"Explicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enter the engagement and "surround the enemy rear." With his remaining ironclads Persano formed three divisions of three ships each and swung across the enemy's bows in line ahead. Just at the critical moment, and for no very explicable motive, he shifted his flag from the Re d'Italia in the center to the Affondatore, which was steaming alone on the starboard side of the line. The change was not noted by all his ships, and thus caused confusion of orders. The delay involved also ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... them say, veritable enodioi symboloi, or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks fancied—to push on the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into weighty motives. It was doubtless a quite explicable, physical fatigue that presented me to myself, on awaking this morning, so lack-lustre and trite. But I must needs take my petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morning hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of a decay in the very capacity of enjoyment. We need some imaginative ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... intelligible enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which have, both then and since, made that humour palatable ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Segistan, to which Mechran appears to have been then joined, from the circumstance before related of the Polos having gone from China by sea to this kingdom. The strange application of Timochaim is probably corrupt, and may perhaps be explicable on the republication of the Trevigi edition of these travels; till then, we must rest ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... century B.C. The Egyptian pronunciation of their name is Khiti, with the feminine Khitait, Khitit; but the Tel el-Amarna texts employ the vocalisation Khati, Khate, which must be more correct than that of the Egyptians, The form Khiti seems to me to be explicable by an error of popular etymology. Egyptian ethnical appellations in iti formed their plural by -atiu, -atee, -ati, -ate, so that if Khate, Khati, were taken for a plural, it would naturally have suggested to the scribes the form Khiti ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... forward, and projected his lips in the direction he sought to indicate,—a mode of indication, I may add, almost universal in Central America, and explicable only on the assumption that it costs less effort than to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... further orders, keeping parallel to the French when within point-blank, the others following her as they could; a process which, from the varying distances, would expose each to a concentrated fire as they successively approached. Byng's action is only explicable to the writer by supposing that he thus by "steer with" understood "steer for;" for when, after the fleet tacked together, the new van ship (formerly the rear) did not of her own motion head for the leading enemy, he signalled her to steer one point, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... justification, to wit: that the present infinitive is the form in which a Latin or a Greek root is always given in Webster and other received lexicographic authorities. It is a curious fact, that, in all the school etymologies, the present indicative should have been given as the root, and is explicable only from the accident that it is the key-form in the Latin dictionaries. The change into conformity with our English dictionaries needs no defense, and will probably hereafter be imitated by all authors ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... full of sap and strength, but uncultivated and solitary. Besides, from the time when he was fifteen, one was accustomed to his motiveless absences, which the indifference that everyone bore him made moreover perfectly explicable; from time to time, however, he was seen to reappear at the castle, like those migratory birds which always return to the same place but only stay a moment, then take their way again without one's knowing towards what spot in the world they ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are also explicable by this idea of their being surrounded with two ethers, which we have termed masculine and feminine for the ease of conversing about them; and have compared them to vitreous and resinous electricity, and to arctic and antarctic magnetism. As when two particles of matter, or two larger ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... on which Skene mainly founds his assertion that Johanna of Strathnaver was Earl John's daughter, is just as easily explicable, and with equal verisimilitude, if she was not. Snaekoll went to Norway in 1232, leaving behind him, on our hypothesis, one child, an infant daughter of tender years, or possibly as yet unborn. The child ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though, of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary, the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as she liked; he didn't ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... outside of man's imagination. I suggest, on the contrary, that the theory is really needed to explain the commonplace, since, in the last analysis, every bit of experience, every phenomenon, be it ever so ordinary—indeed the very fact of experience itself,—is most truly marvellous and magical, explicable only in terms of spirit. As ELIPHAS LEVI well says in one of his flashes of insight: "The supernatural is only the natural in an extraordinary grade, or it is the exalted natural; a miracle is a phenomenon which strikes the multitude because it ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... of vengeance was not confined to the circle of natural kinship is explicable, of course, by the peculiar organization of society. We have seen that the patriarchal family was a religious corporation; and that the family-bond was not the bond of natural affection, but the bond of the cult. We have also ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... dream, produced in that sensitive nature by the uncanny sounds of the wind in the chinks and crannies of the ancient chamber. Had not Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, which we studied hard on that day, proved all such phantoms to be explicable? The only person we told was Griff, who was amused and incredulous. He had heard the noises—oh yes! and objected to having his sleep broken by them. It was too had to expose Clarence to them—poor Bill—on ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that objects of art were safe from destruction or defacement. But with the outburst of Calvinism all those affected were inflamed with a positive hatred of the beautiful in art. If this had been confined to the destruction of images to which idolatrous worship was offered, it would be explicable and justifiable, but it extended to the most innocuous objects. Delicate tracery such as adorns the west front of the church of Vendome, a lace-work of beautiful sculpture representing trailing roses and vines, birds and reptiles, was ruthlessly hacked. Churches, cathedrals, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... which, order being re-established, a new series of events was initiated. In proportion as our faith in these views grows weaker, and the phenomena of the organic or inorganic world presented to us by geology seem explicable on the hypothesis of gradual and insensible changes, varied only by occasional convulsions, on a scale comparable to that witnessed in historical times; and in proportion as it is thought possible that former fluctuations in the organic world may be due to ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... in thanks, and announced that his mind was now at ease. By some mysterious process, not clearly explicable to himself, he contrived to lay aside a portion of his dress, and to dispose himself within the folds of balmy bedclothes that awaited him. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... of pressure observed by Mr. Ferranti and Mr. Kapp could be due to resonance. Mr. Kapp's experiment was not conclusive, for the length of spark is not an accurate measure of electromotive force. As regards Mr. Mordey's observation, he thought the action explicable on the theory of the leading condenser current acting on the field magnets. The same explanation is also applicable to the Deptford case, for when the dynamo is direct on, the condenser current is about 10 amperes, and this exerts only a small influence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... facts having no connection with each other and as utterly inexplicable and confusing as fossils are on the theory that they are special creations and are not the remains of animals that have once lived. It is the vast chaos of facts, which are explicable and fall into beautiful order on the one theory, which are inexplicable and remain a chaos on the other, which I think must ultimately force Darwin's views on any and every reflecting mind. Isolated difficulties and objections are nothing against this vast cumulative argument. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... and moral processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and with these we will ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... discover yellow fever within its own borders. It is always Mississippi that finds the infection in New Orleans, and Louisiana that finds it in Galveston. This apparently curious condition of affairs is explicable readily enough, on the ground that no State wishes to discover the germ in its own veins, but is quite willing, for commercial reasons, to point out the bacillus in the system of its neighbor. In 1897 Texas was infected pretty widely ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... cleared as he showed her that he recognised Tante's case as so explicable. "I'm so glad that you see it all," she said. "For you do. She is oh! so unpractical, poor darling; she would forget everything, you know, unless I or Mrs. Talcott were there to keep reminding her—except her music, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... eulogistic, euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, explicit, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... The affair was easily explicable in the light of what Plutina had to tell. Hodges, undoubtedly, had knowledge of some secret, hazardous path down the face of the precipice past the Devil's Cauldron, and on to the valley. He had meant to flee by it with Plutina, thus to escape ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... elementary particles of the opposite kind in opposite directions, but parallel to the current. Even the differences between common and voltaic electricity, when applied to effect chemical decomposition, which Dr. Wollaston has pointed out[A], seem explicable by the circumstances connected with the induction of electricity from these two sources (25.). But as I have reserved this branch of the inquiry, that I might follow out the investigations contained in the present paper, ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... chorus, keeping up their strange music till morning. Like many Batrachians, this has a voice singularly unlike that of any other organised creature. The cries of beasts, birds, and insects are all explicable to our senses, and we can recognise most of them as belonging to such or such an order of animal; but the voices of many frogs are like nothing else, and allied species utter totally dissimilar noises. In some, as this, the sound is like the concussion of metals; ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... is the foundation and objects what is called the Natural System; and which is foundation of distinction of true and adaptive characters{148}. Now this wonderful fact of hand, hoof, wing, paddle and claw being the same, is at once explicable on the principle of some parent-forms, which might either be or walking animals, becoming through infinite number of small selections adapted to various conditions. We know that proportion, size, shape of bones and their accompanying soft parts vary, and hence constant ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... goatskin, and would have been quite disguised were it not for the grace of his movements. Marie withdrew hastily into the cottage, obeying one of those instinctive promptings which are as little explicable as fear itself. The young man was soon beside her before the chimney, where a bright fire was burning. Both were voiceless, fearing to look at each other, or even to make a movement. One and the same hope united them, the same doubt; it was ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... cases. In general, the two most considerable bodies would unite together, while the third would revolve around their common centre of gravity. Attraction would thus become the cause of a sort of movement which would seem to be explicable ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Catanzaro, an average white man will seldom find, in any Calabrian hostelry, what he is accustomed to consider as ordinary necessities of life. The thing is easily explicable. These men are not yet in the habit of "handling" civilized travellers; they fail to realize that hotel-keeping is a business to be learnt, like tailoring or politics. They are still in the patriarchal stage, wealthy proprietors for the most part, and ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... describing them, suggested that they might be due to some form of parallel variation dependent on climatic influences; and I myself adduced other cases of coincident local modifications of colour, which did not appear to be explicable by any form of mimicry.[106] But we neither of us hit upon the simple explanation given by Dr. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... states of Wuertemberg imparted, among other things, the following piece of information to the house of Habsburg: "That the heads of a democratical government should spread principles destructive to order among its neighbors was easily explicable, but that Austria should take advantage of the war to derange the internal mechanism of neighboring states was inexcusable."—Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 113. The Bavarian proclamation (Allgemeine Zeitung, No. ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... or more explicable reason. It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mutual relations of species, can be shown to be deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, which he propounds, combined with the known facts of geological change; and that, even if all these phaenomena are not at present explicable by it, none are necessarily ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... audience at a premiere and the opinions of the papers. Again and again have I seen an audience moved to laughter and cheers and tears by a play which the great outside public would be informed the next morning was indifferent or worse. The discrepancy was sometimes explicable by claques, which are almost as discreditable to managements as the keeping of tame critics, who eat food out of their hand. Sometimes it was not professional claques, but amateurs come to see a friend's play ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... likely things might have come out. Now don't look furious, Ethel. Indeed, I can't help it, but really I don't think it is explicable why Norman should wish to hush it up, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... prodigious rapidity of the success of Christianity is easily explicable. Polytheism had no longer a great hold on the masses, and no philosophic doctrine had found or had even sought the path to the crowd; Christianity, essentially democratic, loved the weak and humble, had a tendency to prefer them to the great ones of ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... p. 178. "While it is improbable that all the difference of the sexes with regard to physical strength can be attributed to persistent difference in training, it is certain that a large part of the difference is explicable on this ground. The great strength of savage women and the rapid increase in strength of civilized women wherever systematic physical training has been introduced both show the importance ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task—he must gain what unity he can, and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of Oude than those of the Governor-General of Bengal, which might be paid either on the receipt of the Benares revenue, or at the seat of his power, and of the Company's exchequer. Besides, it is not explicable, upon any grounds that can be avowed, why the Nabob, who could afford to give these bills as a present to Mr. Hastings, could not have equally given them in discharge of the debt which he owed to the Company. It ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the Beyond, intimations from another world—all kinds of supernaturalisms are distasteful to me; I cling to the known world of common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out to find, this morning, a cabbalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB—what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... poem in the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount. Those "smiles to earth unknown," had then ceased for ever. The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his "long walks in the country." His wife never did this; she had not the physical strength ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... of the five wounds of Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on natural grounds—what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having become mesmerism or ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... that was of interest concerning these twain in their relation to her. Their influence upon her life is explicable alone by the nature of her longings. Time was when both represented for her all that was most potent in earthly success. They were the personal representatives of a state most blessed to attain—the titled ambassadors of comfort and peace, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... other phaenomena are consequences of the affections of other beings, more or less like itself. And having thus good evidence for believing that many of the most interesting occurrences about it are explicable on the hypothesis that they are the work of intelligences like itself—having discovered a vera causa for many phaenomena—why should the child limit the application of so fruitful an hypothesis? The dog has a sort of intelligence, so has ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... makes, even pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat no phantom, the ghostliest that ear ever heard or eye ever ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sullivan wrote fine English, the beauty of Helen Keller's style would, in part, be explicable at once. But the extracts from Miss Sullivan's letters and from her reports, although they are clear and accurate, have not the beauty which distinguishes Miss Keller's English. Her service as a teacher of English is not to be measured by her own skill ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... no 'ransom for His soul,' which, being translated, is but this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is a manifest fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believe that we have before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the Perfect Man. And the Son needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, as human, was a life of communion and prayer with His Father in heaven. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Carwin adopted, in some degree, a similar distinction. A tale of this kind, related by others, he would believe, provided it was explicable upon known principles; but that such notices were actually communicated by beings of an higher order, he would believe only when his own ears were assailed in a manner which could not be otherwise accounted for. Civility forbad him to contradict my brother or myself, but his understanding refused ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... so-called abiegno-rupestres and pineto-montanae regions of Sweden are wanting in England; and it is only in Scotland that the species of northern mountainous and pine-bearing regions are met with—a circumstance explicable from the similarity in physical features between Sweden and the northern portions of ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... (in the bustling ever- recurring semi-cadences) the master employs with more than surprising ease. But such things—even the greatest negligence (Achtlosigkeit) in the use of common-place phrases and sections— are explicable and excusable from the nature of this sort of Allegro, which is not meant to interest by means of Cantilena, but in which the restless incessant movement is intended to produce a certain excitement. It is a significant trait in the Allegro of the overture to Don Giovanni that this ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... at Yellowstone Park, in America, visitors are carefully watched to see that they do not make the geysers work artificially by means of soap. [Footnote: Hardly explicable in such small quantities by chemistry or physics.] Remembering this experience the last time he went to Iceland, he packed some 2lb. bars of common soap among ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight; yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together?" These phenomena are all explicable if descent with modification ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... there at thirty, of a creeping malady which she might have checked, perhaps, if she had not had too many things to do for the children and husband, to do anything for herself—if she had not been forced to hold the creed: Be healthy, or die! This was no doubt perfectly explicable and in accordance with the Supreme Equation; yet we, enjoying life, and health, and ease of money, felt horror and revolt on, this evening of such beauty. Nor at the moment did we derive great comfort from the thought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... put together, seasoned with wisdom and wit and most capably played; Miss FAY COMPTON, admirable example of a pretty actress who won't let herself be captured by stage tricks, making everything explicable except her continued love for her intolerable bore (and Turk) of a husband; Mr. A.E. MATTHEWS handling a desperately unsympathetic part, which was already beginning to look impossible, with great adroitness; and Mr. STANLEY LOGAN, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... the transition from one view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the picture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views themselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is never explicable except by itself, never ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... language. The French respaulme cet hanap, for instance, is rendered by 'spoylle the cup.' Of course the English verb spoylle never meant 'to rinse'; Caxton was misled by the sound of the Flemish spoel. Caxton's 'after the house,' as a translation of aual la maison (throughout the house), is explicable only by a reference to the Flemish version, which has achter huse. The verb formaketh, which has not elsewhere been found in English, is an adoption of the Flemish vermaect (repairs). Another Flemicism is Caxton's whiler ( while ere) for 'some time ago,' in Flemish ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... etc., are terms of "structural psychology." Binet's psychology is dynamic. He conceives intelligence as the sum total of those thought processes which consist in mental adaptation. This adaptation is not explicable in terms of the old mental "faculties." No one of these can explain a single thought process, for such process always involves the participation of many functions whose separate roles are impossible to distinguish accurately. Instead of measuring ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... many little ones; or, if the sun, at first, were an opaque body, like the planets, or the planets lucid bodies, like the sun, how he alone should be changed into a shining body, whilst all they continue opaque, or all they be changed into opaque ones, whilst he remains unchanged, I do not think more explicable by mere natural causes, but am forced to ascribe it to the counsel and contrivance of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... material things, is either a simple appearance of permanence and quietness, as in the massy forms of a mountain or rock, accompanied by the lulling effect of all mighty sight and sound, which all feel and none define, (it would be less sacred if more explicable,) [Greek: heudousin dioreon koruphai te kai pharanges], or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined; and with respect to these the expression of repose is greater in proportion ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... was probably the tutor of the younger boys. (Mr. Direck also was wearing his hat, his mind had been filled with an exaggerated idea of the treacheries of the English climate before he left New York. Every one else was hatless.) Finally, before one reached the limits of the explicable there was a pleasant young man with a lot of dark hair and very fine dark blue eyes, whom everybody called "Teddy." For him, Mr. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of an incident during the trial of Glengarry, in Scotland, for murder in a duel, which is, perhaps, explicable by this extraordinary attitude: A lady of great beauty was called as a witness and came into court heavily veiled. Before administering the oath, Lord Eskgrove, the judge (to whom this function belongs in Scotland), gave her ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... question now. In the last chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school's other characteristics ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... almost always enjoys, under whatever forms—the substance of democracy. That fact must be emphasized, because without a recognition of it the flaming response which met the first proclamation of theoretic democracy would be unintelligible. It is explicable only when we remember that to the unspoiled conscience of man as man democracy will ever be the most self-evident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational privilege ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... facts with the reasoning in the text. But to be sure, a wider induction is requisite for the establishment of any theory. This is not the place for it. The instances adduced by Dr H. in support of his theory, are explicable on another principle, viz. that every excitement of mind or body is followed by a depression precisely proportioned to its intensity. This seems a law in our economy, deducible from almost unlimited observation, and of extreme importance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... examination of it may be of the very greatest importance. To explain what has hitherto received no explanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress. The observation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soon as it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be an instance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifying and perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted. When it was first noticed in Galileo's time that water would not ascend in ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... of two hundred yards from the base he paused astounded. Why anything of the tower remained at all was a mystery, explicable only by reason of the skeleton-like character of its construction. All about it the surface had been rent as by an earthquake, and save for a fragment of the dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had disappeared. A glistening lake of leperous-like ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone can see and judge in ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... probably very old, since the words of which they are composed are in many cases not retained in the colloquial tongue, in which they must once have been included, and are in some instances lost from the language altogether, so much so as to be only partially explicable even by scholars. The argument applies likewise, in their degree, to camps, barrows, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... procession, of which the central figure was identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession, terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult, such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject tribes is described in a well-known passage by Tacitus,[57] and yet survives, as we have seen, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... efforts. As to the end, all such are agreed. That it is a duty, they are satisfied. As to the means, there can be but little if any variety of opinion that can greatly perplex; and as to the manner, information abundant and easily explicable is found in the Scriptures. If the duty of Covenanting is obligatory on an individual, on a church, or on a nation, it is incumbent on the members of a Bible Society in their associate capacity. "The Lord gave the word; great was the ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... particular conditions of non-conducting rocks, electricity and magnetism, had tempered the laws of nature, giving us only a moderately warm climate, for the theory of a central fire remained in my estimation the only one that was true and explicable. Were we then turning back to where the phenomena of central heat ruled in all their rigour and would reduce the most refractory rocks to the state of a molten liquid? I feared this, and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... movement always occurs during the animal's attempts, whereas each of the others, on the average, occurs in only half the attempts. Thus the tendency to repeat a previous performance (which is easily explicable without the intervention of "consciousness") leads to a greater emphasis on the successful movement than on any other, and in time causes it alone to be performed. The objection to this view, if taken as the sole explanation, is that on improvement ought to set in till after the SECOND ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... reason to fear and hate the creatures, and we can only wonder that he was so moderate as we shall later find him to have been. The story of the affair that stirred up the Scottish king and his people has often been told, but it must be included here to make his attitude explicable. In 1589 he had arranged for a marriage with the Princess Anne of Denmark. The marriage had been performed by proxy in July, and it was then provided that the princess was to come to England. She set out, but was driven on to the coast of