"Confounding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... parchment (for durability) was signed by the members, after being compared at the table with the original one signed on paper, as before stated. I add this P. S. to the copy of my letter to Mr. Wells, to prevent confounding the signature of the original with that of the copy ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... contrary. This assumption, however, as well as the interpretation of most of the passages referred to in its support, proceed, as it appears to me, upon the mistake, not uncommon in conversation, of confounding together the meanings of the words unbeliever and sceptic,—the former implying decision of opinion, and the latter only doubt. I have myself, I find, not always kept the significations of the two words distinct, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... gazed at the poor woman, who was palpably confounding imagination with reality, and after ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... defiantly. My blood boiled. I would have mortgaged the prospects of my Lives of Great Men (not that they were worth mortgaging) for the exquisite satisfaction of confounding this abominable woman. Then I saw the peril of the situation. I thought of horrid headliners in the papers: "Author charged with abusing servant girl," or, "Arrest of Archibald Fairfax on serious charge," and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... sense confounding, Both here and there are opposite voices sounding. Here is my name in measured cadence greeted, And there in hollow echoes oft repeated. Would that the latter cries that reach my ear Came from my mates in this wild forest sphere, In the dread solitude that doth surround me Their presence ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... first step to be taken by the government was to punish severely a ministry that was so short-sighted, and had committed so many faults. Laine declared, with a voice tremulous with emotion, that all was lost, and that but one means of confounding tyranny remained; a scene, portraying the whole terror, dismay and grief of the capital at the approach of the hated enemy, should be arranged. In accordance with this plan, the whole population of Paris—the entire National Guard, the mothers, the young girls, the children, the old and the ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... themselves. They are industrious, prudent, and economical; yet, after a long life of striving, old age finds them still poor. They complain of ill-luck; they say fate is against them. But the real truth is that their projects miscarry because they mistake mere activity for energy. Confounding two things essentially different, they suppose that if they are always busy, they must of a necessity be advancing their fortune; forgetting that labor misdirected is but a waste ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... originally made by him became in the next generation the foundation of further technical distinctions. Both in Plato and Aristotle we note the illusion under which the ancients fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of its unreality, and of confounding the permanence of the intellectual pleasures with the unchangeableness of the knowledge from which they are derived. Neither do we like to admit that the pleasures of knowledge, though more elevating, are not more lasting than other pleasures, and are almost equally dependent ...
— The Republic • Plato
... from this fair, bright, glowing world, thrilling all the world in us with joy, upon the cold and dreary waste of atheism; I will not. I should turn rebel to all the great instincts within me, and all the great behests of nature and life around me, if I did. Ah! the confounding, ever-troubling difficulty is not to believe, but to feel the great Presence all the day long. This is what I think of, and long have, with questioning and pain. What beings should we become—what to one another—under that living and loving sense of the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... you understand how that's done, and there's no need of my explaining it. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. You see what a predicament that would leave the Deity in if you divided, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... o'clock, and broad daylight, when we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most happy accident now favored us; a fog the most intense now prevailed; nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... refuse to continue talking, to explain and to convince some one, to show all and to keep what is hidden, to be expressive and to attack the expense of travelling, to be careful and to ejaculate, to be sincere and to be using confounding refusing with deterioration, to be moving and steadying and surging and complaining and succeeding and grieving and exalting and speeding and pressing and acquiring is not the same thing as being any one. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... were sound; and he was a strenuous supporter of that policy of neutrality which Washington wisely adopted. The Secretary of the Treasury was assailed by those who envied and hated him, in various ways. His official integrity was called in question, but the investigations which he courted led to the confounding of his enemies, while his personal character stood brighter than ever. So bitter became the opposition that some of their number wished for the success of the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, as Mr. Jefferson's correspondence shows; and the part ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... bosome of the bloodie boy, And winde himselfe, his sonne, and harmlesse wife, In endlesse foldes of sure destruction. Now, Homicide, thy lookes are like thyselfe, For blood and death are thy companions. Let my confounding plots but goe before, And thou shalt wade up ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... now from German lips the world may know Facts that should want some skill for their confounding— How Potsdam forced alike on friend and foe A war ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... ministers by telling them the naked truth, which, as they thought impossible to come from the mouth of a statesman, they never failed to write informations to their respective courts directly contrary to the assurances he gave them: most people confounding the ideas of sense and cunning, though there are really no two things in nature more opposite: it is, in part, from this false reasoning, the unjust custom prevails of debarring our sex from the advantages of learning, the ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of the atmosphere, was very remarkable. Travellers having observed the difficulty of judging heights and distances amidst lofty mountains, have generally attributed it to the absence of objects of comparison. It appears to me, that it is fully as much owing to the transparency of the air confounding objects at different distances, and likewise partly to the novelty of an unusual degree of fatigue arising from a little exertion,—habit being thus opposed to the evidence of the senses. I am sure that this extreme clearness of the air gives a peculiar ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... last night, to see the Midsummer Night's Dream—of the Opera Comique. It is a beautiful little theatre now, with a very good company; and the nonsense of the piece was done with a sense quite confounding in that connexion. Willy Am Shay Kes Peer; Sirzhon Foll Stayffe; Lor Lattimeer; and that celebrated Maid of Honour to Queen Elizabeth, Meees Oleeveeir—were the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... peasants seem to have been a peaceful and inoffensive people, although they naturally sympathized with their countrymen, and rejoiced at the victory of Du Quesne, and sorrowed at the defeat of Lake George. They were, nevertheless, declared rebels and outlaws, and a council at Halifax, confounding the innocent with the guilty, decreed the expulsion of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... its forces for the destruction of the Union, he espoused the side of his country, and never faltered in his course. But as to slavery he seemed to have no conscience, regarding it as a matter of total moral indifference, and thus completely confounding the distinction between right and wrong. During the closing hours of his life he probably saw and lamented this strange infatuation; and he must, at all events, have deplored the obsequious and studied devotion of a life-time ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... necessary to point out that this insight, however negatively it be used, is a revelation of positive knowledge. Heraclitus and Parmenides claimed to know; Socrates disclaimed knowledge for reasons. Like all real criticism this is at once a confounding of error and a prophecy of truth. The truth so discovered is indeed not ordinary truth concerning historical or physical things, but not on that account less significant and necessary. This truth, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... spirit is the beautiful lunette which John Sargent placed in the Boston Library, above his well known frieze of "The Prophets." It represents "Jehovah confounding the gods of the nations." The naked figure of suppliant Israel stands before an altar of unhewn stones, on which burns the sacrifice. The smoke ascends to Heaven. On one side stands the mighty figure of Assyria with uplifted mace ready to strike its awful blow upon ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... felt convinced that the spirit of Akhnaton had selected him to do this work. Freddy had been chosen to bestow upon mankind the contents of the royal tomb, which held such a mass of confounding matter. We are all the chosen workers in the Perfect Law, units ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... by the skirts, so to speak, from the open jaws of death by a single savage had proved more confounding to the steadfast mind of Big Black Burl than when but a few minutes before he was dragged thither by twenty, insomuch that ever since the unexpected surcease of the fiendish frolic he had continued to stare about him in a state of bewilderment not unlike that twilight fog of thought and ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... must have been to despatch quickly the king's business, would hardly have spared time to go to Arqua, where Petrarch then lived, and that those who draw from the passage in question the inference that the two great poets must have met, are, as blundering critics often do, confounding the author with his characters. One of Chaucer's personages says that he heard a story he is about to tell from Petrarch; but that is no reason for concluding that Chaucer so heard ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones[62] of as many bag-pipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piece-meal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the air. I despatched four of them, but the rest got away, and I presently shut my window. These creatures were as large as partridges; I took out their ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... pretend to urge on the war. He has them 'spying and lying' every where—promoting cabals in favor of a General, and exciting opposition, in order to eventually crush him—urging Southern rights and amnesties—deluding and confounding every thing. No wonder, after all, that the London Times, comprehending nothing, should have been so wildly asinine as to see in the Message only a bid to conciliate the South!—a timid, making-up measure. The Times is behind our times, and no wonder, when a Russell flounders about for ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Kendall. A more unsatisfactory state of things could not exist than that which prevailed on board of the Young America. The conduct of the crew amounted almost to mutiny. Those who had maliciously made the mischief, and those who had been engaged in it from a love of fun, had succeeded in confounding those who meant to do their duty. It was impossible to tell who were guilty and who were innocent; for three quarters, at least, of the crew seemed to ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... borrower! what rosy gills! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest,—taking no more thought than lilies! What contempt for money,—accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum! or rather what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective!—What near approaches doth he make to the primitive ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... "the biggest chasm on earth"—"so big is it that all other big things,—Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids, Chicago,—all would be lost if tumbled into it." Naturally enough, illustrations as to size are sought for among other canons like or unlike it, with the common result of worse confounding confusion. The prudent keep silence. It was once said that the "Grand Canon could put a dozen ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... followed, leaving her scattered cavalry to be herded home by the two negro boys. It would have been pleasant, she thought, to have appeared at Storm in an automobile, with not only the author in tow, but the interesting stranger as well, to the confounding of Jemima. Her voice came back through the darkness ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, and name the Most High by another name—by the name of Serapis—confounding the substance of the Invisible? Does not Egypt cry aloud for freedom?—and shall she cry in vain? Nay, nay, for thou, my son, art the appointed way of deliverance. To thee, being sunk in eld, I have decreed my rights. Already thy name is whispered ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... tempted me to accept of the office of President of the Antiquarian Society. And now they tell me people have come from the country to be present, and so forth, of which I may believe as much as I may. But I must positively take care of this absurd custom of confounding invitations. My conscience acquits me of doing so by malice prepense, yet one incurs the suspicion. At any rate it is uncivil and must be amended. Dined at Lord C. Commissioner's—to meet the Duchess and her party. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... bound up with cognizance of the enemy. He may be hiding in the bowels of the earth, defying the attempt to tame the soil to our advantage; he may be mocking our efforts to find scientific solutions to the riddles of nature; he may be encamped in our own souls, confounding our goodness and demolishing our moral defences. But he must be there. Without him life would be ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... you'll give more pleasure in this quiet way," said Mr. Irwine. "In this sort of thing people are constantly confounding liberality with riot and disorder. It sounds very grand to say that so many sheep and oxen were roasted whole, and everybody ate who liked to come; but in the end it generally happens that no one has had an enjoyable meal. If the people ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an immense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw it clearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter slowly through his faculties. The ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the Cyclopean, and described by Pausanias, is utterly different, being composed by immense blocks of stone, with small pebbles inserted in the interstices. (See Gell's Topography of Rome and its Vicinity.) By some antiquaries, who have not made the mistake of confounding these distinct orders of architecture, the Cyclopean has been deemed more ancient than the Pelasgic,—but this also is an error. Lycosura was walled by the Pelasgians between four and five centuries prior to the introduction of the Cyclopean masonry—in the building of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the American Calvinists have imputed to the Deity, together with their coarse caricatures of the Gospel, may account for, but cannot justify, the terms in which Dr. Chancing has thought fit to assail the orthodox faith, confounding on all occasions scriptural Christianity, as held by the Catholic Church, with the dogmas of an extravagant creed. To understand his eloquent and indignant declamations, we must read the transatlantic expounders of ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... once, and even to assist in breaking it up, required a great effort of his resolution. The Captain, too, found it difficult to unload his old ideas upon the subject, and to take a perfectly new cargo on board, with that rapidity which the circumstances required, or without jumbling and confounding the two. Consequently, instead of putting on his coat and waistcoat with anything like the impetuosity that could alone have kept pace with Walter's mood, he declined to invest himself with those garments at all at present; and informed Walter that on such a serious matter, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the story of Hilarion. His name still lingers in "the place he loved the best." "To this day," I quote this fact from M. de Montalembert's work, "the Cypriots, confounding in their memories legends of good and of evil, the victories of the soul and the triumph of the senses, give to the ruins of one of those strong castles built by the Lusignans, which command their isle, the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... doctrines which consist nowadays in confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad, have absolutely no foundation. Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix Lemaire, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know. He just wanted to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry. Felix slashed ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... want your wife and mother for?" asked Canny. "That's mere foolishness, my lad. It's the devil confounding you, damn his soul! Don't you listen to him, the cursed one. Don't let him have his way. He is at you about the women, but you spite him; say, 'I don't want them!' He is on at you about freedom, but you stand up to him ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... districts and countries of Kyle, Cunningham, and Carrick, of old extent,—To our trusty and well-beloved William Chalmers and John M'Adam, students and practitioners in the ancient and mysterious science of confounding right and wrong. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... granules without discoverable nucleus or membranous envelope, and interspersed with cretaceous coccoliths. After a description of the structure of this substance and its chemical reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding the statement of fact in the description and the interpretation which he proceeds to put ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... written, 'that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms, he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of character, and to establish the great principle that character ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... creating a partial distraction from the perpetual contemplation of petty irritating causes of disquiet. But while we acknowledge that they are all good in their way for people who can attain nothing better, we must be careful not to fall into the mistake of confounding the best of them, viz. mere reading, with intellectual pursuits: if we do so, the latter will be involved in the depreciation that often falls upon the former when it is found neither to improve the mind or the character, nor to provide ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... the tennis-courts and of the golf-links, the seizure of the bicycle and of the typewriter, were but steps preliminary in that campaign which is to end with the final victorious occupation of St. Stephen's. But stay! The horrific pioneers of womanhood who gad hither and thither and, confounding wisdom with the device on her shield, shriek for the unbecoming, are doomed. Though they spin their bicycle-treadles so amazingly fast, they are too late. Though they scream victory, none follow them. Artifice, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... the folly of those crimes, receives them to favour. But the institutions of countries that profess to worship this God admit no such distinctions. They leave no room for amendment, and seem to have a brutal delight in confounding the demerits of offenders. It signifies not what is the character of the individual at the hour of trial. How changed, how spotless, and how useful, avails him nothing. If they discover at the distance ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Gentiles, and keeping company only with the Jews, whereby both the Jews and the Gentiles were scandalised, because both were made to think (at least occasion was given to both for thinking) the observation of the ceremonial law necessary. That which deceiveth Paybody, is the confounding of scandalising and displeasing. Peter, by eating with the Gentiles, perhaps had displeased the Jews, but he had thereby edified them, though the scandal which he gave them was by Judaising; Judaizabat ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... no appearance of defence; and the present edifice had never been designed for more than the accommodation of a peaceful family, having a low, heavy front, loaded with some of that meretricious ornament, which, uniting, or rather confounding, the Gothic and Grecian architecture, was much used during the reigns of James VI. of Scotland, and his unfortunate son. The court formed a small square, two sides of which were occupied by such buildings as were required for the family, and the third by the stables, the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... one great natural phenomenon, the one grand spectacle which I had ever seen that did not at first give vague disappointment, a confounding of reality, a disenchantment of contrast with what the mind ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the historical books is confirmed by the prophets. It is true that in their polemic against confounding worship with religion they reveal the fact that in their day the cultus was carried on with the utmost zeal and splendour, and was held in the highest estimation. But this estimation does not rest upon the opinion that the cultus, as regards its matter, goes back to Moses ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... months a striking proof of anti-non-restraint opinion among the French physicians, in an interesting discussion at the Societe Medico-Psychologique. I wish here only to chronicle the fact, and would urge the necessity of not confounding honest differences of opinion with differences of humane feeling. The non-restrainer is within his right when he practises the system carried to its extremest lengths. He is within his right when he preaches its advantages to others. But he is not within his right if he denounces ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... observant and sensible men. But his rather stately carriage produced no envy or ill-will among his humbler neighbors, for his superiority was never questioned. Men bowed to him with honest good-will, and boys, who had been flogged at school for confounding Congo and Coromandel, and putting Borneo in the Bight of Benin, made an awkward obeisance and stared wonderingly, as they met the man who had actually sailed round the world, and had, in his own person, illustrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... to boast that it was improved in degree and in splendour. That there was no end, nor would there be, so long as the promoters of sedition were rewarded with honour in proportion as sedition was successful. What and how important schemes Caius Canuleius had set on foot! that he was introducing confounding of family rank, a disturbance of the auspices both public and private, that nothing may remain pure, nothing uncontaminated; that, all distinction being abolished, no one might know either himself or those he ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... will you be enabled to cast aside with disdain the bonds of domestic confinement, which insure merely your peace and happiness; to mingle your shrill cries with the tumult of contending armies, confounding confusion itself with your loud clamors! You may then unite your voices with the shouts of opposing factions at the momentous periods of election, huzzaing for your candidates, and gathering all your influence ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... Great Britain. They are Mahomedan Negroes who have made, or affect to have made, the laws of the Prophet their peculiar study; and if I may judge from their harangues, which I frequently attended, I believe that in the forensic qualifications of procrastination and cavil, and the arts of confounding and perplexing a cause, they are not always surpassed by the ablest pleaders in Europe. While I was at Pisania a cause was heard which furnished the Mahomedan lawyers with an admirable opportunity of displaying their professional dexterity. The case was this: An ass ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... institutions of their own country find the true measure of the fitness of a people for self-government in their respect for the authority of a lawful Executive. The fatal mistake has been made by the Third as it was by the First French Republic of confounding respect for a lawful Executive with submission to an Executive controlled by a majority of the Legislature. The fact that the power of the public purse, in a constitutional government, is necessarily ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... same mind, and that they cared as little for the Pope and his monks as they did for Don Carlos; for the latter was a dwarf (chicotito) and a tyrant, and the others were plunderers and robbers. I told them they must beware of confounding religion with priestcraft, and that in their abhorrence of the latter they must not forget that there is a God and a Christ to whom they must look for salvation, and whose word it was incumbent upon them to study on every occasion; whereupon they all ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to a rack on the wall. "Do you mind if I get down maps? These French ones are very good." He spread a sheet of canvas on the table, thereby confounding all Gribton's hospitable manoeuvring. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... be not only surprising but somewhat confounding to our classifications that a whole group of plants should subsist partly by digesting animal matter and partly in the normal way of decomposing carbonic acid and producing the basis of animal matter, we have, as Mr. Darwin ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... with this mass of negro depravity, because they are fewer in number? It is true they are fewer in number, but they are so thoroughly distinct in standing and character that Mr. Sewell is justly chargeable with cruel recklessness in confounding them together as he does. It may concern the world little to distinguish among the people of Kingston, but it does very vitally concern the morality of authorship, that a traveller should not, by a careless and sweeping sentence, leave a cruel sting in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... constituted: that Elfride's second lover should not have been one of the great mass of bustling mankind, little given to introspection, whose good-nature might have compensated for any lack of appreciativeness, was the chance of things. That her throbbing, self-confounding, indiscreet heart should have to defend itself unaided against the keen scrutiny and logical power which Knight, now that his suspicions were awakened, would sooner or later be sure to exercise ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... divers and confused, how should it otherwise be, but that the species should be divers and confused? Many new and old writers have spoken confusedly of it, confounding melancholy and madness, as [1076] Heurnius, Guianerius, Gordonius, Salustius Salvianus, Jason Pratensis, Savanarola, that will have madness no other than melancholy in extent, differing (as I have said) in degrees. Some make two distinct species, as Ruffus Ephesius, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of New England, who besieged this town of Quebec, and who threatened to renew their attack this year, constructed, at the charge of the king, this citadel, with the fortifications therewith connected, for the defence of the country and the safety of the people, and for confounding yet again a people perfidious towards God and towards its lawful king. And he ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... need be adduced than the Athanasian Creed. As confessed by the Church of England in this day, and as published in the official ritual (see Prayer Book) "The Creed of Saint Athanasius" is this: "We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... as the vessels were at sea he was released, his uniform was removed, and he was courteously treated. What ultimately became of him was never clearly ascertained, but it is certain that on more than one occasion he succeeded in confounding his opponents, and by his startling revelations of the past led many who would fain have disputed his identity to express their doubts as to the justice of his punishment. The probability is that he was a rogue, but he was a clever one. Rumour ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... Pike, in his letter, "Touching Masonic Symbolism," speaks of the "poor, rude, unlettered, uncultivated working Stone-masons," who attended the Assemblies, he is obviously confounding Free-masons with the rough Stone-masons of the Guilds. Over against these words, read a brilliant article in the Contemporary Review, October, 1913, by L.M. Phillips, entitled, "The Two Ways of Building," showing how the Free-masons, instead of working under ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... worth our while to pay a little attention to the extent of genius required by these legislators, that we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus, blending theft with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... up type had not much more to do with the study of new books than Stephen's turning the grindstone had with fighting in the lists; and the mistakes he made in spelling from right to left, and in confounding the letters, made him despair, and prepare for any amount of just indignation from his master; but he found on the contrary that Master Hansen had never had a pupil who made so few blunders on the first trial, and augured well of him from such a beginning. Paper was too costly, and pressure too ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... reality, he represented to himself the Pyrot affair as a struggle between good and bad angels. He awaited the eternal triumph of the Sons of Light and congratulated himself on being a Child of the Day confounding the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... and evil," so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... auctioneer, looking at her dubiously, "might I ask if you mean sestertii or sestertia?[*] Your pardon, but it has occurred to me that you might be confounding the two sums." ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.' WATSON. 'I own I am for much attention to accuracy in composing, lest one should get bad habits of doing it in a slovenly manner.' JOHNSON. 'Why, sir, you are confounding DOING inaccurately with the NECESSITY of doing inaccurately. A man knows when his composition is inaccurate, and when he thinks fit he'll correct it. But, if a man is accustomed to compose slowly, and with difficulty, upon all occasions, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... of originality I have never seen better stated than by Coleridge, in a passage justifying the form of Shakespeare's dramas against a mode of criticism which has now, happily, gone out of use. "The true ground," says he, "of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... has introduced some confusion into the natural history of the earth, in not properly distinguishing the mineral operations of the globe, and those again which belong entirely to the surface of the earth; perhaps also in confounding the natural effects of water upon the surface of the earth, with those convulsions of the sea which may be properly considered as the accidental operations of the globe. This subject being strictly connected with the opinions of that philosopher with regard to primitive mountains, I am obliged ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... and such cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial magnitudes. But manifestly, ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... blow beyond its nature's strength Shatters forthwith each living thing soe'er, And on it goes confounding all the sense Of body and mind. For of the primal germs Are loosed their old arrangements, and, throughout, The vital motions blocked,—until the stuff, Shaken profoundly through the frame entire, Undoes the vital knots of soul ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... they endeavor in vain to find. The error which limits republican government to a narrow district has been unfolded and refuted in preceding papers. I remark here only that it seems to owe its rise and prevalence chiefly to the confounding of a republic with a democracy, applying to the former reasonings drawn from the nature of the latter. The true distinction between these forms was also adverted to on a former occasion. It is, that in a democracy, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... and the by Danish; they are half- brothers of Bovil and Belville, both signifying fair town, and which ought to be written Beauville and Belville. The Gypsies, who know and care nothing about etymologies, confounding bos with buss, a vulgar English verb not to be found in dictionaries, which signifies to kiss, rendered the name Boswell by Chumomisto, that is, Kisswell, or one who kisses well—choom in their language signifying to kiss, and misto well—likewise by choomomescro, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... has given them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper development of the ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... to him to refuse to read his Christian documents in the light of a trained scientific criticism. We shall have made some positive advance in rationality when the man who is perfectly capable of dealing sanely with legend in one connection, and, in another, will insist on confounding it with history proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unmerited praise. It is useless, however, to hope that things will change. So long as this giddy old world goes on waltzing in space, so long shall we continue to be duped by shams and pin our faith on frauds, confounding an attractive bearing with a sweet disposition and mistaking dishevelled hair and eccentric appearance for brains. Even in the Orient, where dogs have been granted immunity from other labor on the condition that ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... that I feel so much, but that I do not feel more. Would to Heaven that neither you nor I could eat or sleep for pity, pity for our poor down-trodden brothers and sisters. But the thing to which I implore your attention now, is, not what we know and feel, but the delusion which we are under, in confounding knowing with doing, in fancying that we are working to abolish Slavery because we know that it is wrong. This is what I would have you now to consider, the deception that we practise on ourselves, the dangerous error into which we fall, when we pass off the knowledge of our duty for ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... model of Christian graces for my descendants to admire. No one can be more convinced than myself how much sectarians are prone to substitute their own narrow notions of right and wrong for the Law of God, confounding acts that are perfectly innocent in themselves with sin; but, at the same time, I am quite aware too, that appearances are ever to be consulted in cases of morals, and that it is a minor virtue to be decent in matters of manners. The Rev. Mr. Worden, whatever might have ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... first is, confounding work with play,—or rather expecting the pleasure of play, while they are doing work. There is great pleasure in doing work, as I have told you before, when it is well and properly done, but it is very different from the pleasure of play. It comes later; generally after the work is done. While you ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books, etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... loss to reconcile what I see, with what I hear. Their protestations are full of zeal against the public enemy; but their measures are so inconsistent that all their professions become suspected. By confounding you with a variety of projects, they perplex your resolutions, and lead you from executing what is in your power, by engaging you in schemes not ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Her passion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement—beginning over again, with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sometimes accused of confounding fiction with reality. He therefore thinks it necessary to state that the circumstance of the hunting described in the text as preparatory to the insurrection of 1745 is, so far as he knows, entirely imaginary. But it is well known such a great hunting was held in the Forest ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... sure, places enough of ancient name, in D'Anville's Geography, along the coast, but nothing beyond the name itself. This is so exactly the case, that even with the beautiful and authentic money of Leontium before us, we did not land at Lentini! There is nothing so utterly confounding as the contemplation of money, every piece of which is a gem, on spots where no imagination can conceive the city that coined it. We are not long before we begin to cater for new disappointment, in the desire to be conducted without delay to the fountain of Arethusa. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... nothing more sublunary than the course of the planets. But I have it. His device will serve the purpose. Do you remember Eugene confounding him with Friar Bacon because he was said to light a candle without flint or steel? It was true. When he was a bachelor he always lit his own candle and fire, and he always carries the means. I was frighted the first time he showed ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... election she recollected with particular pleasure—she was happy that Lord Glistonbury's interest was of service to Mr. Vivian. Then "she hoped his canvass to-day had been successful?"—and asked some questions that showed her mind had become confused, and that she was confounding the past with the present. Lady Sarah and Mr. Vivian said a few words to set her right—she looked first at one, and then at the other, listening, and then said—"I understand—God bless you both." Vivian took up his hat, and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another; and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law makes property" (confounding a law existing anywhere with the law which is binding everywhere), can deceive only those who have either never read the Constitution, or are ignorant of the opinions and intentions of those who framed it. It is true only of the States where slavery already exists; and it is because the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... thing, do but look back and compare antichrist four or five hundred years ago, with antichrist as he is now, and you shall see what work the Lord Jesus has begun to make with him, even with the spirit and soul and life of antichrist, both in confounding and blasting it by the Spirit of his mouth, as also by forcing it to dishonorable retreats, and by making it give up to him as the conqueror, not only some of his superstitious and diabolical rites and ceremonies to be destroyed, but many ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... sunk to the level of any other arduous and uncertain occupation, and the magic prizes of the early days were seldom found, something of the old, romantic glamour still clung to this most famous gold-field, dazzling the eyes and confounding the judgment. Elsewhere, the horse was in use at the puddling-trough, and machines for crushing quartz were under discussion. But the Ballarat digger resisted the introduction of machinery, fearing the capitalist machinery would bring in its train. He remained the dreamer, the jealous individualist; ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... really was, and the absolute devouring of the poor Unknown, who had to carry off, besides all the rest, one small bit of literal butter dug up in a Milesian stone jar lately from the bottom of some Irish bog. Great romance (i.e. absurd innocence of character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this mixed up with such eager curiosity, and enormous knowledge of the tattle and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed to have the deaths ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... fated and influential hour rolled on, the terrors of the hateful Presence grew more confounding to the mortal senses of the victim, and the knot of the accursed sophistry became more inextricable in appearance, at least to the prey whom its meshes surrounded. He had not power to explain the assurance of pardon which he continued to assert, or to name the victorious ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... ordinary language is inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare; second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... that she was afraid to go against his precise instructions. Mrs. Mel then folded her hands, and sat in quiet reserve. She was one of those numerous women who always know themselves to be right. She was also one of those very few whom Providence favours by confounding dissentients. She was positive the chops would be ill-cooked: but what could she do? She was not in command here; so she waited serenely for the certain disasters to enthrone her. Not that the matter of the chops occupied her mind particularly: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... At last he grew almost used to the dumb exultation of the cliff above him. He saw that Roderick was a mass of hideous injury, and he tried to understand what had happened. Not that it helped him; before that confounding mortality one hypothesis after another faltered and swooned away. Roderick's passionate walk had carried him farther and higher than he knew; he had outstayed, supposably, the first menace of the storm, and perhaps even found a defiant entertainment in watching ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... even across the Mediterranean into Africa, overwhelming the Roman Empire of the West in its course,—observe this tide of human movement, as wave followed wave for centuries, rolling peoples against and over one another, confounding them together, and leaving them upon the same soil, or in close proximity to each other; and, even admitting that they were simple and primitive to begin with, we shall not wonder at the diversified aspect of the people of Europe and their descendants ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... does she fly me confounding modesty with fear! I pass slowly by (one would think me quite uninterested), draped in my splendid coat. She's struck by its stripes. Oh, she'll come back, a little love-sick kitten, and putting aside all constraint she'll throw herself at my ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... the reality of demoniacal possession, and if the representation that Jesus also assumed it is due to the evangelists, what trust can be reposed in authorities which misrepresent Him in such a matter? On the other hand, if they do not misrepresent Him, and He blundered, confounding mere insanity with possession by a demon, what reliance can be reposed in Him as our Teacher of the Unseen World? The issues involved are very grave and far-reaching, and raillery or sarcasm is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... he is blamed. Conversing one day with a Calvinistic clergyman, he intimated that a certain person had declared that the only thing stronger than God in the world was the human will. We remarked that we did not approve of such a mode of expression. And rightly so. It implies a confusion of ideas, confounding physical power which is almighty, and moral power, which is suasory and resistible. Stephen charged the Jews with resisting the Spirit. "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye" (Acts vii. 51). Because ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... one of these forms, which he calls Spirifer trigonalis, he says that it is so dissimilar to another extreme of the series, S. crassa, that in the first part of his memoir (published some ten years ago) he described them as distinct, and the idea of confounding them together must, he admits, appear absurd to those who have never seen the intermediate links, such as are presented by S. bisulcata, and at least four others with their varieties, most of them shells formerly recognised as distinct by the most eminent palaeontologists, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin, then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ten minutes and then I'm off," he muttered, and then aloud to the Prince: "I'll join you in confounding all clocks, my friend, and ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... be noted, that in divers of these Receipts there are Directions for two or three several Things in one, not confounding the Brains with multitudes of Words, to little or no purpose, or vain Expressions of things with are altogether unknown to the Learned as well as to the Ignorant: This is really imparted for the good of all ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... enacted, that no senator should contract a debt of above two thousand drachmas, he himself, after death, was found indebted three millions. This was the man whom Marius let in upon the Commonwealth, and who, confounding all things by force and the sword, made several ordinances of dangerous consequence, and amongst the rest, one giving Marius the conduct of the Mithridatic war. Upon this the consuls proclaimed a public cessation of business, but as they were holding an assembly ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... impossible for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and divisions of the middle ages—the one, that old dualism of the inner man, the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have so often alluded—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... inappropriate for our friends against whom it has been applied. Such an error could not have been committed by a man of local knowledge and experience, such as that noble of colonial birth, Sir Andries Stockenstrom; and such instances of confounding friend and foe, in the innocent belief of thereby promoting colonial interests, will probably lead the Cape community, the chief part of which by no means feels its interest to lie in the degradation of the native tribes, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone |
