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Confounding   Listen
noun
confounding  n.  A mistake that results from taking one thing to be another.
Synonyms: confusion, mix-up.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Confounding" Quotes from Famous Books



... have always walked hand in hand with the professors of artificial theology. As their end, in confounding the reason of man, and abridging his natural freedom, is exactly the same, they have adjusted the means to that end in a way entirely similar. The divine thunders out his anathemas with more ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... 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 reason ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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 experiment of walking with his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... Colour Revolt; add too the certainty that Women would speedily learn to shade off their extremities so as to imitate the Circles; it must then be surely obvious to you, my dear Reader, that the Colour Bill placed us under a great danger of confounding a Priest ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... it was to be expected that ardent Humanists, filled with their new-born zeal for classical studies, should advance too rapidly, and by confounding religion with the crude methods of some of its defenders should jump to the conclusion that a reconciliation between the revival and religion was impossible. Nor should it be a matter of surprise that the Theologians, confident in the strength of their own ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with 'the exact summary of human Worth,' as in one place he defines it. Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one immeasurably ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject of our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their figures or their songs. A writer in the "Atlantic" [Footnote: For December, 1853] gravely tells us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit, and then, after describing the song ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... truth; 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 ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... man? No; very little gentleness, confounding the quality with weakness. Fierce and wrathful when crossed? Very, and stupendously unreasonable. Moody? Exceedingly so. Vindictive? Well; he had had scowling thoughts that he would formally curse his daughter, as he had seen it done ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens

... 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 in the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... poles with regard to the equinoctial. But, finally, we remark, that whereas human nature has ever been prone to the superstition of local consecrations and personal idolatries, by means of memorial relics, apparently it is the usage of God to hallow such remembrances by removing, abolishing, and confounding all traces of their punctual identities. That raises them to shadowy powers. By that process such remembrances pass from the state of base sensual signs, ministering only to a sensual servitude, into the state of great ideas—mysterious as spirituality is mysterious, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... into those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey'd to the future. The hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65, deserves indeed to be recorded. Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and bounties—the immense money expenditure, like a heavy-pouring constant rain—with, over the whole land, the last ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... this St. Thomas plainly establishes that reason, distinct from the intellect, with which we must beware of confounding it, proceeds from it as effect proceeds from cause. Therefore, intellect surpasses reason as its principiant and guiding faculty; and reason only figures in the intelligential sphere, despite the important part it plays in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... between the two might be easily pointed out, if time and space permitted; but the intelligent parent, who has rightly comprehended the method of management here described, and the spirit in which the process of applying it is to be made, will be in no danger of confounding ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... apostle doth also further suppose by the text that Jesus Christ, as Advocate, if he will but plead our cause, let that be never so black, is able to bring us off, even before God's judgment-seat, to our joy, and the confounding of our adversary; for when he saith, "We have an Advocate," he speaks nothing if he means not thus. But he doth mean thus, he must mean thus, because he seeketh here to comfort and support the fallen. "Has any man sinned? We have an Advocate." But what of that, if yet he be unable to fetch us ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... true which sages teach— That passion sways not with repose, That love, confounding these with those, Is ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... are threatening to renew the siege this very year, has caused to be built, at the expense of the King, this Citadel, with the fortifications adjoining thereto, for the defence of the country, for the security of the people, and for confounding again that nation perfidious alike towards its God and its lawful King, and he (Frontenac) has placed ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... one and the same thing—the town of Bui—the well being French, the ton Saxon, 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, a kisser. Vulgar as the word ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow

... of the impious pile, Thou mayest have heard, with silent nonchalance, That strange catastrophe of human speech, That dire confusion of the languages, Confounding all the tongues and dialects To unknown chaos ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... ingenuous, candid, naive, concise, rustically simple, unconsciously arch, sometimes rough, alike chivalrous and holy, generally bearing on the inheritance and the anointing of the Dauphin and the confounding of the English. This was the language of her Voices, her own, her soul's language. The other, more subtle, flavoured with allegory and flowers of speech, critical with scholastic grace, bearing on the Church, suggesting ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... good quality," said John, reluctantly, "if it doesn't mean confounding good with ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... known, but not how. By the accounts we have, he was by the Act of Indemnity only incapacitated for any public employment. This is a notorious mistake, though Toland, the bishop of Sarum, Fenton, &c, have gone into it, confounding him with Goodwin; their cases were very different, as I found upon enquiry. Not to take a matter of this importance upon trust, I had first recourse to the Act itself. Milton is not among the excepted. If he was so conditionally pardoned, it must then be, by a particular instrument. That could ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... all the same, it's confounding class with class to think of him as a husband for you. Not that I've got any class prejudice myself. You can't keep a hotel year in, year out, and allow yourself the luxury of class prejudice; but be that as it may, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... 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, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... "there has been a great mistake. This man," pointing to Barkswell, "is the outlaw, and by confounding him with Mr. Bordine an innocent man has ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton

... respectable colored families to be confounded 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 minds of hundreds of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... confused, how apparently inextricable the ca- uses which tend to the decline of the Roman empire! how countless the nations which swarm forth, in mingling and indistinct hordes, constantly changing the geographical limits—incessantly confounding the natural boundaries! At first sight, the whole period, the whole state of the world, seems to offer no more secure footing to an historical adventurer than the chaos of Milton—to be in a state of irreclaimable disorder, best described in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... hearing to any sincere demand: freedom of speech and press, the wide distribution of the franchise, and of opportunity for power. Contrary to a theory that philosophers have done much to support, democracy is not a method of confounding intelligence with the clamor of many voices, but a method of correcting the single intelligence by the report of whatever other intelligence may be most advantageously related to the matter at issue. Human intelligence ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... 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 necessity be advancing their fortunes; forgetting that labor misdirected is but ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... edged his work. The effect was charming. He experimented further, went into the enchanted wood of such a design as that of The Lady and the Unicorn to pluck more flowers, and of them wove a solid garland, symmetrical, strong, with which to frame the picture. To keep from confounding this with the airy bells and starry corollas of the tender inspiring blossoms of the work, he made them bolder, trained them to their service in solid symmetric mass, and edged the whole, both sides, with the accustomed two-inch line of solid rich ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... eat a piece of sweet-cake for my 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 ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... point it may be permissible to question Mr. Chesterton's use of words in one important point. He appears to fall into the old error of confounding reason with reasoning. Reason is one thing and argument another. It may be impossible to express either human nature or religious faith in a series of syllogistic arguments, and yet both may be reasonable in a higher sense. Reason includes those extra elements to which Mr. Chesterton ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... preceptive will of God." A doctrine most shocking in itself! How strange! that Christians, from any consideration, will obstinately maintain a favorite opinion, which is confessedly built upon, and cannot be established but at the expense of blending and confounding the preceptive and providential will of God, while the distinction thereof is clearly and inviolably established in the word of God! Although divine providence, which is an unsearchable depth, does many times, and, in many cases, serve as a commentary to ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... short, there'd be no poverty." "A splendid scheme," quoth I; "but stay! What of the nation's credit, pray?" "Ha-ha! ho-ho!" he loudly roared. "We'll leave that problem to the Lord. And if He fails to keep us straight Once more we'll have to legislate, And so create, Confounding greed, As much of credit ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs

... 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 to the poetical mind, furnishing his ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... advice was to bring "the constitution back to its proper principles; to restore to the crown, in the person of the proprietaries, its just prerogative; to check the growing influence of assemblies, by distinguishing, what they are perpetually confounding, the executive from the legislative power." News of this alarming document reached Franklin just as he was about to start upon a trip through Ireland. It put an end to that pleasure; he had to set to work on the moment, with all the zeal and by all the means he could compass, to counteract ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... enough to encourage the composer of dances to form them entirely in that stile. All that he can do is to take a great part of his attitudes from the serious stile, but to give them another turn and air in the composition; that he may avoid confounding the two different stiles of serious and half-serious. For this last, it is impossible to have too much ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... from the first: something which each of them, in turn, had felt, and vaguely tried to express. It had little or nothing to do with the fact that they had defied convention. That, regrettable though it might be, was beside the mark. The confounding truth was, that, in an emotional crisis of an intensity of the one they had come through, it was imperative to be able to say: our love is unparalleled, unique; or, at least: I am the only possible one; I am yours, you are mine, only. That had not been the case. What he had been forced ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... among men whose religious views are anything rather than enthusiastic. And I here take occasion to declare, that my conviction of the danger and injury of this principle was and is my chief motive for bringing the doctrine itself into question; the main error of which consists in the confounding of two distinct conceptions—revelation by the Eternal Word, and actuation of the Holy Spirit. The former indeed is not always or necessarily united with the latter—the prophecy of Balaam is an instance of the contrary,—but yet being ordinarily, and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... 16th verse, which perhaps may refer to the image), it refers invariably to the two-horned beast. 3. The image of the beast. This is, every time, with the exception just stated, called the image; so that there is no danger of confounding this with any ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith

... triumphs than it will ever be mine to achieve: and never did architect of dreams build his pyramid upon (alas!) a narrower base, or a more crumbling soil!... Time cures us effectually of these self-conceits, and brings us, somewhat harshly, from the gay extravagance of confounding the much that we design with the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... followed. Then Bunting returned to say the pennant was there, a fact he had quite overlooked in his former observations, confounding the narrow flag in question with the regular pennant of the king. This short red pennant denoted that the communication was verbal, according to a method invented by Bluewater himself, and by means of which, using the ordinary numbers, he was enabled to communicate ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... animals which seem to have been wholly wanting, and others which were feebly represented in the Tertiary period, are now rich in species, and appear to be in such perfect harmony with the present conditions of existence that they present us with countless varieties, confounding the zoologist or botanist who undertakes to describe ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... 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 double name of the Castle of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... sentiency" and "elemental strategies," why should not Mrs. Aitken aspire to hear the silences bend? To do her justice, she does not use such expressions very often—her style is usually simple and comprehensible—but she does sometimes make the mistake of confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... unblemished, in the height of power and place, might well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of the divine beings, to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world. Not as the poets represent, who, while confounding us with their ignorant fancies, are themselves confuted by their own poems and fictions, and call the place, indeed, where they say the gods make their abode, a secure and quiet seat, free from all hazards and commotions, untroubled with winds or with clouds, and equally through all ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... illegal. I go further, and I find that the penal law of China, whilst it facilitates the adoption of children into a family to keep up its succession, prohibits by section 78 the receiving into his house by any one of a person of a different surname, declaring him guilty of 'confounding family distinctions,' and punishing him with 60 blows; the father of the son who shall 'give away' ... his son is to be subject to the same punishment. Again, section 79 enacts that whosoever shall receive and detain the strayed or lost child of a respectable person, and, instead of taking it before ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... backward in her recovery from the first. She was more lean and shrunken, more uncertain in her imbecility, and made stranger confusions in her mind and memory. Among other symptoms of this last affliction, she fell into the habit of confounding the names of her two sons-in-law, the living and the deceased; and in general called Mr Dombey, either 'Grangeby,' or ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... not only his plants but the delicate miniature landscapes he fashioned, to be imprisoned forever in the hearts of protecting plasta balls. But Weeks had never shown his work before and now he had an artist's supreme pleasure of completely confounding his shipmates. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... by confounding the roots of Umbelliferae with those of horse radish or other esculents, it is well, when in doubt, to send the plants, always in fruit, if possible, for identification. None of them are poisonous to the touch—at least to ordinary people. Cases of rather ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... opposed to hedonism in general, that is to say, to the theory which is based on the pleasure and pain intrinsic to Economy and accompanies every other form of activity, confounding the content and that which contains it, and fails to recognize any process but the hedonistic; so we are opposed to aesthetic hedonism in particular, which looks upon the aesthetic at any rate, if not also upon all other activities, as a simple fact of feeling, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... self-possession well calculated to let her cut short any inconvenient revelations. It was as if she had had long practice in the art, though I cannot say what occasion she can have had for its practice—perhaps for the confounding of wavering avowers of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... stupidity or laziness, in completely puzzling the reader by omitting syllables, and transposing and substituting consonants and vowels, thus producing the most confounding gibberish, as "pars nipulique" for "Pharasmani Polemonique" (XIV. 26); or adding a letter, as "mortem" for "morem" (III. 26), or omitting a syllable, as "effunt" for "effundunt" (VI. 33). From the same ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... 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 belonging ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... 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 ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... part of the western shores of Asia Minor were occupied by Grecian colonies, and all remembrance of AEne'as and his followers lost. When the narrative of the Trojan war, with other Greek legends, began to be circulated in Lati'um, it was natural that the identity of name should have led to the confounding of the AEne'adae who had survived the destruction of Troy, with those who had come to La'tium from the Pelasgic AE'nus. The cities which were said to be founded by the AEne'adae were, Latin Troy, which possessed empire for three years; Lavinium, whose sway ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... queried the 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 ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... a black business, and ought to be put a stop to in some way or other—" answered Hurry, confounding the distinctions between right and wrong, as is usual with selfish and vulgar men. "I heartily wish old Hutter and I had scalped every creatur' in their camp, the night we first landed with that capital object! Had you not held back, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... tone will and must be taken in a different relation, with a different position of the organs, although the difference may be imperceptible, if it is to have its proper place in the whole. People cling to the appellations of chest, middle, and head register, confounding voice with register, and making a hopeless confusion, from which only united and very powerful forces can succeed in ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann

... that does not perish, but only changes hands, people overlook the destruction which takes place in the case of unproductive expenditure. The money being merely transferred, they think the wealth also has only been handed over from the spendthrift to other people. But this is simply confounding money with wealth. The wealth which has been destroyed was not the money, but the wines, equipages, and furniture which the money purchased; and, these having been destroyed without return, society collectively is poorer by the amount. In proportion as any class is improvident or luxurious, the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... structure of the organ is fitted; and all the various sensations of sound, colour, taste, smell, resistance, and temperature, find appropriate organs by which they are perceived, without mixing with, or confounding each other. External objects, therefore, act upon the parts of the body endowed with feeling, and their action is diversified in such a manner, as to give us a great number of sensations, which appear to have no resemblance to each other, and which make us acquainted with the various properties ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... The census statistics in civilised countries show a general inverse ratio between national wealth and the growth of the population—a fact which, however, will be misinterpreted unless one carefully avoids confounding the wealth of certain classes in a nation with the average level of prosperity, which alone has to be taken into account here. In Europe, Russia takes the lead in the rate of growth of population, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... anything displeasing to your Imperial self. I must not remind you that you are a man like other men, a man liable to weakness and error, swayed by temper, capable, since your position gives you power, of trampling on the rights of others in a moment of passion, of confounding justice with your own desires and of mistaking the promptings of ambition or malice or envy for an inspiration from Heaven itself. No, I must not say all this or any of it, but, on the contrary, I must describe you to yourself and your family and the chosen intimates who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various

... must have rolled out of it, 'what errand was I then upon, and to what Abyssinian point had public events then marched? No matter as to me. And as to them, if the wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly confounding in its inscrutable unreason) I had not then lighted on a poor young savage boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first off by the hair of his princely head to "inspect" the British volunteers, and hauled the second off by the hair of his equine tail to the Crystal Palace, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post as the night advanced began to make larger demands on his attention: and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... expression, asks himself, "What might its origin have been?" and suggests that the name of Ierne—the same as Erin—having been given to Ireland by the ancients, and the Greek iepa—holy— bearing a great resemblance to it, Avienus might have thus fallen into a very natural mistake of confounding the one with the other. But, in the first place, Himilco's report was certainly not written in Greek, but in Phoenician, and Avienus seems merely to have translated that report. Moreover, the word iepa begins with a very strong aspirate, equivalent to a consonant, while there are ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... Their efforts had a remarkable result, precisely for the reason that they never succeeded in speaking pure French, and that in their ill-cleared brains the two languages were never kept distinctly apart. The nobles, cleverer men, could speak both idioms without confounding them, but so could not these rurales, who lisped the master's tongue with difficulty, mixing together the two vocabularies and the two grammars, mistaking the genders, assigning, for want of better knowledge, the neuter to all the words that did not designate beings with a sex, in ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... find this denied. Besides a proof from Revelation, this is an argument from experience. And yet we shall still be told that this Spiritual Life is a force. But let it be remembered what this means in Science, it means the heresy of confounding Force with Vitality. We must also expect to be told that this Spiritual Life is simply a development of ordinary Life—just as Dr. Bastian tells us that natural Life is formed according to the same laws which determine the more simple ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... by the prophet Micheas,[20] several ages before. How sweet and adorable is the conduct of divine providence! He teaches saints his will by the mouths of impious ministers, and furnishes Gentiles with the means of admonishing and confounding the blindness of the Jews. But graces are lost on carnal and hardened souls. Herod had then reigned upwards of thirty years; a monster of cruelty, ambition, craft, and dissimulation; old age and sickness had at that time exasperated his jealous mind in an unusual manner. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... wildly in every direction. Nor could Hamilton's dragoons on the other wing stand the heavy rolling fire of the advancing Macdonalds. Mad with terror, man and horse fled in blind confusion, some backwards, confounding their own ranks, some along the shore, some actually through the ranks ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... 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 comprehensive departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought—feeling; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... chapter on colour I have noticed the curious fact that the word purple was sometimes used to mean colour, and sometimes to express the texture of velvet, thus confounding the two; but I have also pointed out that it had other meanings, and had become a very comprehensive word for everything ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... Crouching, he prepared to meet the charge which he knew would soon come, nor did he have long to wait. His antagonist paused only for sufficient time to permit him to recount for the edification of the audience and the confounding of Korak a brief resume of his former victories, of his prowess, and of what he was about to do to this puny Tarmangani. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... some ancient bond. The cool nights revived and nourished his memories of an older time, wherein lay his subtile wisdom, but day by day his aspiring crest grew brighter. The life of Eden became for him oblivion, the light of the sun obscuring and confounding his reminiscence, even as for Adam and Eve this life was Illusion, the visible disguising the invisible, and pleasure ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... From confounding signs with causes came the worship of the sun and stars. "If," says Job, "I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon progressive in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand, this were an iniquity to be punished ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... you are perhaps confounding this with some remembered adventure of your own. There was no appointment. But I felt confident that blue-eyed ogre was walking every morning along the path where I met him first, and that he would compel me to open the door and walk straight to our own ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... the then-accepted truism that King Arthur was at one time Lord of Great Britain. This appeal to "The Graal" as the authority for a general belief shows that it was at that time recognised as a well-spring of authentic knowledge; while the fact that the trouveur was not confounding "The Graal" with the later version of the story is further shown by his going on presently to speak of "the Romance that Chrestien telleth so fairly of Perceval the adventures of the ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown

... with Mexico was wonderfully successful from a military point of view, but its political effects were equally confounding to the politicians who projected it. The American people resemble the French, quite as much perhaps as they do the English, and the admiration of military glory is one of their Gallic traits. It happened that the two highest positions in the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... airth, if ever ye had either; whilst the laws and language o' England are at this time universal! ay, sir, universal, or at least mair sae than any one tongue ever yet was since the Lord made men strangers to their fellows at the confounding o' Babel." ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... egotism,—and it takes much experience or an extraordinary nature to counteract this unhealthy stimulus. For the ordinary nature it is impossible to live day after day, year in and year out, under the powerful external stimulus of riches, without confounding the outer source of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... secured. Then, ladies, 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 to win success for them. So shall you nobly fulfil the high destiny ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... nearly always occur in couples, as in the case of Antoine Vrard, one of the earliest printers to adopt this form; but a few exceptions may be mentioned where only one appears, namely, in the Mark of Estienne Baland, Lyons (1515), in which an angel is represented as confounding Balaam's ass; and in that of Vincent Portunaris, of the same place and of about the same time, in which an angel figures holding an open book; in the four employed by G.Silvius, an Antwerp printer (1562), in three of which the figure ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... Naturalists, as Benozzo Gozzoli and Perugino. Hence there is a tendency in the Naturalists to despise the Purists, and in the Purists to be offended with the Naturalists (not understanding them, and confounding them with the Sensualists); and this is grievously ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... The fallacy of the gentleman's position, in fact the fallacy of the doctrine of "State rights," and the deductions made therefrom by the school of politicians and statesmen to which the gentleman belongs, arises from confounding the terms State rights and State sovereignty, and using these as though they were convertible terms. The several States of this Union possess certain rights clearly defined, and known and understood by the reader of American ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... our plea. "Mere lack of will, Not lack of power," you told us We showed our free-state records; still You mocked, confounding good and ill, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... private thought; Alike to council or the assembly came, With equal souls, and sentiments the same. But when (by wisdom won) proud Ilion burn'd, And in their slips the conquering Greeks return'd, 'Twas God's high will the victors to divide, And turn the event, confounding human pride; Some be destroy'd, some scatter'd as the dust (Not all were prudent, and not all were just). Then Discord, sent by Pallas from above, Stern daughter of the great avenger Jove, The brother-kings inspired with fell debate; Who call'd to council all ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... improvements that might be made in it, he turned his thoughts toward the divine being of his worship, and the first steps in art were taken in the monuments which he raised to his gods. Then, confounding kings with deities, he reared palaces like unto temples. But civil architecture, properly so called, came into existence only with an already advanced state of civilization, when cities were forming and peoples were organizing. After having satisfied the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... strictest exactness and perspicuity are required, that an ordinary English style is apt to become loose and shadowy; and it is precisely here that we are entitled to expect the severest, chastest form of utterance. Coleridge used to complain of a general confounding of the word 'notion' with 'idea,' and was often at great pains to point out the distinction between the two, as also between many other words similarly misused. Archdeacon Hare, too, has remarked upon the common misapplication of such ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... work came out in an unpropitious hour; other things were occupying the public; the world was not at leisure to heed him, and the book did not penetrate into the great circle of readers. But a savage critic has seized on it, and mangled, distorted, deformed it, confounding together defect and beauty in one mocking ridicule; and the beauties have not yet found an exponent, nor the defects a defender; and the publisher shakes his head, points to groaning shelves, and delicately hints that the work which was to be the epitome of the sacred life within life does not hit ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... routs in one evening. When Edward was elevated upon their shoulders, he could not help being gratified with the romantic effect produced by the breaking up of this sylvan camp. [The author has been 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 ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... pleasure of travelling is even impaired by this increase of speed. There is such a thing as fatal facility. As well eat a condensed dinner, or hear a concert in one comprehensive crash, ear-splitting and soul-confounding, as see miles of landscape at a glance. Willis says, travelling on an English railway is equivalent to having so many miles of green damask unrolled before your weary eyes. And one may certainly have too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... exclaimed Wilfrid, "you take pleasure in confounding me. Who and what is she? What ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... Apollo of the Greeks, was supposed to be the issue of a marriage consummated before the birth of his parents while they were still within the womb of their mother Rhea-Nuit. This was a way of connecting the personage of Haroeris with the Osirian myths by confounding him with the homonymous Harsiesis, the son of Isis, who became the son of Osiris through his mother's marriage with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... has Punch adopted with the view of pleasing his constituents and confounding his enemies, exclusive of the mock Mulready envelope known as the "Anti-Graham Envelope" and the "Wafers," which are elsewhere referred to. The first of these was the music occasionally printed in his pages from the hand of his own particular maestro, Tully, the well-known member ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... Dessau that Minna had made her first debut on the stage, and while there I heard her spoken of by frivolous young men in the tone usual in such circles when discussing young and beautiful actresses. My eagerness in contradicting this chatter and confounding the scandalmongers revealed to me more clearly than ever the strength of the passion which drew me ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... Portuguese or the Brazilian embassy. Monsieur de Funcal is a nobleman belonging to both those countries. As for the convict, he is dead and buried. Your persecutor, whoever he is, seems to me so powerful that it would be well to take no decisive measures until you are sure of some way of confounding and crushing him. Act prudently and with caution, my dear monsieur. Had Monsieur de Maulincour followed my advice, nothing of all ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood! Is it not scandalous, is it not humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself; seducing ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... iii; also his Antiquities, vol. viii, Whiston's translation. On the "devil cast out," in Mark ix, 17-29, as undoubtedly a case of epilepsy, see Cherullier, Essai sur l'Epilepsie; also Maury, art. Demonique in the Encyclopedie Moderne. In one text, at least, the popular belief is perfectly shown as confounding madness and possession: "He hath a devil, and is mad," John x, 20. Among the multitude of texts, those most relied upon were Matthew viii, 28, and Luke x, 17; and for the use of fetiches in driving out evil ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... whose full significance lies in another scheme of things, but which touches and interacts with this material universe in a certain way, building its particles into notable configurations for a time—without confounding any physical laws,—and then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a theory of life—we have not even a theory of the essential nature of gravitation; discoveries ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... had gone through my part thinking of my woes. I had swallowed the draught as if it had indeed been a potion to put me out of all remembrance of my misery. I had snatched the dagger and stabbed myself with great satisfaction, and I felt I should at least have the comfort of confounding my enemies and ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... in that day's black fury Like leaves shall be whirled in the blast; Hoary-headed Eryri Prone to the plough-lands cast! Then shall be roaring and warring And ferment of sea and firth, Ocean, in turmoil upboiling, Confounding each bound of earth. The flow of the Deluge of Noah Were naught by that fell ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... Charles Lamb who said, in his "Chapter on Ears," that in voices he could not distinguish a soprano from a tenor, and could only contrive to guess at the thorough-bass from its being "supereminently harsh and disagreeable;" yet dear old Elia may be forgiven, since his confounding the bass voice with a system of musical short-hand is so delightful a proof of the ignorance he ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel



Words linked to "Confounding" :   unsupportive



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