Norway by a violent ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... never surely thought it satisfactory to explain a particular effect by a particular cause, which was no more to be accounted for than the effect itself. An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... quite explicable, but the explanation is not necessarily a justification. Although every division of the human family must have passed through many social phases, and must therefore have experienced revolutionary shocks, yet the rule of man's existence has been a rigorous ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... trades when they had none. They learnt all this from him. The greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men. Everything else in Christian or secular history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... penetrate and pervade The White Ship; and The King's Tragedy is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... circle in which stand only familiar images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but pigs. Simplicity, with mystery, is the keynote of all the pictures, and these are ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... miles of his father's house, he instantly accepted it, as solving a host of difficulties that have all his life embarrassed him. And not these only, but similar moraines and detritus of moraines, that cover half of the adjoining counties are explicable on your theory, and he has consented to my proposal that he should immediately lay them all down on a map of the county and describe them in a paper to be read the day after yours at the Geological Society. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... [Greek: dounai ten psuchen hautou] in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.—2. The fact that the same uncommon expression occurs not fewer than five times in the same discourse of Christ, and that so intentionally and emphatically, is explicable only when it was thereby intended to point to an important fundamental passage of the Old Testament.—3. In the discourses of our Lord, the expression is, no less than in the passage before us, used ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... Vanrenens in Paris," he said. "Business brought me here, and I was surprised to see Miss Vanrenen without her father. You will pardon my reference to your son, I am sure. His attitude is explicable now. He resented my offer of friendly assistance to the young lady. Perhaps he thought she might avail herself ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... crystallised upon or near each other, and adhering to coal, or mixed with bitumen, etc. are found; circumstances that cannot be explained in the hypothesis of solution in the moist way.—He then answers;—"Not exactly, nor with certainty; which is not wonderful: But they are still less explicable in the hypothesis of dry solution, as must be apparent from what has been already said. How coal, an infusible substance, could be spread into strata by mere heat, is to me incomprehensible."—It is only upon the last sentence ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... life-saving maneuver. "Graphs of my delicate apparatus have proved that trees possess a circulatory system; their sap movements correspond to the blood pressure of animal bodies. The ascent of sap is not explicable on the mechanical grounds ordinarily advanced, such as capillary attraction. The phenomenon has been solved through the crescograph as the activity of living cells. Peristaltic waves issue from a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... And this is easily explicable if only it is borne in mind that the Rowley poems were written by a boy, and that such lovely things as the Dirge in AElla suggest a maturity that Chatterton did not by any means perfectly possess. ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... Gaertner expressly stated that he had during many years grown these two varieties together, and they did not spontaneously cross; and this, considering that the plants are monoecious and abound with pollen, and are well known generally to cross freely, seems explicable only on the belief that these two varieties are in some degree mutually infertile. The hybrid plants raised from the above five seed were intermediate in structure, extremely variable, and perfectly fertile.[226] No one, I believe, has hitherto suspected that ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... of his own will deny that animals are capable of such actions? Mr. Mivart indeed says:—"It may be safely affirmed, however, that there is no trace in brutes of any actions simulating morality which are not explicable by the fear of punishment, by the hope of pleasure, or by personal affection" (p. 221). But it may be affirmed, with equal truth, that there is no trace in men of any actions which are not traceable to the same motives. If ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... my dear, explicable but unexplained. The most formidable men are her friends, and why? Nobody dares to fathom the mystery. Then is this person the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... which has shortly been washed away by the waves. Knowing as we do that volcanoes abound on the sea floor, the question why we do not oftener see their explosions disturbing the surface of the waters is very interesting, but not as yet clearly explicable. It is possible, however, that a volcanic discharge taking place at the depth of several thousand feet below the surface of the water would not be able to blow the fluid aside so as to open a pipe to ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... brother Ashton wrote to him from La Bourboule a letter (received on July 9th), in which he said: "To judge by the French newspapers, you are as popular in France as Pitt at the height of the great war." A note from the Memoir renders this state of feeling explicable: [Footnote: A very different current in French opinion from that of the newspapers found outlet in this letter from M. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... monetary considerations seriously to concern him, he might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases—the strengthening of passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of those habitually curbed—the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made of it—are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences: an ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... explicable, with what divine lines and lights the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... intelligible. Another case is still more difficult to understand: Dr. Herbert raised, from the seeds of a highly cultivated red cowslip, cowslips, oxlips of various kinds, and a primrose. (2/10. 'Transactions of the Horticultural Society' 4 page 19.) This case, if accurately recorded, which I much doubt, is explicable only on the improbable assumption that the red cowslip was not of pure parentage. With species and varieties of many kinds, when intercrossed, one is sometimes strongly prepotent over the other; and instances are known of a variety crossed ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... interesting thing that such lives should go wrong, and they base upon that fact the suggestion that life is essentially a tragic and rather disappointing matter. To me nothing seems more inevitable and more entirely explicable than that on such terms life should fail, and should fail alike for the married and the unmarried. ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... some sort or other—the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... by-products. These troubles occur most frequently during the summer months, especially with infants and children, as in cholera infantum and summer complaint. The higher mortality of bottle-fed infants[119] in comparison with those that are nursed directly is explicable on the theory that cows' milk is the carrier of the infection, because in many cases it is not consumed until there has been ample time for the development of organisms in it. Where milk is pasteurized or boiled it is found that the mortality among children ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... cogency of the system of debate followed in the Indian Council has not seemed to me clearly demonstrable; nor is the cause for the honour attaching to the Chiefs of the Mohawks and Senecas, and of the Onondagas, respectively, of commencing and closing discussion, very explicable. I believe, however, that the principle of kinship subsisting between the tribes, the Chiefs of which are thus singled out for these duties, governs, in some way, the practice adopted; and am led, also, to ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Between 1870 and 1890 the production of gold fell off while its use as money increased greatly, and prices fell. A great increase of gold production has occurred in the period since 1890. In part the rising prices since 1897 are explicable as the periodic upswing of confidence and credit, but in the main doubtless they are due to the stimulus of increasing gold supplies.[10] These are but a few of many instances in monetary history, which, taken together, make an argument of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... approach with a degree of calmness, almost of apathy, which was only explicable on the ground that after a certain point Nature applies her own anaesthetic, and a merciful condition of numbness supervenes. On they came, step by step, nearer and nearer, with the shuffling sound of the burden behind growing louder ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... English school, that all our ideas have their root in experience, but he urges at the same time, with the Germans, that there are innate ideas. The conscious life of the individual, that cannot be understood from the experience of the individual, becomes explicable from the inherited experience of the race. Even the intellectual form which is the condition of the individual's apprehension is gradually made up out of the experience of the race, and consequently innate without for that reason being independent of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Well may the foolish editor of Boswell's letters to Temple, who takes Macaulay's view, talk of the difficulty of explaining how it came about that Boswell formed one of a society which included such men as Johnson and Burke. The truth is that on his theory and Macaulay's it is not explicable at all. ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... itself prove the common parentage. Such minor differences as there are between man and the higher ape—in the development of the cerebrum, the number of the teeth or ribs, the distribution of the hair, and so on—are quite explicable when we reflect that the two groups must have diverged from each other more than ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... mind's silence; and a half-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and irrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past, exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in fidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material influences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are obviously not discoverable without some derangement and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... consistency is quite natural and explicable. In the first place, local organization as it existed at this time was the residuum of several successive systems of custom and law, and contained survivals from the nomenclature of each. "Township" or "town" was a term belonging to a far-distant ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... Therefore, to borrow an argument from Butler, as that which now happens must be consistent with the attributes of the Deity, if such a Being exists, Evolution must be consistent with those attributes. And, if so, the evolution of the universe, which is neither more nor less explicable than that of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, is the conception of creation, which ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... period, race, or caste. Ageless and universal, it raises to highest daring, or suffuses with tenderness, to-day and here, as once on Argo's deck, or in the halls of Persepolis. Purely material in origin and analysis, easily explicable in mere physical operation, its influence is one of the things that are not dreamt of in the philosophy of Science. Why should a certain psychological effect ensue upon certain untranslatable sounds being ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... then, was to call attention to the persistence of many types without appreciable progression during geological time; to show that this fact was not explicable on any other hypothesis than that put forward by Darwin; and by paleontological arguments, to pave the way for consideration of the imperfection of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... far-off goal of simple obedience to a law of life, which God knew, and which his son had justified through sorrow and pain. Again and again the words of the Master gave him a peep into a region where all was explicable, where all that was crooked might be made straight, where every mountain of wrong might be made low, and every valley of suffering exalted. Ever and again some one of the dark perplexities of humanity began to glimmer with light in its inmost depth. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the beautiful reddish or purplish coloring-matters are producible in the greatest abundance by the very species from which we should least expect to derive any, viz., in those most devoid of external color. This, though at first sight very remarkable, is easily explicable, when we remember that, in most of the so-called dye-lichens, colorific principles exist in a colorless form, and only become converted into colored substances under a ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, though not published till after the King's death, had been on hand before, if not completed, might be inferred from the pamphlet itself, the language and tense of some parts of which are scarcely explicable otherwise. But see his account of the composition of the pamphlet in his Def. Sec. He there says that the book did not come out till after the King's death, and consequently had no direct influence in bringing about that fact; but this very statement, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the question from another point of view, are we not continually finding in schools and educational establishments pupils who, for no explicable reason, show a disposition for one branch of instruction only? They shine in this, but are dunces ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... they passed to Curzon Street; "Susan's Vanity" landed them in Coburg Place; and, finally, "Margaret's Involution" had planted them in Belgrave Square. Now, with each of these works of genius Mrs. Greyne had taken what she called "a new departure." Mr. Greyne's remark is, therefore, explicable. ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... with metamorphosis into direct development is here under discussion, this may be the proper place to say a word as to the already indicated absence of metamorphosis in fresh-water and terrestrial animals the marine allies of which still undergo a transformation. This circumstance seems to be explicable in two ways. Either species without a metamorphosis migrated especially into the fresh waters, or the metamorphosis was more rapidly got rid of in the emigrants than in their fellows remaining in ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... same reason, not unfrequently manifest a stronger predilection for their employers' bottles than their patients do for theirs. In the absence of innocuous and benign appliances, the deleterious are had recourse to exorcise the fiend that is raging within them. These views are explicable by the laws of physiology, but this is not the place for such disquisitions. One reason why the temperance movement has been arrested in this country is, that while one sensual gratification was withdrawn, another was not provided. The intellectual excitements which were offered as a substitute ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... completely did James think the emotions were explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations which go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... phenomena having apparently so little connection as the sterility of hybrids, the principle underlying longevity, the resumption of feral characteristics, the sterility of many animals under confinement, are not only made intelligible but are shown to be all part and parcel of the same story—all being explicable as soon as Memory is made the main ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... time Cowperwood had been sentenced, and more particularly after the time he had cried on Aileen's shoulder in prison, she had turned on her father in an almost brutal way. Her attitude, unnatural for a child, was quite explicable as that of a tortured sweetheart. Cowperwood had told her that he thought Butler was using his influence to withhold a pardon for him, even though one were granted to Stener, whose life in prison he had been following with considerable interest; and this had enraged her beyond measure. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... indispensable condition of all morality and all religion.[U] Thus, instead of recognising in the facts of intelligence "an order of existence diametrically in contrast to that displayed to us in the facts of the material universe,"[V] he regards both classes of facts as of the same kind, and explicable by the same laws; he abolishes the primary contrast of consciousness between the ego and the non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among the many phenomena of the universe, determined by the same laws of invariable antecedence ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... hand, that the provisions of the Articles of War, of the Geneva Convention and the Fifth Amendment apply."[95] And the adherence of the United States to the Charter of London in August 1945, under which the Nazi leaders were brought to trial, is explicable by the same theory. These individuals were charged with the crime of instigating aggressive war, which at the time of its commission was not a crime either under International Law or under the laws of the prosecuting governments. It must be presumed that the President is not in his capacity as Supreme ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin |
