mundi, as he was called. Some fragments of his conversation have been preserved, the unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific titles: 'doctor angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable.' 'Was Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as a phantom: I have read him in Greece in his own words.' To Ostendorp, then a ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... after her the words of the formidable oath that she administered an oath which it must damn his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because she imagined that she had taken the measure of his faith, she returned him his dagger, and let him go at last. She imagined that she had bound him fast in irrefragable spiritual bonds. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... mean time, this reason of silence has entirely ceased, by the hostilities which the said kingdom has commenced against our Republic, under pretences, and in a manner the injustice of which has been demonstrated by the supreme government of the State, with an irrefragable evidence, in the eyes of impartial Europe; whilst the petitioners themselves, by the illegal capture of so large a number of Dutch ships, and afterwards by the absolute stagnation of navigation, and of voyages to foreign countries, have experienced in the most grievous manner, the consequences ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... leadership.[220] He calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (tyrannides) "oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who reasons."[221] He has nothing but pity for mankind when it has become a many-headed beast, "despising the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of experience."[222] He had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the divine right of I'm as good as you. He thought it fatal to all discipline: "The confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... vehemence that I never saw surpassed, yet, with a common inconsistency, showed more than indifference towards learned historical and critical evidence on the side of Christianity; and indeed, unmercifully exposed erudition to scorn, both by caustic reasoning, and by irrefragable quotation of texts. I constantly had occasion to admire the power with which be laid hold of the moral side of every controversy; whether he was reasoning against Romanism, against the High Church, against learned ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... produced in verse. With the exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediaeval dialectic, the Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the least select of literary histories. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... might have seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands, if I had done what I ought to have done. But, as I see it, it is not a matter of what one ought to do, or ought not to do. It is what one DOES do. That is the everlasting, irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of men over the world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it because the way led to it, because I was only a ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... is coming fast, after some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of unreason, which discoursed gravely and learnedly of nuns and witches, hysteria and madness, persecution and torture, and, like a madman in his dreams, built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted pyramid of seeming truth upon a single false premiss. To this it has come, after long centuries in which woman was regarded by celibate theologians as the 'noxious animal,' the temptress, the source of earthly misery, which derived—at ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... the Boyars, the armed followers of the Princes, the peasantry, the slaves, and various others; and one of the oldest legal documents which we possess—the "Russian Right" (Russkaya Pravda) of the Grand Prince Yaroslaff (1019-1054)—contains irrefragable proof, in the penalties attached to various crimes, that these classes were formally recognised by the legislation. Since that time they have frequently changed their character, but they have never at any period ceased ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... an irrefragable truth. Philosophy, and still more a mind courageous and elevated by religion, are capable of completely weakening the influence of the animal sensations which assault the soul of one in pain, and able, as it were, to withdraw ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the old theological view based upon the letter of our sacred books to the modern scientific view based upon evidence absolutely irrefragable is complete. Here, too, we are at the beginning of a vast change in the basis and modes of thought upon man—a change even more striking than that accomplished by Copernicus and Galileo, when they substituted for a universe in which sun and planets revolved ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... dunameis, and put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and the vices—yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause (which indeed was all things), Noesis Noeseon, "the Thought of Thoughts," whom he discovered by irrefragable processes of logic, and in whom the philosophers believe privately, leaving Serapis to the women and the sailors? All they had to do was to follow in his steps; to take each of them a branch, of science or literature, or as many branches as one man ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion. I say domestic and individual; for—and this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mind—the most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... have lived much more happily since they were abandoned. From this increased prosperity we may confidently deduce the maxim that we should not kill and eat our fellow-creatures. I have consulted the higher power by whom you know that I am inspired, and he has assured me that this conclusion is irrefragable. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... steam. Thus the rascally tailors were to be put down, humanity clad, and the philanthropists rewarded (but that was a secondary consideration) with a clear return of thirty per cent. In spite of the evident charitableness of this Christian design, and the irrefragable calculations upon which it was based, this company died a victim to the ignorance and unthankfulness of our fellow-creatures; and all that remained of Jack's L6,000, was a fifty-fourth share in a small steam-engine, a large assortment of ready-made pantaloons, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... defiance of the law." He further observed, that he had good reason to believe that some of these little enemies to the constitution had contrived and abetted Monsieur de Fleury's escape. Of their having rejoiced at it in a most indecent manner, he said he could produce irrefragable proof. The boy who saw Babet tear down the placard was produced and solemnly examined; and the thoughtless action of this poor little girl was construed into a state crime of the most horrible nature. In a declamatory tone, Tracassier reminded ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... towards centralisation on the part of the Jerusalem priesthood beyond the presumption that the Priestiy Code must chronologically precede, not Deuteronomy merely, but also the prophets. For the sake of this presumption there is constructed a purely abstract (and as such perfectly irrefragable) possibility that furnishes a door of escape from the historical probability, which nevertheless it is impossible ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... suspicion that these stories were made up after the whites had reached the American shores, and nearly all historians have summarily rejected their authenticity, on this account. But a most careful scrutiny of their sources positively refutes this opinion. There is irrefragable evidence that these myths and this ideal of the hero-god, were intimately known and widely current in America long before any one of its millions of inhabitants had ever seen a white man. Nor is there any difficulty ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... men born in New England, and who choose a seafaring life, his frame had acquired a robustness and solidity, his countenance a healthy brown, his chest a depth, and his shoulders a breadth, that are each and all considered—and with justice—by the present generation, as irrefragable proofs and marks of vulgarity. But folks thought otherwise thirty years since, and, however incredible it may appear, there are actually now in existence a great many painters, sculptors, anatomists, and perhaps as many as a dozen women, who persist in thinking ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... awakened him to energy, and have taught him to be just not captious, his desires would have been more rational: but, to a man who had formed a system of obedience to authority, and not to reason, the arguments he used were irrefragable. To a woman who imagined that obedience, in all cases, was the badge of abject slavery, they were absurd. Thus opposite in principle and in practice, their unhappy state of existence finally became so intolerable, to one of them ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the speech of Mr. Sherwood at Champlain was a renewed onslaught upon the anti-democratic coalition. In this speech the most irrefragable evidence, drawn from the recitals in the records of treason, is produced against the conspirators. The perusal of this speech leaves the mind in no doubt as to the purpose of the traitors to overthrow democratic government in the South, and to establish a new form of government, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the schism of their ontology; the mighty structure heaves—reels—seems in suspense for one moment, and then, with one choral crash—to the frantic joy of the young Sagittary—lies subverted on the floor! Kant and Aristotle, Nominalists and Realists, Doctors Seraphic or Irrefragable, what cares he? All are at his feet—the Irrefragable has been confuted by his arrows, the Seraphic has been found mortal, and the greatest philosopher and the least differ but according to the brief ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that Charles III. was the illegitimate son of Ferdinand VI., and that, consequently, he ought to be considered as a usurper of the throne of his reputed father. The minister, Roda, intercepted a correspondence containing irrefragable proofs of that abominable intrigue; and this was sufficient to make the king resolve upon a course of action which he had refrained from for some time, at the instance of his ministers, through fear of offending the court of ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... is evident and irrefragable. Since the bounty was given, multitudes eat wheat who did not eat it before, and yet the price of wheat has abated. What more is to be hoped from any change of practice? An alteration cannot make our condition better, and is, therefore, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... man, after he had created him? Most certainly he did not. This fact relieves us of all doubt as to who was meant as the men of whose daughters the sons of God took their wives, independent of the preceding irrefragable proofs, that it was the negro; and the crime of amalgamation thus committed, brought the flood upon the earth. There is no possibility ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... deepened in intensity, the change has been for some time in progress. I am enabled to state on irrefragable authority, that Lord Houghton's sudden departure from Dublin on Sunday week was entirely due to his alarm at the shifting aspect of affairs, which rendered instant conference with Mr. Gladstone a matter of urgent ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... which the modern Spanish, French, and other Latin dialects can be shown to have all radiated from Rome as their centre, the old traditions of the eastern origin of all the chief nations of Europe have been proved to be fundamentally true; for by evidence so "irrefragable" (to use the expression of the Taylorian professor of modern languages at Oxford), that "not an English jury could now-a-days reject it," Philological Archaeology has shown that of the three great families of mankind—the Semitic, the Turanian, and ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... should be unable to perceive the logical necessity of these simple arguments, which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin's reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... and lived many ages after Moses, does