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Cognisance

noun
1.
Having knowledge of.  Synonyms: awareness, cognizance, consciousness, knowingness.  "His sudden consciousness of the problem he faced" , "Their intelligence and general knowingness was impressive"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Cognisance" Quotes from Famous Books



... that but for the diary—the civilised substitute for the notched stick—count of them might be lost. And this extorts yet another confession. One year, Good Friday passed, and Easter-time had progressed to the joyful Monday, ere cognisance of the season came. Speedy is the descent to the automaton. A mechanical mis-entry in the diary threw all the orderly days of the week into a whirling jumble. We knew not Wednesday from Thursday, nor Thursday from Friday, though we ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... opposite evil of excessive concentration. It was the most sagacious of Governments, and would rarely have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives as wise as its own, and had taken account of passions and follies of which it had little cognisance. But the supreme power of the nobility had passed to a committee, from the committee to a Council of Ten, from the Ten to three Inquisitors of State; and in this intensely centralised form it became, about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... only to make the darkness denser and thicker. In many cases, the saints of God have burnt down to the last film of vital energy and expired, and there has been no shining that the world has taken cognisance of. Their bitter complaint has been, "I have laboured in vain; I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain." But even these shall shine. They shall shine as the stars for ever and ever in that world where all holy and faithful souls obtain ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... formed a singular contrast with his person. He opened the letter; and whether it was that he cared as little for the General as for the cause of M. do Bourrienne's arrest, he replied that the matter was no longer in his hands, and that it was now under the cognisance of the public administrators of the laws. The Minister then stepped into his carriage, and the writer was conducted to several offices in his hotel. She passed through them with a broken heart, for she met with none but harsh men, who told her ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... condition, they are the sport of any invisible intelligences that choose to play upon them; but fearing lest they may be accused of this, they erroneously assert that no such intelligences of a high order have cognisance of what happens in this world. The fact that mahatmas have powers which appear supernatural proves nothing, as Mr Sinnett also admits that innumerable fakirs and yojis possess these as well, whose authority on occultism he deems of no account, when he says that 'careless inquirers are ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... cognisance of the fact, and were active in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... and declared they could not accept the bailiff as their judge, and did not think that it could be legal for them to refuse to obey a command from their ecclesiastical superiors, whether with relation to exorcism or any other thing of which the ecclesiastical courts properly took cognisance. The clerk brought this answer to the bailiff, and he, thinking it was better to wait for the arrival of the bishop or of fresh orders from him, put off his visit to the convent until the next day. But the next day came without anything ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in Athens, and have perished from the same ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... is this: the problem of evil as such is of anything but an abstruse or remote nature, nor one requiring unusual philosophical penetration to bring to light; on the contrary, pain and sorrow, privation, adversity, death—these are experiences that have come within the cognisance of all. If, then, the facts are neither so remote nor so inconsiderable that men could have simply {107} forgotten to take them into account in framing their estimates of the Divine character, how is it, we ask, that they have arrived at and clung to the belief in the benevolence of God ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... this kind of magic as a crime. The commonest form of it was that of the spell, or carmen, no doubt often sung, and accompanied by some action which would bring it under the head of sympathetic magic; but the spell alone is taken cognisance of by the State. Pliny has preserved three words from the XII. Tables which tell their own tale: "qui fruges excantassit."[109] Servius, commenting on the line of Virgil's 8th Eclogue, "atque satas alio vidi traducere messes," writes, "magicis quibusdam artibus hoc ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... called the nine together, and in 1635 organised them into an Academie Francaise, whose function should be to perfect and watch over the purity of the French tongue. The Parlement granted letters-patent, limited the number of academicians to forty, and required them to take cognisance of French authors and the French language alone. The original nine, however, were far from gratified, and always regretted the "golden age" of early days. Richelieu established the Jardin des Plantes for the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... to take part with his own people in the final struggle. Still, however, the inbred abhorrence of idolatry had influenced his manner of worship, and when, after half a lifetime, Granada had fallen, and the Inquisition had begun to take cognisance of new Christians from among the Moors as well as the Jews, there were not lacking spies to report the absence of all sacred images or symbols from the house of the wealthy merchant, and that neither he nor any of his family had been seen kneeling before the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... involved very few changes, and in most cases it has been bibliographically misleading to term them "editions". Undoubtedly, somewhere in the past, the distinction between a "printing" and an "edition" has not been understood. However, with due cognisance of the irregularity, the practice of giving each reprint a new edition number accompanied by a running sales total is being maintained for ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... perhaps done for us or can still do, but we must remember that they are in continuous communication with the Netherlands Government, and I am convinced that the correspondence between the Netherlands Minister and Lord Lansdowne was sent to our Government with the cognisance of the Deputation. I think that we must banish from our minds the hope of obtaining any benefit through the mediation of our Deputation. The correspondence in question between the Netherlands and British Governments probably ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell

... their possessions." In this wicked deed we gather that many of the Israelites, and the members of Saul's family in particular, had an active share, and were benefited by the spoils. The Almighty beheld and took cognisance, but no immediate retribution followed. Towards the close of David's reign, however, for some unknown reason, the whole land was visited with a famine. Month after month it stalked abroad, and ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... oratory, sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I've sold 'em jewelry, medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I've taken cognisance some of women. It takes a man a lifetime to find out about one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One lesson I picked up was when I was working the West ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... which shall stand for an image and monument of your worthines to posteritie. And though they serve to pleasure and profite manie, yet shall my selfe reape pleasure, also if they please you well, under whose name and cognisance they shall goe abroad and seeke their fortunes. How the world will entertaine them I know not, or what acceptance your credit may adde to their basenes I am yet uncertaine; but this I dare vaunt without sparke of vaine-glory that I have given you a taste of ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... having a part in the play announced for performance upon the following day, an order was sent to silence the whole company, and to close the theatre, although it was admitted that the managers had been without cognisance of their actor's misconduct! "However," Cibber narrates, "this order was obeyed, and remained in force for two or three days, till the same authority was pleased, or advised, to revoke it. From the measures this injured gentleman took for his redress, it may be judged how far it was taken for ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... science, we shall see there too the wondrous slavery which men have endured—from puny fetters, moreover, which one stirring thought would, as we think, have burst asunder. The above, however, are matters not within every one's cognisance; some of them are shut in by learning or the show of it; and plain "practical" men would say, they follow where they have no business but to follow. But the way in which the human body shall be covered is not a thing for the scientific and the learned only: and is allowed on all hands ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... himself; but her simple truthfulness, her strong good sense (which no sophistry could impose upon), and her delicate feeling for propriety, rendered her judgment a test of utmost value with regard to any subjects of which it could take adequate cognisance. And these were confined within no narrow range—the workings of Nature as it lived and moved around her, social equities and charities, religious and moral truth, tried by the heart as well as by the head, and verbal expression, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... first charge, and eventually both charges were allowed to drop. The council at the same time passed a resolution to the effect that whenever a charge should in future be made by one member of the court against another, and the court take cognisance of it, the charge itself and the names of the accuser and the accused should be expressed in the order of ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... Corbett is a philanthropist of the most practical kind. He does not distribute his means like milk spilled upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither does he take cognisance of merely speculative benevolence. Everything to which he has put his hand has prospered, and he has thus laid the foundations of a good name, which is better than all his riches—a name which the working men of his native city will be slow to forget. It is with the establishment ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... Having taken cognisance of the report of the First Committee upon the terms of Article 36, paragraph 2, of the Statute of the Permanent Court ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller

... impregnable, unless a pilot could be found to show an enemy the way. Against such a result they had several safeguards: each man of this fraternity had bound himself by an oath not to betray any of their secrets. The Spanish authorities took very little cognisance of them, as their own vessels were not attacked; while at that time the governors of the West India Islands did not trouble themselves much about rooting out piracy; and it was only when some act of especial atrocity had been committed, that, if a man-of-war ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... adopted by the Black Prince as his badge. But, as a matter of fact, the ostrich feather was used as a family badge by all the sons of Edward III. and their descendants. It appears to have been the cognisance of the province of Ostrevant, a district lying between Artois and Hainault, and the appanage of the eldest sons of the house of Hainault. In this way it may have been adopted by the family of Edward III. by right of ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport

... FOLLIOTT. Well, sir, these gentlemen among them, the present company excepted, have practised as much dishonesty as, in any other department than literature, would have brought the practitioner under the cognisance of the police. In politics, they have ran with the hare and hunted with the hound. In criticism, they have, knowingly and unblushingly, given false characters, both for good and for evil; sticking at no art of misrepresentation, to clear out of the field of ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... face; always the eyes watering and smarting; always the unyielding opposition against which to bend the head; always the rush of sound in the ears,—a distraction against which the senses had to struggle before they could take their needed cognisance of trail and of game. An uneasiness was abroad with the wind, an uneasiness that infected the men, the dogs, the forest creatures, the very insentient trees themselves. It racked the nerves. In it the inimical Spirit of the North seemed to find its plainest symbol; ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... when a ship was shattered at sea, two men fell at strife fighting for one plank. Antagoras struck away Pisistratus; one could not blame him, for it was for his life; but Justice took cognisance. The other swam ashore; but him a dog-fish seized; surely the Avenger of the Fates rests not even in the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... of the aforesaid Cognefestu has by us been required to state also upon oath the things come to her cognisance in this process, and has avowed naught save praises of the said foreigner, because since her coming her man had treated her better in consequence of the neighbourhood of this good lady, who filled the air with love, as the sun did light, and other incongruous nonsense, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... Mr. Barnes who was the padre? Mr. Barnes turned his eyeglass towards the spectacles, and said "he didn't know any more than the dead; he didn't know two people in the room." The spectacles nevertheless made the eyeglass a bow, of which the latter took no sort of cognisance. The spectacles advanced; Mr. Newcome fell back with a peevish exclamation of "Confound the fellow, what is he coming to speak to me for?" He did not choose to be addressed by all sorts ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ever fought, in which a brace of Blabs were sweetly discomfited. They had succeeded in separating "very friends," and had arranged a hostile meeting; but, through the intervention of better men, and without their cognisance, the principals entered into explanation, and, finding that they had been misled, mutually agreed to fire at the seconds, who had made the mischief. One Blab received a bullet in the calf of his leg, and the other a ping close to his whiskers; and then the combatants said ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... reparation being adequate security against repetition of the wrong. So far as may be necessary for this purpose, punishment may equitably go, but no further. Genuine justice does not permit penal laws of human enactment to take into account the abstract turpitude of crime. That she reserves for divine cognisance, recollecting that 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' saith the Lord. Nor does she permit the smallest aggravation of punishment for the sake either of the offender's own mental improvement, or to discourage others from evil doing; ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... Characters of the Ministers..... The Commons reduce the Number of standing Forces to Ten Thousand..... They establish the Civil list; and assign Funds for paying the National Debts..... They take Cognisance of fraudulent Endorsements of Exchequer Bills..... Anew East-India Company constituted by act of parliament..... .Proceedings against a Book written by William Molineux of Dublin, and against certain Smugglers of Alamodes and Lustrings from France..... ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... up, the guards retired, the money was carried to the treasury, the executioner wiped his sword, and the lives of the pacha's subjects were considered to be in a state of comparative security, until the affairs of the country were again brought under their cognisance on the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat

... her beautiful boudoir, with its blue-satin hangings, its numerous mirrors, its redundancy of coronets surmounting her own cipher, twisted and twined into a far more graceful decoration than the grim heraldic bruin which formed her husband's cognisance, she said to herself that something was yet required to constitute a woman's happiness beyond the utmost efforts of the upholder's art—that even carriages, horses, tall footmen, quantities of flowers, unlimited credit, and whole packs of cards left on the hall table every ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... probable we do not call severely for the proof of. Moreover Miss Martineau is not only a believer in the mysteries of mesmerism (and she wrote to me the other day that in Birmingham, where she is, she has present cognisance of three cases of clairvoyance), but she is a believer in the personal integrity of her witnesses. She has what she has well called an 'incommunicable confidence.' And this, however incommunicable, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... was read out first. She was now accused of conspiring with Paul Deroulede against the safety of the Republic, by having cognisance of a treasonable correspondence carried on with the prisoner, Marie Antoinette; by virtue of which accusation the Public Prosecutor asked her if she had anything ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... up by anxiety, and so took no cognisance of time. He had forgotten the passing of daylight. Therefore sudden realisation flung him into headlong panic. The forest about him was growing dark. The snow fog outside had changed to a deeper hue. Night was coming on. The man in the storm was beyond ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... week—and was in the possession of the cats of the town, and the flies of Egypt. Two monstrous hounds entered with us; and the cats fled hastily by a window which was slightly open at the top, spitting and howling with fear when they missed the first spring, and came within the cognisance of ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... 'T is for your own good I am acting. Not merely is this fellow wholly beneath ye in birth and fortune, besides a rebel to our king, but there are facts about him of which ye have not cognisance that should ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... roses, but a feather was also the cognisance of Henry VI., and every one's barret-cap mounted a feather, generally borrowed from the goodwife's poultry yard at home, but sometimes picked up on the moors, and showing the barred black and brown patterns of the hawk's or the owl's plumage. It was a heron's feather that ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... under her arm, shuffles noiselessly by and disappears down an adjacent turning. Then there is another long interval, interrupted by a pretentious clock sonorously sounding two. A feeling of drowsiness creeps over me; my eyelids droop. I begin to lose cognisance of my surroundings and to imagine myself in some far-away place, when I am recalled sharply to myself by an intensely cold current of air. Intuitively I recognise the superphysical; it is the same species of cold which invariably heralds its approach. I have been right ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... replied William, gravely, "this is a matter more out of my cognisance than thou seemest to think. It is true that Guy, Count of Ponthieu, holds fief under me, but I have no control over the laws of his realm. And by those laws, he hath right of life and death over all stranded and waifed ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... system of religious rites written out and sealed, (showing) with what victims, upon what days, and in what temples the sacred rites were to be performed; and from what funds the money was to be taken for these expenses. He placed all religious institutions, public and private, under the cognisance of the pontiff to the end that there might be some place where the people should come to consult, lest any confusion in the divine worship might be occasioned by neglecting the ceremonies of their own country, and introducing foreign ones. (He ordained) that the same ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... fields, and fruit and vegetables in the garden; but there is a scarcity of flour and groceries, and instead of the claret which, in the good old days, flowed freely at table, we are reduced to drink whisky, of which the excise has not always had an opportunity of taking due cognisance. My father does not quite see the matter in the light I do, and was inclined to be offended when I ordered down a cask of the cratur from Dublin, as a salve to my conscience, and a few dozen of claret, as a remembrance ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... takes cognisance of the river Jordan, and describes river scenery in the land of Edom, i.e., south of the ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... connection cannot dispense with xviii. 6 seq, but at the same time it is beyond doubt that the venomous way of interpreting the facts is a mark of later revision. For Saul here practices his perfidies with the cognisance of his servants, who must therefore have been well aware of his disposition towards David; but the old narrator proceeds on the opposite assumption, that his hatred appeared all at once, and that David had been ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... produced an obvious revulsion in my favour. The President conferred hastily with his colleagues, and then said that my arrest had indeed been made upon the information of Lucius, and with the cognisance of the Court; but that he sincerely regretted that I had any complaint of unhandsome usage to make, and that the matter would be certainly inquired into. He then added that he understood from my words that I desired to make a complete submission, and that in that case I should be acquitted ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... constant pursuit of them, but with bad intelligence and never knowing whether I was going right or not." Yet though compelled to act thus blindly, in that torturing uncertainty, the eyes of the world were upon him, and men, wise in the cognisance of after- events, would unhesitatingly judge him in the light of ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)

... absolutely, small a consideration it is possible to obtain two works so brimful of interest and curiosity on all subjects connected with gardening, agriculture, and rural pursuits or amusements. But both these works long remained—the Bacon yet does so—outside the collector's pale and cognisance, and the real cause was that they were alike common; they had been the favourites of successive generations; edition upon edition had been demanded; and the survival of copies was too great to suit the book-hunter, who ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... still-existing staircase constructed by Ercole I. in 1481. The usual bird in a cage appears, the symbol of human passions conquered by religious abnegation. The lower rows of seats are also worked in tarsia, but with ornaments of geometrical form, books, and joint-stools, the diamond, the cognisance of Ercole I. (who gave the original commission), and the pomegranate, that of Alfonso, and this last figure, which only occurs in the third stall to the right in the lower order, makes one think that ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... jealous one of the other. He did not succeed with Lord Northbrook in an attempt to work on that Viceroy by playing off the bogey of Russian aggression; and as the consequence of this failure he allowed himself to display marked evidences of disaffected feeling. Cognisance was taken of this 'attitude of extreme reserve,' and early in 1876 Lord Lytton arrived in India charged with instructions to break away from the policy designated as that of 'masterly inactivity,' and to initiate a new basis of relations with ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... distressful tidings, the Frenchman believed, or affected to believe, that he had been swindled, and he threatened, unless he were repaid in full, he would publish Lady Mary's letters to him. Lady Mary's fear was lest the matter should come to the cognisance of her husband: it would certainly be unfair to Montagu to suggest that he might not have forgiven his wife for a love-affair; but he would certainly never have pardoned her any transaction that ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... cling vigorously to the jury. It constitutes, perhaps, the only category of crowd that cannot be replaced by any individuality. It alone can temper the severity of the law, which, equal for all, ought in principle to be blind and to take no cognisance of particular cases. Inaccessible to pity, and heeding nothing but the text of the law, the judge in his professional severity would visit with the same penalty the burglar guilty of murder and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... George Borrow a series of impressions which, to the end of his life, remained as vivid as at the moment they were absorbed. What appeared to those around him as dull-witted stupidity was, in reality, mental surfeit. His mind was occupied with other things than books, things that it eagerly took cognisance of, strove to understand and was never to forget. {10b} Hitherto he had taken "no pleasure in books . . . and bade fair to be as arrant a dunce as ever brought the blush of shame into the cheeks of anxious and affectionate parents." {10c} His mind was not ready for them. When the time ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... through a responsible channel, through one whose duty it is to take cognisance of such things and to report ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... from the schooner on the 20th to inform me, that the seamen were committing many irregularities, taking spirits out of my cabin and going on shore as they pleased; the French guard seeming to take little or no cognisance of their actions. At one o'clock the interpreter and a military officer took me to the government house, and I expected to have an interview with the general and a termination put to our confinement. They showed me into the secretary's office, and requested a copy of my passport and commission; ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... the other two. The question at the beginning is, Who is the sower? And the question at the end, What is the reaping? The point in the centre already fixed, on which the two extremities depend, is the growth of the seed without the aid, and even beyond the cognisance, of the sower. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... Ana-eli-beli-amur, a maid, for half a mina of silver and a mina and a half of silver to boot. The day that Dagil-ilani shall take a second wife, Dagil-ilani shall give Latubashinni a mina of silver and she shall go back where she was before. With the cognisance of Shum-iddin, son ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... be a more perfect instrument for communication with the external universe. We know that the present body conditions our knowledge, and that our senses do not take cognisance of all the qualities of material things. Microscopes and telescopes have enlarged our field of vision, and have brought the infinitely small and the infinitely distant within our range. Our ear hears vibrations at a certain rate per second, and no doubt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... them immoralities would be going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have cognisance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things, and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and right, should not ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... highly incensed, and immediately ordered the Gov.-General to Mexico, declaring him disqualified for life to serve under the Crown. The senior magistrates of the Supreme Court were removed from office. Each priest who had yielded to the legate's authority without previously taking cognisance of the regium exequatur was ordered to pay P1,000 fine. The Archbishop was degraded and transferred from the Archbishopric of Manila to the Bishopric of Guadalajara in Mexico. In spite of this punishment, it came to the knowledge of the King that the ex-Archbishop of Manila, as Bishop of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... diffuse and diversified measure. I have said, my Lord, that his subjects are more diversified, because in the character of a Lyric Poet we must consider him as a professed imitator both of Anacreon and of Pindar. In the former point of view he falls under our immediate cognisance; in the latter we shall take a view of him afterwards, when we come to examine the works of that great ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... be added also that of Genesis, (Gen. 3. 5) "You shall be as Gods, knowing Good and Evill." and verse 11. "Who told thee that thou wast naked? hast thou eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee thou shouldest not eat?" For the Cognisance of Judicature of Good and Evill, being forbidden by the name of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, as a triall of Adams obedience; The Divell to enflame the Ambition of the woman, to whom that fruit already seemed beautifull, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... little animal, who returned her endearments, and, at length, suddenly concealed itself in her bosom, which unexpected proceeding startled the Queen, when the Seigneur du Rohan, who was by her side, exclaimed, "What do you fear, madam; is not the ermine your cognisance?" No less enthusiastic was the reception given by the citizens of Morlaix forty years later (1548) to Mary Stuart, then only five years old, on her landing in France. She was lodged in the convent of the Jacobins, and assisted at the Te Deum in the church of Notre Dame-du-Mur. When passing ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... the United States minister at Madrid by the Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs on the twenty-first instant, whereby the foregoing notification was conveyed. It will be perceived therefrom, that the government of Spain, having cognisance of the joint resolution of the United States Congress, and, in view of the things which the President is thereby required and authorised to do, responds by treating the reasonable demands of this government as measures of hostility, following ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... Archbishop gave or refused license through his chaplains, and could not be ignored as Milton had ignored the little Presbyterian Popes; Geneva in his person must repair to Lambeth. Chaplain Tomkyns, who took cognisance of "Paradise Lost," was fortunately a broad-minded man, disposed to live and let live, though scrupling somewhat when he found "perplexity" and "fear of change" imputed to "monarchs." His objections were overcome, and on August 20, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... administration of the townships and the counties,[99] either as public officers or as the judges of public misdemeanors, but in most of the states the more important classes of public offences come under the cognisance of ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... over the land to complete, as it were, the disadvantages caused by the prolonged storms at sea. At a critical period of the battle the silver stars on the banners of one of the Lancastrians, the Earl of Oxford, being mistaken for the silver suns of Edward's cognisance, two important sections of Warwick's army fell upon one another. Friend was slaughtering friend ere the error was detected. While all was yet in doubt, confusion, and dismay, rushed full into the centre Edward himself, with his knights and riders; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... was the most trusted. Government functionaries sought his protection, Franciscan and Dominican missionaries gave him their confidence and, after he was appointed to a seat in the India Council, he had official cognisance of all correspondence relating to American affairs. Prior to the appearance in Spain of the celebrated Letters of Cortes, Peter Martyr's narrative stood alone. Heidenheimer rightly describes him: Als echter ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... disappeared the people returned to their old amours, the sugar-cane, whose five loaves, disposed crosswise, gave the island her heraldic cognisance. Madeira first cultivated sugar in the western hemisphere and passed it on to the New World. Yet the cane was always worked under difficulties. Space is limited: the upper extreme of cultivation on the southern side may be estimated at 1,000 feet. The crop exhausts the soil; the plant ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... custody on a charge of bigamy chiefly through the instrumentality of Mr. Bonteen, who had been the friend of the victim of the supposed bigamist. With the accusation of bigamy they would have nothing to do, but he must ask them to take cognisance of that quarrel as well as of the quarrel at the club. He then named that formerly popular preacher, the Rev. Mr. Emilius, and explained that he would prove that this man, who had incurred the suspicion of the police in the first instance, had during the night of the murder been so circumstanced ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... judgment of any book, is to read it? Was it prudently considered that the dullest of critics can read only as long as his eyes are open? and that the function of judge must incessantly bring under his cognisance papaverous volumes, with which only a super-human endowment of vigilance could hope successfully to contend? so that the goddess is driven, by the necessity of the game, to admit within the circuit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... outstanding events happened to him. The development of his character went on, but that development was silent and almost unnoticed by those with whom he came into contact. Still, there were certain things of which cognisance must be taken, because not only did they affect his future but they formed a part of the chain of events which led to the tragic ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... extraordinary cases when church government doth degenerate into tyranny, or those who manage it make defection from the truth, "the Christian magistrate may and ought to do diverse things in and for religion, and interpose his authority diverse wayes so as doth not properly belong to his cognisance, decision and administration ordinarily, and in a reformed and well constituted church";[270] but also that, in ordinary cases, he is free to act as his own conscience directs in giving or refusing his sanction to the government and discipline of the church; and that if ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... says, that it is decided by the senses themselves that pleasure is a good and that pain is an evil, he has attributed more weight to the senses than the laws allow them. We are the judges of private actions, but we cannot decide anything which does not legally come under the cognisance of our tribunal; and, in such a case, it is to no purpose that judges are in the habit, when they pronounce sentence, of adding, "if the question belongs to my jurisdiction;" for, if the matter did not come under their jurisdiction, this additional form of words would not any the more give ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... majority of nineteen to one. It is believed that the one who voted for mercy was the most illustrious of all, Racine. Boileau and Bossuet also defended the Abbe, and when the matter became at last so serious that the King himself was obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood that his ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... But it was also evident, with the heavy selling at the close and the stiffness of the price, which had never wavered as block after block was thrown on the market, that some powerful interest as well had taken cognisance of the fact that the morrow was hoodoo-day. At the close, most of the sellers, had they been granted another five minutes, would have repurchased, even at a loss, what they had sold, for it looked as though they had sold themselves ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson

... fire. Untutored things scarce brought beneath the laws And meek provisions of this ancient State. Yet is it wise, with wealth and power like hers, To let so many of her sons grow up In untaught darkness and consecutive vice? True, we are jealous, free, and hate constraint And every cognisance, o'er private life; Yet, not to name a higher principle, 'Twere but an institute of wise police That every child, neglected of its own, State claimed should be, State seized and taught and trained To social ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... is simple and blind, taking no cognisance of the consequences, or the quality of the offspring produced. The divine command is complex. It embodies the reproductive instinct, but restrains and guides it in view ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... and what would live to do. 'They say that the strain of the fiend is in that race, my dear,' he told her. 'They say that Geoffrey Grey-Gown had intercourse with a demon. And certain it is that in Richard, as in all his brothers, that stinging grain lives in the blood. For testimony look at their cognisance of leopards, and advise yourself, whether any house in Christendom ever took that device but had known familiarly the devil in some shape? And look again at the deeds of these princes. What turned the young king to riot and death, and Geoffrey to rapine and death? What else ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... wards or districts: out of these burgesses are chosen two chief burgesses, one for the city, the other for the liberties. The dean, high steward, or his deputy, the bailiffs and burgesses, or a quorum of them, are empowered to make bye-laws, and take cognisance of small offences, within the city and liberties of Westminster. But I look upon it that the justices of peace for Westminster have in a great measure superseded the authority of the burgesses (except as to weights, measures, and nuisances), by virtue of whose warrants all petty offenders ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales

... which all is regularity and order, and all flows from, and is obedient to, a divine code of laws of unbending operation. We are to understand from what has been laid before us that man, with his varied mental powers and impulses, is a natural problem of which the elements can be taken cognisance of by science, and that all the secular destinies of our race, from generation to generation, are but evolutions of a law statuted and sustained in action ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... merchant is still a mystery. His mock trial was decided by the commission appointed to examine him at the castle of Lusignan, in May, 1453, and judgment was pronounced by Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins, chancellor of France, after the king had taken cognisance ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... has been so successfully cultivated in this country by our periodical Essayists, and which consists in applying the talents and resources of the mind to all that mixed mass of human affairs, which, though not included under the head of any regular art, science, or profession, falls under the cognisance of the writer, and "comes home to the business and bosoms of men." Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli, is the general motto of this department of literature. It does not treat of minerals or fossils, of the virtues of plants, or the influence of planets; ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... and gazed wretchedly about the room, taking no cognisance of what objects his sight fell upon. Margaret seated herself, with a sigh of annoyance, and regarded him with a countenance ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... They obscure, as such characteristics nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer's nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the springs of human weakness. Undoubtedly brilliant in force and keenness, it yet too seldom produces the kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest scorn. His personal experience of life ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... him, and have finally turned him loose. I cannot very well make out their object in setting him free without getting a German officer in exchange, but they were keen to get him off their hands and wanted us to take cognisance of the fact that they had accorded him his liberty. This we have done. I shall be curious to see whether there is any sequel to ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... BEAR, markgrave of Brandenburg, called the Bear, "not from his looks or qualities, for he was a tall handsome man, but from the cognisance on his shield, an able man, had a quick eye as well as a strong hand, and could pick what way was straightest among crooked things, was the shining figure and the great man of the North in his day, got much in the North and kept it, got Brandenburg ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... avoidance and confirmation thereof, the plenipotentiaries have furthermore resolved that the 'pothecaries are concocting a certain miasma, by which decree we men are to be kept within salutary boundaries. Such finally being the case, and the people having cognisance thereof, the secular inhabitants of the neighbouring districts and sequestrations have arisen, and want to know what it is all about and wherefore. I myself am not able to say a word there anent, inasmuch as I wish not to apprehend it; but so much I can say for certain, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... must be reopened, and that there could be no peace between him and the Church until it satisfied him on these four points:—that ministers should make no reference in the pulpit to affairs of government; that the Courts of the Church should take no cognisance of offences against the law of the land; that the General Assembly should only meet by the King's special command; and that the Acts of the Assembly should, no more than the statutes of the realm, be held valid till they ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison

... leopard-skins girded round their waists. Speke was desired to halt and sit in the glaring sun, while he was advancing hat in hand. He donned his hat, mounted his umbrella, and quietly sat down, to observe what was going on. A white dog, spear, shield, and woman, the Uganda cognisance, were by the side of the king, as also a knot of staff-officers, with whom he kept up a brisk conversation, while he took copious draughts from neat little gourd cups, offered by ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... me cognisance of certain names . . . certain movements . . . enough, I think, to thwart their projected COUP for the moment, it would only be for the moment, and still leaves me in ignorance of the identity of the ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... that he could not expect a fair and equal Tryal before the Peers of Flanders. And when afterwards the Cause was by the Countess revok'd to the judgment of the Peers of Flanders, it was at Length for certain Reasons decreed, that the Peers of France should take Cognisance of it. What the Reasons were of transferring, that Tryal, Budaeus does not tell us; which one versed in the Feudal Laws should never have omitted. But 'tis Time to return ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman

... infusorial life, but now it is like a pale jewel. How strange, I thought, to think of this liquid gaseous juice, which we call water, trickling in the cracks of the earth! And just as the fish that live in it think of it as their world, and have little cognisance of what happens in the acid, unsubstantial air above, except the occasional terror of the dim, looming forms which come past, making the soft banks quiver and stir, so it may be with us; there may be a great mysterious world outside of us, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... not a satisfactory way for a person with a soul to spend his time. His wife spends her day much in the same way, smoking paper cigarettes instead of a pipe, and managing the female domestic serfs instead of the men. All matrimonial affairs come under the cognisance of the Pameshtchik, as no serf can marry without his permission. This, however, is rarely withheld, as it is his interest to have as large a number of people as ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... have now told thee every thing about the Sankhya System truly. Those who are conversant with this philosophy succeed in attaining to tranquillity. Indeed, as men whose understanding are subject to error have direct cognisance of Brahma. They that succeed in attaining to that state have never to come back to this world after the dissolution of their bodies; while as regards those that are said to be emancipate in this life, puissance, and that indescribable felicity which attaches itself to Samadhi, and immutability, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... but lives in the world, in the souls of the elect to the glory of election. She was wounded in Paradise by a dart of the devil, and healed of her hurt by the death of Christ Jesus. She is the poor man's credit and the rich man's praise, the wise man's care and the good man's cognisance. In sum, finding her worth in words hardly to be expressed, I will in these few words only deliver my opinion of her:—She is God's blessing and man's bliss, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... brain, and is called the mind. But just as in a political state only the most important and most exceptional duties are performed by the imperial body, and minor matters and questions of routine are referred to boards and local authorities, so the mind takes cognisance only of a few of the higher concerns of the animal, and a large amount of the work of the nervous system goes on insensibly, in a perfectly automatic way— even much that occurs in ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... and to append to this a few easy exercises. It must be remembered, however, that there are great difficulties to be overcome in such a task. Every home, for instance, has its own rules for pronunciation. Of these I do not for my immediate purpose propose to take cognisance. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various

... been here!" Can we, dare we doubt it? Is the departure of the immortal soul to the spirit-world so trivial a matter that the life-giving God takes no cognisance of it? No! Mourning one, in the deep night of thy sorrow, thou must rise above "untoward coincidences"—thou must cancel the words "accident" and "fate" from thy vocabulary of trial. God, thy God, was there! If there be perplexing accompaniments, be assured they were of His ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... half spray, came whistling by. Above the rest, a turret square Did o'er its Gothic entrance bear, Of sculpture rude, a stony shield; The bloody heart was in the field, And in the chief three mullets stood, The cognisance of Douglas blood. The turret held a narrow stair, Which, mounted, gave you access where A parapet's embattled row Did seaward round the castle go. Sometimes in dizzy steps descending, Sometimes in narrow circuit bending, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... turret-chamber on the angle of the south-eastern wall whence I could keep my lady's window in view. I was never a man to need much sleep: but if, through the year which followed, the apparition escaped once or twice without my cognisance, I dare take oath this was the extent of it. It appeared more rarely, as my Master had promised: and in the end (I think) scarce above once a month. In form it never varied from the cresseted globe of flame I had first seen, and always it took ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... readiness the materials she had judged requisite," writes her chronicler, "she retired at her usual hour to bed, intending to rise at twelve.... There was none but the Invisible who could take cognisance of her passion on assuming ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... mediums in all ways that England has ever produced—then I look upon the matter in a more serious light. Again, if Miss Julia Ames can tell Mr. Stead things in her own earth life of which he could not have cognisance, and if those things are shown, when tested, to be true, then one is more inclined to think that those things which cannot be tested are true also. Or once again, if Raymond can tell us of a photograph no copy of which had reached England, and which proved to be exactly as he described ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to him, and which bears as its ensign, swinging from an elm near the inn porch, the Three Castles of the Esmond family. They had a sign, too, over the gateway of Castlewood House, bearing the same cognisance. This was the hatchment of Francis, Lord Castlewood, who now lay in the chapel hard by, his son reigning ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... violence than they do at present, and they carry down the period of this excessive action to the commencement of the present terrestrial order. The Uniformitarians, in effect, deny this proposition, at any rate as regards any period of the earth's history of which we have actual cognisance. If, however, the "nebular hypothesis" of the origin of the universe be well founded—as is generally admitted—then, beyond question, the earth is a gradually cooling body, which has at one time been very much hotter than it is at present. There ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... on Tower Hill the fatal stroke which severed the wisest head in England from the shoulders of the Earl of Strafford, whose crime coming under the cognisance of no human law, a new one was made to his destruction—to such exorbitancy ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... of silver. In the love of books, as in everything else, Diane and Henri II. were inseparable. The interlaced H and D are scattered over the covers of their volumes; the lily of France is twined round the crescents of Diane, or round the quiver, the arrows, and the bow which she adopted as her cognisance, in honour of the maiden goddess. The books of Henri and of Diane remained in the Chateau d'Anet till the death of the Princesse de Conde in 1723, when they were dispersed. The son of the famous Madame de Guyon bought the greater part of the library, which has since been scattered ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... Rachel Cohen even Royalties and Press notices would eventually pall. And in pausing I may remark that the beast Glatisant cuts a very episodic and unsatisfactory figure in the Morte D'Arthur. Pursued for a short while by Sir Palamides in his Paynim days, it scarcely comes into the cognisance of KING ARTHUR'S Court and the Table Round. And I fancy that the circulating libraries will feel the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various

... at least has a parallel in Irish legend. This Garlon has an unknightly way of killing men by viewless blows from the rear. Balan goes to encounter Garlon. Balin remains, learning courtesy, modelling himself on Lancelot, and gaining leave to bear Guinevere's Crown Matrimonial for his cognisance,—which, of course, Balan does not ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... of her mind which registered the greater, deeper, and more lasting impressions remained inactive, the smaller faculty, that took cognisance of the little, minute-to-minute matters, was as busy and bright as ever. It appeared that the blow had been struck over this latter faculty, and not, as one so often supposes, through it. She seemed in that hour ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... hours, and it can certainly be done in the time by guides. But then guides can always go twice as fast as any but the first flight of amateurs. My companion, though an excellent and well-known mountaineer, took cognisance of the fact that I was not in first-class training. And I must say for him that he is not one of those who think of the Alps as no more than a cinder track to try one's endurance. He was never in a hurry, and was always ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... Professor Weismann and, we will say, Heringians consists in the fact that the first maintains the new germ-plasm when on the point of repeating its developmental processes to take practically no cognisance of anything that has happened to it since the last occasion on which it developed itself; while the latter maintain that offspring takes much the same kind of account of what has happened to it in the persons of its parents since the last ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... things which range under one [Greek: idea] are also under the cognisance of one science, there would have been, on their theory, only one science taking cognisance of all goods collectively: but in fact there are many even for those which range under one category: for instance, of Opportunity or Seasonableness (which ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... historical facts in connection with the life of the soul is not difficult to see. The whole philosophy of the future will be transformed as soon as psychology takes cognisance of these genetic phenomena and makes them the basis of its speculations. When we examine impartially the manuals of psychology that have been published by the most distinguished speculative philosophers and are still widely distributed, we are astonished ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel

... Well, here are some of the conditions which he has himself dictated to our go-between for you to take cognisance of, before anything ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere



Words linked to "Cognisance" :   consciousness, feel, cognizant, cognise, aware, sense, self-awareness, incognizance, unaware, knowing, knowingness, cognisant, incognizant



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