little else than err ingeniously, this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touching science at a thousand points, has written nothing that has not been "demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," is an irrefragable proof of his having derived his knowledge from a supernatural source. How does it happen, then, that Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position? How is it that we find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the discoveries of science, by means ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... are also some notable points of difference in the shape. Such at least is the current opinion; although the proofs that such difference is not referable to difference of age or sex, is by no means irrefragable. Still we may take the fact as it is supposed and reported ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... Sunday to perform service in the woodland chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying.... It does honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei!—But how did they light upon it?" He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some tree or stone which had witnessed the apparition, had marked the miracle. What can ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found, not rarely, in the notes of the learned commentators on 'Paley's Natural Theology,' has, I believe, had a temporary effect of turning attention from the solid irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. But overpowering proof of intelligence and benevolent design lie all around us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... but converses with Christ's human nature only. However, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles. Afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose, such as the Irrefragable Doctor, the Subtile Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor, who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that one would conclude they were resolved no one should understand a ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... fluid, in which a definite number of spores or yeast globules had been placed, with a pellicle of air, into which the germinating threads might pass and fructify, is perhaps the most satisfactory that has been adopted, though it requires nice manipulation. If carefully managed, the result is irrefragable, though doubts have been cast, without ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... lordship, with many a broad acre besides, passed from the Quins, and are now the property of the O'Briens to this day; and while the rest of the castle is little better than a heap of ruins, the fatal window still remains nearly as perfect as when the lady sprang through it, an irrefragable proof of the truth of the legend in the eyes of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... what do they prove? There is only one certain, irrefragable proof—the confession of the guilty ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... irrefragable; and if logicians, though unable to dispute it, have usually exhibited a strong disposition to explain it away, this was not because they could discover any flaw in the argument itself, but because the contrary opinion seemed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... exceedingly distending them, discover New Vessels, &c: But not now to enlarge upon the Uses, the Reader may securely take this Narrative, as the naked real Matter of Fact, whereby 'tis as clear, as Noon day (both from the Time, and irrefragable Testimony of very many considerable Persons in that University, who can jointly attest it; as well as from that particular unquestionable one of Mr. Boyle and his worthy Company, who were the first Eye-witnesses of the Tryals made,) that ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged corps de ballet, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty, twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of worth was money thought of, and though much needed, it alone was lightly regarded. The amount turned out to be very small. The editor handed it out of his trousers pocket—not the golden guinea looked for, but a few shillings. He must have detected a little disappointment ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... a very old question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began. Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... was nine o'clock. She must rise, and appear below for the first time as mistress in her own house. Also, she remembered faintly something which Mrs. Dugdale had said about the custom at Kingcombe—an irrefragable law of country etiquette—-of a bride's going to church for the first time, ceremoniously, in bridal dress. And no sooner had she descended—wrapped in the first morning-frock she could lay her hands upon, than ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... my neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon the report of every new author who seeks to give body to their dreams. To accommodate the examples that Holy Writ gives us of such things, most certain and irrefragable examples, and to tie them to our modern events, seeing that we neither see the causes nor the means, will require another sort-of wit than ours. It, peradventure, only appertains to that sole all-potent testimony to tell us. "This is, and that is, and not that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... is satisfactorily proved. This is the legal right of the prisoner; contingent on no peculiar circumstances of any particular case, but is the common right of every person accused of a crime. The law surrounds the prisoner with a coat of mail, that only irrefragable proofs of guilt can pierce, and the law declares her innocent, unless the proof you have heard on her trial satisfies you, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she is guilty. What constitutes reasonable ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... remembrance in my mind of having rambled in the fields and fallen asleep on the grass; but this planet missing in the constellation Sagittarius recalled to me at once my miraculous position on the planet Mars. Here was a confirmation unexpected and irrefragable of the truth of what Copernicus had written by my hand. The excited whirl of thoughts and emotions thus revived banished sleep, and I walked back and forward under the grove, and out on the open turf, gazing again ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Authentic and irrefragable evidence of the magnitude of this danger exists in the statistical tables of committals which have now, for a very considerable time, been prepared in all parts of the British empire. Since the year 1805, when regular tables of commitments first began to be kept in England, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... to me, surprises me not. But grant me time to send home (as the English in the colonies affectionately call England to this day,) and I will prove my knighthood honorably won upon a stricken field, by irrefragable testimony. I will not deny that I have the honor of an acquaintance with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, but I am in no sense his agent, nor in any wise hold communication with him, save as a friend. For the note-book found ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... now most certain and irrefragable proof that much definiteness exists in living things apart from Selection, and also much that may very well have been preserved and so in a sense constituted by Selection. Here the matter is likely to rest. There is a passage in the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... own political creed. The disputants who had long agreed in accusing him of an impious error had now effectually vindicated him, and refuted one another. The High Churchman who took the oaths had shown by irrefragable arguments from the Gospels and the Epistles, from the uniform practice of the primitive Church, and from the explicit declarations of the Anglican Church, that Christians were not in all cases bound to pay obedience to the prince who had the hereditary title. The ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I acknowledge that for the most part it is, to speak disrespectfully of Works that have enjoyed for a length of time a widely-spread reputation, without at the same time producing irrefragable proofs of their unworthiness, let me be forgiven upon this occasion.—Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that, from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas—these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths."[a] ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They are obligations written in the heart. They approximate men to men, without their knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions. The secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to equivocate, scuffle, and fight, about the terms of their written obligations. As to war, if it be the means of wrong and violence, it is the sole means of justice amongst nations. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... original name of which was MacDermott. From an Irish estate, my great-grandfather changed it to that of Darby. My father, who was born in America, was a man of strong mind, high spirit, and great personal intrepidity. Many anecdotes, well authenticated, and which, being irrefragable, are recorded as just tributes to his fame and memory, shall, in the course of these memoirs, confirm ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... wall; and confident as Mr. Tulliver was in his principle that water was water, and in the direct inference that Pivart had not a leg to stand on in this affair of irrigation, he had an uncomfortable suspicion that Wakem had more law to show against this (rationally) irrefragable inference than Gore could show for it. But then, if they went to law, there was a chance for Mr. Tulliver to employ Counsellor Wylde on his side, instead of having that admirable bully against him; and the prospect ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... or fairy-tales. Nobody can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical—an epithet which one could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to Beyle and his school—they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of common sense, be regarded as the murderer. His flagrant usurpation, as well as his other treacherous and cruel actions, makes no better be expected from him. He could not say, with Cain, that he was not his nephews' keeper." This reasoning, which was irrefragable at the very first, became every day stronger from Richard's continued silence, and the general and total ignorance of the place of these princes' abode. Richard's reign lasted about two years beyond this period; and surely he could not have ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... strike the reader as merely Pagan. Not at all. In England, at the close of the Parliamentary war, it was generally argued—that Providence had decided the question against the Royalists by the mere fact of the issue. Milton himself, with all his high-toned morality, uses this argument as irrefragable: which is odd, were it only on this account—that the issue ought necessarily to have been held for a time as merely hypothetic, and liable to be set aside by possible counter-issues through one generation at the least. But the capital argument against such doctrine ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... well-bred tone; "for my part, I who have the honour of speaking to you, can boast, that never since I was of years of discretion (counting new style, beginning at thirteen, of course)—never have I lost a friend, a sincere friend—never, for this irrefragable reason—since that nonage, never was I such a neophyte as to fancy I had found that lusus natures, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... insufficiently worked out, and it is not fully convincing, or let us say, quite reliable; because the materials are, as a matter of fact, insufficient. Neither the Divinity of Christ, nor His lack of Divinity, can be proved historically; there is but one irrefragable proof.... ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... white to the lips. As much by her vehement pretence of sincerity as by the apparently irrefragable logic of her arguments, she forced conviction upon him. This brought a loathly fear in its train, and the gates of his heart stood ever wide to fear. He stepped aside to a chair, and sank into it, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... criticism, but the unity of interest, character, imagery, and thought—a unity which required no written references to maintain it, but which was the essential quality of one master-mind, and ought to be, to all plain men, an irrefragable proof that one mind alone conceived and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is no estimating the injury ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of one which a witness long inured ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and although he was aware that Tetrazzini was singing Mazzone's Sogni e Canti and Benedict's Carnevale di Venezia, the music was no more than a noise in the air to him. What should he do if Eleanor were married? Bad enough if she were engaged, but married!... An engagement was not an irrefragable affair, and he could woo her so ardently that his rival would swiftly vanish from her thoughts ... but a marriage!... He knew that marriages were not so irrefragable as they might be, and that a very desperate couple might go to the length of running away together even though ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... more than this, according to the belief of the times, as expressed by Jean de Serres; for, "having been present at the Bayonne affair," he brought him irrefragable proof of the "holy league entered into by the kings of France and Spain for the ruin of the religion." Comment. de statu. rel. et reip., ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... then, still more, it had its imaginary; and the subterranean activities were busy! The witnesses, contemporaneous and other, assign three reasons, or considerations and quasi-reasons, which the Tobacco-Parliament and Friedrich Wilhelm's lively fancy could insist upon it till they became irrefragable:— ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... baronet had always regarded as the Young Man of the future. Sydney had been wont to sneer a little, after his fashion, at the individuals who interpreted the new ideas, though he accepted the ideas themselves as irrefragable. The nation must be saved by its young men—yes, certainly. As a young man he saw that plainly enough, but it was not going to be saved by any young man who could be named in his presence. He had said something like this to Sir John Pynsent, not many days before his marriage, and Sir ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... could find.[149] That he was cautious in his investments was evident. He had seen too much suffering through rashness in money affairs not to benefit by the experience. Thereby he made clear his desire for the rehabilitation of himself and family in the place where he was born. By 1598 we have irrefragable testimony to the position he had already taken, alike in the world of letters as in the social life of Stratford. In the autumn of that year appeared the perennial advertisement of Meres, the Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, Master of ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... of the Universe. And after all, there are many minds—some of them, I must admit, not wanting in philosophical power—who never succeed in accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man {20} cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without first being an Idealist. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... questions and replies seemed to spring to his lips, but no word passed them. He felt that in argument he was no match for the cardinal, even had disputation with so eminent and august a personage been possible. He felt that somewhere there was an answer to this irrefragable argument, but for the moment he could not find it; he stood tongue tied, silent. The cardinal looked at him with his slight, peculiar smile, and then turned ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... said her ladyship, "to trifle: I am satisfied. My lord, it is time that you should he satisfied. I can give you the most irrefragable proof, that whatever may have been the apparent levity of my conduct, you have had no serious cause for jealousy. But the proof will shock—disgust you. Have you courage to know more?—Then ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... But I was bound to see the thing through to the end. It occurred to me that I could prove the accuracy of my theory with the aid of a kite. You were kind enough to lend your assistance in that experiment, and it gave me irrefragable evidence of the existence of a shaft of flying atoms extending in a direct line between Dr. Syx's pretended ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... earth were not the central and all-important body in the universe, if the sun and planets and stars were not attendant and subsidiary lights, but were other worlds larger and perhaps superior to ours, where was man's place in the universe? and where were the doctrines they had maintained as irrefragable? I by no means assert that the new doctrines were really utterly irreconcilable with the more essential parts of the old dogmas, if only theologians had had patience and genius enough to consider the matter calmly. I suppose that in that case they might have reached the amount of reconciliation ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... is alive, and you bring fifty witnesses to swear it: I answer, "Why do you not produce the man "' This is an argument founded on one of the first principles of the LAW OF EVIDENCE, which Gilbert would have held to be irrefragable. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... threw off all restraint, and laughed aloud. Everybody laughed as he did, and the two philosophers were saluted with unanimous felicitations. La Fontaine, however, was declared conqueror, on account of his profound erudition and his irrefragable logic. Conrart obtained the compensation due to an unsuccessful combatant; he was praised for the loyalty of his intentions, and the purity of ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, Irrefragable, or Seraphic Doctors), and after a certain date by women too (Angelical Sisters), who had no knowledge of the world, of society, of human nature, or of real philosophy. Yet they were, and long remained, the class of literature ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... was but in a condition to be acquainted with previous causes, with subsequent effects. That the evils resulting to him from his own vices, have equally their remedies in this nature, which it is his duty to study; which if he does he will find, that the same omnipotent goodness, who gave her irrefragable laws, also planted in her bosom, balsams for all his maladies, whether physical or moral: but that it is not given him to know what this great, this universal cause is, for purposes of which he ought not to dispute ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the ambition of nations, if fantastic and vain, but gentle to approve the efforts of children, made in accordance with the visible intention of the Maker of all flesh, and the Giver of all Intelligence. These laws, therefore, I now repeat, and beg of you to observe them as irrefragable. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... vol. i. p. 206) or of the 'Angka, and other beings of that rare and wondrous order; for there is nothing in their existence incompatible with the Divine Power; but we decline to believe in them because their existence has not been manifested to us on any irrefragable authority." ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... dogmatism. As an orator, he was accustomed to hear arguments put forward with equal persuasiveness on both sides of a case. It seemed to him arrogant to make any proposition with a conviction of its absolute, indestructible and irrefragable truth. One requisite of a philosophy with him was that it should avoid this arrogance[73]. Philosophers of the highest respectability had held the most opposite opinions on the same subjects. To withhold absolute assent from all doctrines, while ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... glove! By the by, I fancy that phrase comes from the custom of pledging a glove as the signal of irrefragable faith right, I say, as my glove, Caxonbut we of the Protestant ascendency have the more merit in doing that duty for nothing, which cost money in the reign of that empress of superstition, whom Spenser, Caxon, terms in his ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... period. The chief point which we have to notice is, that a considerable revolution of opinion has taken place on this point. It was originally believed that the presence of such animals as Elephants, Lions, the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus afforded an irrefragable proof that the climate of Europe must have been a warm one, at any rate during Post-Glacial times. The existence, also, of numbers of Mammoths in Siberia, was further supposed to indicate that this ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a forest of scrub pine and pinon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was winding hopefully if blindly toward the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... deliberate, regulated, ponderously impressive (GRAVITATISCH) Feat of Arms, as the reader sees; done all by Regulation methods, with orthodox exactitude; in a slow, weighty, almost pedantic, but highly irrefragable manner. It is the triumph of Prussian Discipline; of military orthodoxy well put in practice: the honest outcome of good natural stuff in those Brandenburgers, and of the supreme virtues of Drill. Neipperg and his Austrians had much despised Prussian soldiering: "Keep our soup hot," cried they, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and unquestionable claims, though he assured his party that he had done so only out of deference to his predecessor in office. Those inherited policies having led to naught, he was now prepared to reassert our title to the whole of Oregon, which was sustained "by irrefragable facts and arguments." He would therefore recommend that provision be made for terminating the joint treaty of occupation, for extending the jurisdiction of the United States over American citizens in Oregon, and for protecting emigrants in transit ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... principal and interest of another 1000l. within ten days after she was of age: and having taken the money, she accompanied Mr and Mrs Harrel into another room. Presenting it then with an affecting solemnity to Mrs Harrel, "accept, Priscilla," she cried, "this irrefragable mark of the sincerity of my friendship: but suffer me at the same time to tell you, it is the last to so considerable an amount I ever mean to offer; receive it, therefore, with kindness, ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... is not necessary to speak. The preceding volumes of this work have been written in vain, if the reader has not obtained from irrefragable testimony—the monarch's own especially—a sufficient knowledge of that human fetish before which so much of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not sufficient to hinder us from believing in the Divine Personality as a fact, yet hinder us from conceiving the manner of its existence, and prevent us from exhibiting our belief as a philosophical conclusion, proved by irrefragable reasoning and secured against all objections. These difficulties are occasioned, on the one hand, by the so-called Philosophy of the Unconditioned, which in all ages has shown a tendency towards Pantheism, and which, in one of its latest and most finished ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... aversion to names. I do not call myself so; I only say that I believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity—that 'tongs with which God holds the world'—as a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... on unanswered, and, therefore, little read. Addison knew the policy of literature too well to make his enemy important by drawing the attention of the publick upon a criticism, which, though sometimes intemperate, was often irrefragable. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... development to breed butterflies, possessed of the characteristics of related varieties and species living in southern and northern regions respectively, characteristics not merely of color and design, but also of structure, is complete irrefragable proof of my views." ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... books, which by tradition have been transmitted to us. By whom were these books written? Who are the men who have transmitted them? They are either the founders of religions themselves, or their adherents and assigns. Thus, in religion, the evidence of interested parties becomes irrefragable and incontestable. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... of a forest surrounding the Mount, is the Cornish name of St. Michael's Mount, Cara clowse in cowse, which in Cornish is said to mean "the hoar rock in the wood." In his paper read before the British Association at Manchester, Mr. Pengelly adduced that very name as irrefragable evidence that Cornish, i.e. a Celtic language, an Aryan language, was spoken in the extreme west of Europe about 20,000 years ago. In his more recent paper Mr. Pengelly has given up this position, and he considers it improbable that any philologer could now give ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... enlarged benevolence, of Georgiana Carlton. With respect to her philosophy—it was of a noble cast. It was, that all men are by nature equal; that they are wisely and justly endowed by the Creator with certain rights, which are irrefragable; and that, however human pride and human avarice may depress and debase, still God is the author of good to man—and of evil, man is the artificer to himself and to his species. Unlike Plato and Socrates, her mind was free from the gloom that surrounded theirs; her philosophy was founded in the ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... inhumanity and cruelty, in all their intercourse with the Spaniards the French behaved with moderation and even kindness. Paying for everything, obtaining their billets peaceably and quietly, marching with order and regularity, they advanced into the heart of the country, showing, by the most irrefragable proof, the astonishing evidences of a discipline which, by a word, could convert the lawless irregularities of a ruffian soldiery into the orderly habits and obedient conduct ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... him, and banished him to Greece."[25] But even if the fact that Pope Silverius had really held treasonable communication with the Goths, be admitted, still the manner in which he was condemned by Belisarius affords irrefragable evidence of the injustice of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all association of ideas—these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald Steward expressed surprise that ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... of a soldier's life, riding forth "in jack and knapskull"—the woman who long afterward was to hold her own for two days together, without help of counsel, against all the array of English law and English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and supported by the resentment of a nation—showed herself devoid of moral and physical resolution; too senseless to realize the significance and too heartless to face the danger of a situation from which the simplest exercise of reason, principle, or courage must have rescued the most ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Dungeness, the sea might hold its dead were past, and at any moment the resurrection might commence. But it never came, and other theories had to be broached to explain the unprecedented circumstance. The most generally acceptable, because the most absolutely irrefragable, was that the dead men and women had been carried away by an under-current out into the Atlantic, and for ever ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... of the body and brain, so the body is liable to be reciprocally affected by the affections of the mind, as is evident in the visible effects of all-strong passions,—hope or fear, love or anger, joy or sorrow, exultation or despair. These are certainly irrefragable arguments that it is properly no other than one and the same thing that is subject to these affections."[155] Mr. Atkinson urges the same reason. "The proof that mind holds the same relation to the body that all other phenomena ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... his article, after triumphantly expressing his belief that his "main conclusions are irrefragable," ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... Condorcet, had no other force than that of disciplined reason and principle. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in with oceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention and irrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments were loyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises of this overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell and mere goodwill does not tell. Exaltation reaches ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... section was invented to give currency to the wild forgery of the second. Latin books, a library, gold, ships, and foreign trade, corn, beer, numerous towns and castles, all in the most northern parts of America in the fourteenth century, where only nomadic savages had ever existed, are all irrefragable evidence, that the whole, or at least that portion of the voyages of the Zenos, is an idle romance. To increase the absurdity, as if to try the gullability of the readers, Dedalus, a king of Scotland! is assumed to have been the first discoverer ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... had perhaps listened to strange proposals for effecting such object. But the Cardinal knew right well also to what extent Louis was a king and a Frenchman, and devoted by self-interest to their common system. He despatched, therefore, Chavigny in all haste from Narbonne with irrefragable evidence of the treaty made with Spain. Louis, thunderstricken, could scarcely believe his own eyes. He sank into a gloomy reverie, out of which he emerged only to give way to bursts of indignation against ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... principles from which it originated: IT IS ENDED." And in effect, books being opened throughout France, the names of the citizens who inscribed their acceptance of this new constitution amounted to four millions, while but a few votes to the contrary were registered—an irrefragable proof that the national mind was disposed to think no sacrifice too dear, so tranquillity ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... varying number (usually four, more rarely three, or five or six) of small degenerated vertebrae, and is a useless rudimentary organ with no actual physiological significance. Morphologically, however, it is of great interest as an irrefragable proof of the descent of man and the anthropoids from long-tailed apes. On no other theory can we explain the existence of this rudimentary tail. In the earlier stages of development the tail of the human embryo protrudes considerably. It afterwards atrophies; but the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel |
