"Irrefragable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... baronet had always regarded as the Young Man of the future. Sydney had been wont to sneer a little, after his fashion, at the individuals who interpreted the new ideas, though he accepted the ideas themselves as irrefragable. The nation must be saved by its young men—yes, certainly. As a young man he saw that plainly enough, but it was not going to be saved by any young man who could be named in his presence. He had said something like this to ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has suffered, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... language is irrefragable," as the great Oxford Sanskritist says. To which he is answered—"provided it does not clash with historical facts and ethnology." It may be—no doubt it is, as far as his knowledge goes—"the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historical ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... justice, whether a man be dead or alive. You aver he is alive, and you bring fifty witnesses to swear it: I answer, "Why do you not produce the man "' This is an argument founded on one of the first principles of the LAW OF EVIDENCE, which Gilbert would have held to be irrefragable. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... difficulties, which, while they are not sufficient to hinder us from believing in the Divine Personality as a fact, yet hinder us from conceiving the manner of its existence, and prevent us from exhibiting our belief as a philosophical conclusion, proved by irrefragable reasoning and secured against all objections. These difficulties are occasioned, on the one hand, by the so-called Philosophy of the Unconditioned, which in all ages has shown a tendency towards Pantheism, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... many a broad acre besides, passed from the Quins, and are now the property of the O'Briens to this day; and while the rest of the castle is little better than a heap of ruins, the fatal window still remains nearly as perfect as when the lady sprang through it, an irrefragable proof of the truth of the legend in the eyes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... experience at Dungeness, the sea might hold its dead were past, and at any moment the resurrection might commence. But it never came, and other theories had to be broached to explain the unprecedented circumstance. The most generally acceptable, because the most absolutely irrefragable, was that the dead men and women had been carried away by an under-current out into the Atlantic, and for ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... only grasp what it is that transforms the molecule of dead matter into the living molecule! Pasteur called it "dissymmetric force," which is only a new name for the mystery. He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier between organic and inorganic nature"—that the molecules of an organism differed from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... celestial regions, but converses with Christ's human nature only. However, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles. Afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose, such as the Irrefragable Doctor, the Subtile Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor, who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... very desirable it is that it should happen, how reasonable it is to expect that it should happen, what good results would follow from believing that it has happened—all that is irrelevant. Think of it as first a history, and then you are shut up to the old-fashioned line of evidence, irrefragable as I take it to be, to which all these others may afterwards be appended as confirmatory. It is true, because sufficient eye-witnesses assert it. It did happen, because it is commended to us by the ordinary canons of evidence which we accept in regard ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... fragments of his conversation have been preserved, the unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific titles: 'doctor angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable.' 'Was Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as a phantom: I have read him in Greece in his own words.' ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... the whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened to find it; so modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he was that it was established on irrefragable laws. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... with history. Bishop Vaughan applies more than one touchstone, which, one would imagine, ought to be sufficient to prove to any unprejudiced mind the falsity of that theory. Among these, what I may call the "pallium touchstone,"—which still bears its irrefragable testimony in the arms of the Archbishops of Canterbury,[1]—has always ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... can hold, and by exceedingly distending them, discover New Vessels, &c: But not now to enlarge upon the Uses, the Reader may securely take this Narrative, as the naked real Matter of Fact, whereby 'tis as clear, as Noon day (both from the Time, and irrefragable Testimony of very many considerable Persons in that University, who can jointly attest it; as well as from that particular unquestionable one of Mr. Boyle and his worthy Company, who were the first Eye-witnesses of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... visit, that the secret of this coast was of so important and delicate a nature that rather than attract attention to it at all, overt action against intruders would be taken only in the last resort, and on irrefragable ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to the probability of this being true. His answer was as follows: "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and laughed aloud. Everybody laughed as he did, and the two philosophers were saluted with unanimous felicitations. La Fontaine, however, was declared conqueror, on account of his profound erudition and his irrefragable logic. Conrart obtained the compensation due to an unsuccessful combatant; he was praised for the loyalty of his intentions, and the purity ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... against this inference it might reasonably be urged that "eternal" ought to be taken in the same sense relatively to the "punishment" of the wicked, as relatively to the "life" of the righteous, and eternity is here predicated of the one just as of the other. Now, although this reasoning appears to be irrefragable, the additional arguments from Scripture which I am about to adduce will, I think, show that there must be some other way of regarding the doctrine of future punishment, which, although not inconsistent with that to which the foregoing interpretation ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... right as my glove! By the by, I fancy that phrase comes from the custom of pledging a glove as the signal of irrefragable faith right, I say, as my glove, Caxonbut we of the Protestant ascendency have the more merit in doing that duty for nothing, which cost money in the reign of that empress of superstition, whom Spenser, Caxon, terms in ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... lord, the most valid and irrefragable; proofs that cannot be questioned, even for a moment; and, least of all, by your lordship, who are best acquainted ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... deliberate, regulated, ponderously impressive (GRAVITATISCH) Feat of Arms, as the reader sees; done all by Regulation methods, with orthodox exactitude; in a slow, weighty, almost pedantic, but highly irrefragable manner. It is the triumph of Prussian Discipline; of military orthodoxy well put in practice: the honest outcome of good natural stuff in those Brandenburgers, and of the supreme virtues of Drill. Neipperg and his Austrians had much despised Prussian soldiering: "Keep our soup hot," cried they, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... alarmed at its effect on the question of verbal inspiration. And it was the disproof of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris by the learned Bentley,(410) which first threw solid doubts on the value attaching to traditional titles of books, and showed the irrefragable character belonging to an appeal to internal evidence; a department which has been called the higher criticism. This latter branch, so abundantly developed in German speculation, is only hinted at by the English deists of the eighteenth age, as by Hobbes and ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... that Tetrazzini was singing Mazzone's Sogni e Canti and Benedict's Carnevale di Venezia, the music was no more than a noise in the air to him. What should he do if Eleanor were married? Bad enough if she were engaged, but married!... An engagement was not an irrefragable affair, and he could woo her so ardently that his rival would swiftly vanish from her thoughts ... but a marriage!... He knew that marriages were not so irrefragable as they might be, and that a very desperate ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... answer is obvious, and, I should hope, irrefragable. A duty, and a sacred one too, is due TO THE LIVING. Past examples operate upon future ones: and posterity ought to know, in the instance of this accomplished scholar and literary antiquary, that neither the sharpest wit, nor the most delicate ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... nature and causes of the insidious warfare, which is maintained, in various forms, against the essential doctrines of the Gospel. It is just an effusion of the malignity of the unsanctified heart. Its prevalence is an exact fulfilment of prophecy; and therefore an irrefragable proof of the truth and divine authority of that system which it is labouring to destroy. The emphatic declaration of the apostle, in the text, strikingly describes the state of feeling which now actually prevails, among many who enjoy all the ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... whole affair should be kept a close secret. But hardly had the marriage ceremony been gone through (1540) than the story of the dispensation became public. Luther was at first inclined to deny it entirely as an invention of his enemies, but he changed his mind when he found that the proofs were irrefragable and determined to brazen out ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... that I have read sets forth another view of God's purpose. God seeks our praise. The glory of God is the end of all the divine actions. Now, that is a statement which no doubt is irrefragable, and a plain deduction from the very conception of an infinite Being. But it may be held in such connections, and spoken with such erroneous application, and so divorced from other truths, that instead of being what it is in the Bible, good news, it shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that I was familiar with appeared to me a desert, even with all its fairy-land splendors? Jack Holt's father was too rich a man not to allow his wife all the good things which she coveted, and her parlors, halls and bedrooms were irrefragable proof of the enormities which may be committed with an utter want of taste and tens of thousands of dollars. Both Harry and Jack hated the house, and spent every available moment out of school in our comfortable, well-worn nooks inside and out of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... was condemned to "the pelting of a merciless storm." Lowth told him—"You give yourself out as demonstrator of the divine legation of Moses; it has been often demonstrated before; a young student in theology might undertake to give a better—that is, a more satisfactory and irrefragable demonstration of it in five pages than you have done in five volumes."—Lowth's "Letter to Warburton," ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Almost inconceivable is the power of a visible communion of numbers to give intensity to those feelings of the heart which usually retire into privacy, or only open themselves to the confidence of friendship. The faith in the validity of such emotions becomes irrefragable from its diffusion; we feel ourselves strong among so many associates, and all hearts and minds flow together in one great and irresistible stream. On this very account the privilege of influencing an assembled ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a method; his "Harmonielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs; he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on the course of music. It may be that many a musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... for an effect whose Cause is God,"—God is clearly recognized as returning a harvest in the future, in strict and accurate accord with the sowing of the present. This is very clear. Then how simple and how certain that if this is God's irrefragable law in Nature, it must have its fulfillment too in the moral nature of man. It has been one of the chief sorrows of the book that neither wrong nor confusion is righted here, and those "days of darkness" to which all life tends are no discriminative judgment, nor is there ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... of in recent zoological speculations. Reaction against the frivolities of teleology such as are to be found in the notes of the learned commentators on Paley's 'Natural Theology,' has, I believe, had a temporary effect in turning attention from the solid and irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. But overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all around us,"[11] &c. Sir William Thomson goes on to infer that all living beings ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... person of quality and fortune; but the ancient Breviary and constant tradition of the place assure us, that her father was a poor shepherd. Adrian, Valois, and Baluze, observe, that her most ancient life ought not to be esteemed of irrefragable authority, and that the words of St. Germanus are {083} not perhaps related with a scrupulous fidelity.[4] The author of her life tells us, that the holy virgin begging one day with great importunity that she might go to the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical—an epithet which one could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to Beyle and his school—they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even Hazlitt (who has been selected, not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and in a short time he acquired a considerable fortune. Notwithstanding all these advantages he passed his life miserably, and ended it on the scaffold. The following story afterwards got into circulation, and has been often triumphantly cited by succeeding astrologers as an irrefragable proof of the truth of their science. It was said, that long before he died he uttered three remarkable prophecies; one relating to himself, another to his friend, and the third to his patron, Pandolfo di Malatesta. The first delivered was that relating to his friend, Guido di Bogni, one ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Pope. When argument failed, the Church called the secular arm to its aid, and then began a series of persecutions, extending over several centuries, which, for brutality and ferocity, are probably unexampled in history. To crush this unoffending but faithful people, Rome employed her most irrefragable arguments—the curses of Lucius and the horrible cruelties of Innocent—and the "Vicar of Christ" bathed the banner of the Cross in a carnage from which the wolves of Romulus and the eagles of Caesar would ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... entirely ceased, by the hostilities which the said kingdom has commenced against our Republic, under pretences, and in a manner the injustice of which has been demonstrated by the supreme government of the State, with an irrefragable evidence, in the eyes of impartial Europe; whilst the petitioners themselves, by the illegal capture of so large a number of Dutch ships, and afterwards by the absolute stagnation of navigation, and of voyages to foreign countries, have experienced in the most grievous manner, the consequences ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... mankind come upon one doctrinal platform when they enter eternity. They all have one creed there. There is not a skeptic even in hell. The devils believe and tremble. The demonstration that God is holy is so irrefragable, so complete and absolute, that doubt or denial is impossible in any spirit that has passed the line between ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... is extreamely longed for by the good People, and will be a remedy of the many differences and divisions about the Worship of God in this Kingdome, esspecially in this place: If there be any thing in it that displeaseth, let it be remonstrate upon irrefragable and convincing reason, otherwise ye will in your wisedome give approbation to it. 2. If there be any particular differences among some Brethren; which are not determined, but passed over in silence in the Directory, and yet hinted at in the Letter from the Assembly, we ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... uninstructed opinion; namely that, down to this date, the varieties of Northumbrian are much fewer and slighter than they afterwards became, and that the written documents are practically all in one and the same dialect, or very nearly so, from the Humber as far north as Aberdeen. The irrefragable results noted by Dr Murray will probably come as a surprise to many, though they have now been before the public for more than forty years. The Durham dialect of the Cursor Mundi and the Aberdeen Scotch of Barbour are hardly ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... party of moderate republican opinions in the French Revolution; "men," says Carlyle, "of fervid constitutional principles, of quick talent, irrefragable logic, clear respectability, who would have the reign of liberty establish itself, but only by respectable methods." The leaders of it were from the Gironde district, whence their name, were in succession members of the Legislative Body ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... golden Book be read with Attention, I doubt not but it will plainly appear, that the Scripture was in all Things preferr'd by the Author before them all; and that he accounted that alone truly infallible, and of irrefragable Authority, and did not account the Councils, Popes ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Bouille, informing him that his brother-in-law the emperor Leopold was about to march a body of troops on Longwi, in order to afford a pretext for the concentration of the French troops on that frontier, and thus favour his flight from Paris, are irrefragable proofs of the counter-revolutionary understanding existing between the king and the foreign powers, no less than between the king and the leaders of the emigres. The memoirs of the emigres are full of proofs of this fact; and nature even attests them, for the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... reality of occurrences in violation of the order of nature, which is based upon universal and invariable experience, must recognize that, even if the earliest asserted origin of our four Gospels could be established upon the most irrefragable grounds, the testimony of the writers—men of like ignorance with their contemporaries, men of like passions with ourselves—would be utterly incompetent to prove ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... tone; "for my part, I who have the honour of speaking to you, can boast, that never since I was of years of discretion (counting new style, beginning at thirteen, of course)—never have I lost a friend, a sincere friend—never, for this irrefragable reason—since that nonage, never was I such a neophyte as to fancy I had found that lusus natures, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands, if I had done what I ought to have done. But, as I see it, it is not a matter of what one ought to do, or ought not to do. It is what one DOES do. That is the everlasting, irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of men over the world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it because the way led to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... dunameis, and put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and the vices—yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause (which indeed was all things), Noesis Noeseon, "the Thought of Thoughts," whom he discovered by irrefragable processes of logic, and in whom the philosophers believe privately, leaving Serapis to the women and the sailors? All they had to do was to follow in his steps; to take each of them a branch, of science or literature, or as many branches ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical sciences from theological control. It was the gradual development of an irrefragable method that gave the physicist his intellectual freedom as against all the powers of the world. His proofs were so clear, his evidence so sharply superior to tradition, that he broke away finally from all control. But the journalist has no such ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye, and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated, should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or other, facts which ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas;-these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith. In short, Sir, except Euclid's Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father's fire-side, in the winter evening of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... material modes are real, then we must at once relegate the stories of the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection, and the ascension to the realm of myth. If the so-called laws of matter are real, irrefragable laws, then we indulgently, pass by these stories as figments of heated imaginations. But, regarding matter as a human, mortal concept, entirely mental, and wholly subject to the impress and influence of mind, and knowing, as we do now, that mental concepts change with changed thought, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the Jerusalem priesthood beyond the presumption that the Priestiy Code must chronologically precede, not Deuteronomy merely, but also the prophets. For the sake of this presumption there is constructed a purely abstract (and as such perfectly irrefragable) possibility that furnishes a door of escape from the historical probability, which nevertheless it is ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the purity of their penitents, have failed to touch the guilty parties, they are, in the good providence of God, infallible witnesses to tell to the world that auricular confession is nothing else than a snare to the confessor and his dupes. Yes, those Bulls of the popes are an irrefragable testimony that auricular confession is the most powerful invention of the devil to corrupt the heart, pollute the body, and damn the soul of the ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... I,—'Calista's letters to Eugenio. They may have been very innocent; but will the world believe it? You may have only intended to play with the heart of the poor artless Irish gentleman who adored and confided in you. But who will believe the stories of your innocence, against the irrefragable testimony of your own handwriting? Who will believe that you could write these letters in the mere wantonness of coquetry, and not ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... written? Who are the men who have transmitted them? They are either the founders of religions themselves, or their adherents and assigns. Thus, in religion, the evidence of interested parties becomes irrefragable and incontestable. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... their jamming, bound aback and leave Huge gaps between, and some from off the blow Are hurried about with spaces small between. And all which, brought together with slight gaps, In more condensed union bound aback, Linked by their own all inter-tangled shapes,— These form the irrefragable roots of rocks And the brute bulks of iron, and what else Is of their kind... The rest leap far asunder, far recoil, Leaving huge gaps between: and these supply For us thin air and splendour-lights of the sun. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... suggests the gravest suspicion that these stories were made up after the whites had reached the American shores, and nearly all historians have summarily rejected their authenticity, on this account. But a most careful scrutiny of their sources positively refutes this opinion. There is irrefragable evidence that these myths and this ideal of the hero-god, were intimately known and widely current in America long before any one of its millions of inhabitants had ever seen a white man. Nor is there any difficulty in explaining ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... this, according to the belief of the times, as expressed by Jean de Serres; for, "having been present at the Bayonne affair," he brought him irrefragable proof of the "holy league entered into by the kings of France and Spain for the ruin of the religion." Comment. de statu. rel. et reip., ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... highly bred, purely English type of woman who, looking at facts squarely in the face, accepts them as facts and does not allow her imagination to dally in any atmosphere wherein they may be invested. To this type a vow is irrefragable. Loyalty is inherent in her like her blood. She never changes. What feminine inconsistencies she had at fifteen she retains at five-and-twenty, and preserves to add to the charms of her old age. She is the exemplary wife, the great-hearted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... evidence. But a cause, however ingeniously pleaded, is not therefore gained. You may remember, the neatly-wrought chain of circumstantial evidence, so artificially brought forward to prove Sir Philip Francis's title to the Letters of Junius, seemed at first irrefragable; yet the influence of the reasoning has passed away, and Junius, in the general opinion, is as much unknown as ever. But on this subject I will not be soothed or provoked into saying one word more. To say who I ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of one which a witness long inured to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... temperature during the time of development to breed butterflies, possessed of the characteristics of related varieties and species living in southern and northern regions respectively, characteristics not merely of color and design, but also of structure, is complete irrefragable proof of ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... feeble, and the altered habits of my life render it almost impossible that I should proceed to London with this object, and I therefore ask it of your Christian charity that you should visit me here at Loughlinter. You, as a Roman Catholic, cannot but hold the bond of matrimony to be irrefragable. You cannot, at least, think that it should be set aside at the caprice of an excitable woman who is not able and never has been able to assign any reason for leaving the protection of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the world with a dogma freighted with such wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be prepared to furnish the most irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority. We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all astronomers, for ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... recognition of a number of subordinate divinities, he held that the Divine is one, because Reason is one. He taught that the Supreme Being is the immaterial, infinite Governor of all;[880] that the world bears the stamp of his intelligence, and attests it by irrefragable evidence;[881] and that he is the author and vindicator of all moral laws.[882] So that, in reality, he did more to overthrow polytheism than any of his predecessors, and on that ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he had good reason to believe that some of these little enemies to the constitution had contrived and abetted Monsieur de Fleury's escape. Of their having rejoiced at it in a most indecent manner, he said he could produce irrefragable proof. The boy who saw Babet tear down the placard was produced and solemnly examined; and the thoughtless action of this poor little girl was construed into a state crime of the most horrible nature. In a declamatory tone, Tracassier ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... common sense of a most extraordinarily refined and penetrating kind. But before examining the procedure of science, we must consider briefly its imposing product, that science whose vast structure seems to the layman so final, imposing, and irrefragable. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... can be effected. With this conviction the proposition of compromise which had been made and rejected was by my direction subsequently withdrawn and our title to the whole Oregon Territory asserted, and, as is believed, maintained by irrefragable facts ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... arisen among his adversaries had established the soundness of his own political creed. The disputants who had long agreed in accusing him of an impious error had now effectually vindicated him, and refuted one another. The High Churchman who took the oaths had shown by irrefragable arguments from the Gospels and the Epistles, from the uniform practice of the primitive Church, and from the explicit declarations of the Anglican Church, that Christians were not in all cases bound to pay obedience to the prince who ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... how long they were to persevere in the crime of its continuance? One had said, that they might be unjust for ten years longer; another, only till the beginning of the next century. But this diversity of opinion had proceeded from an erroneous statement of Mr. Dundas against the clear and irrefragable calculations of Mr. Pitt. The former had argued, that, because Jamaica and the ceded islands had retained almost all the slaves which had been, imported into them, they were therefore not yet in a situation to ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... now so often denied, that slavery is fast undermining all true regard for human life. We know this one instance is not a demonstration to the contrary; but, adding this to the lists of tragedies that weekly come up to us through the Southern mails, may we not admit them as proofs irrefragable? The newspapers confirmed this account ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... unshrinking vehemence that I never saw surpassed, yet, with a common inconsistency, showed more than indifference towards learned historical and critical evidence on the side of Christianity; and indeed, unmercifully exposed erudition to scorn, both by caustic reasoning, and by irrefragable quotation of texts. I constantly had occasion to admire the power with which be laid hold of the moral side of every controversy; whether he was reasoning against Romanism, against the High Church, against ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... la semence, qu'elles recoiuent du Diable, est froide comme glace: Spranger & les Inquisiteurs, qui en ont veu vne infinite, l'escriuent ainsi. Remy, qui a fait le procez a plus de deux milles Sorciers, en porte vn tesmoignage irrefragable. Ie puis asseurer au semblable, que celles, qui me sont passees par les mains, en ont confesse tout autant. Que si la semence est ainsi froide, il s'ensuit qu'elle est destituee de ses esprits vitaux, & ainsi qu'elle ne peut estre cause ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... Universe. And after all, there are many minds—some of them, I must admit, not wanting in philosophical power—who never succeed in accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man {20} cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... to approve the efforts of children, made in accordance with the visible intention of the Maker of all flesh, and the Giver of all Intelligence. These laws, therefore, I now repeat, and beg of you to observe them as irrefragable. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... in the Ladrones, and in Otaheite, whose manners are thus licentious, should be considered as a distinct confraternity, called by a particular name; and that this name should be the same in both places: this singular coincidence of custom, confirmed by that of language, seems to furnish an irrefragable proof of the inhabitants of both places being the same nation. We know, that it is the general property of the Otaheite dialect, to soften the pronunciation of its words. And, it is observable, that, by the omission of one single letter (the consonant t), our Arreoys ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... mighty structure heaves—reels—seems in suspense for one moment, and then, with one choral crash—to the frantic joy of the young Sagittary—lies subverted on the floor! Kant and Aristotle, Nominalists and Realists, Doctors Seraphic or Irrefragable, what cares he? All are at his feet—the Irrefragable has been confuted by his arrows, the Seraphic has been found mortal, and the greatest philosopher and the least differ but according to the brief ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... it worth my while to add a remarkable Letter of Pope Stephen, adapted to the foregoing Fable; by which we may make a judgment of the Madness and folly of that old crafty Knave. This Letter is extant in Rhegino, a Benedictine Monk, and Abbot of Prunay, [Footnote: Abbot Pruniacensis] an irrefragable Testimony in an Affair of this Nature; 'tis in Chron. anni 753.—"Stephen the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God, &c. As no Man ought to boast of his Merits, so neither ought the wonderful Works of God which are wrought upon his Saints without their Desert, ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... very commonly themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediaeval dialectic, the Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some notice here in a ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters in absentia. A university must keep its word, and Dean Elderberry Foible, who was honesty itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book became as irrefragable as the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... true this was. When the mining first began, several rebels toward the East had tried profitlessly to buck this irrefragable game and had found they had battered their unyielding heads against an equally unyielding stone wall. These men had demanded more and Robinson's company, true to its threat, had urbanely gone around their farms, travelled on and left them behind, their coal untouched and certain to so remain. Such ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... laws, customs, manners, and habits of life. They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They are obligations written in the heart. They approximate men to men, without their knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions. The secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to equivocate, scuffle, and fight, about the terms of their written obligations. As to war, if it be the means of wrong and violence, it is the sole means ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... certain and irrefragable proof that much definiteness exists in living things apart from Selection, and also much that may very well have been preserved and so in a sense constituted by Selection. Here the matter is likely to rest. There is a passage in the sixth edition of the Origin which has I think ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... expounded Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre The seminary of being, and extinction The Ceres of existence: it discovers Life in putridity, vigour in decay; Dissolution even, and disintegration, Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder, Finds in God's thoughts irrefragable order, And admirable the manner of our corruption As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress The tree of Life—Death dies on his own dart Promising to our ashes perpetuity, And to our perishable elements Their proper imperishability; extracting ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... tragi-comic scenes, tragic enough in effect, between Father and Son; Son now about eighteen,—fit to be getting through Oxford, had he been an English gentleman of private station. It comes from the irrefragable Nicolai; who dates it about this time, uncertain as to ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the climate of Western Europe at this period. The chief point which we have to notice is, that a considerable revolution of opinion has taken place on this point. It was originally believed that the presence of such animals as Elephants, Lions, the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus afforded an irrefragable proof that the climate of Europe must have been a warm one, at any rate during Post-Glacial times. The existence, also, of numbers of Mammoths in Siberia, was further supposed to indicate that this high temperature extended itself very far north. Upon the whole, however, the evidence is ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... his way to the United States, he had been providentially led to inquire into the circumstances of his birth on shipboard, and had discovered that not himself alone, but another baby, had come into the world during the same voyage of the prolific vessel, and that there were almost irrefragable reasons for believing that these two children had been assigned to the wrong mothers. Many reminiscences of his early days confirmed him in the idea that his nominal parents were aware of the exchange. The family to which ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... divided stream, on either side the base of the larynx, into the oesophagus. These correlated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, designed with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother and off-spring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of creative forsight. The parts of this apparatus cannot have produced one another; one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except design can operate to make them ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... power in heaven, for fear of being damned. In order to cure men's apprehensions of the former, several of our learned members have writ many profound treatises on Anarchy; but a brief complete body of Atheology seemed yet wanting, till this irrefragable Discourse appeared. However, it so happens, that our ablest brethren, in their elaborate disquisitions upon this subject, have written with so much caution, that ignorant unbelievers have edified ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... sovereigns, and of blind unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation. Upon the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion, Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arguments of reason. The minatory words he uttered were all the more significant because neither he nor the State he represented sought to break with Catholic traditions. His voice was terrible and mighty, inasmuch as he ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... elapsed since that bright spring morning on which she had beheld the irrefragable proof of her lover's perfidy, when she received an offer of marriage from a gentleman, of good family and large property. He had been struck by her beauty at a party where he had seen her; and after a few meetings, made formal proposals to her father almost ere she was aware that he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... supports," said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as the observations of learned men of all ages have ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the Parliamentary war, it was generally argued—that Providence had decided the question against the Royalists by the mere fact of the issue. Milton himself, with all his high-toned morality, uses this argument as irrefragable: which is odd, were it only on this account—that the issue ought necessarily to have been held for a time as merely hypothetic, and liable to be set aside by possible counter-issues through one ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... therefore, little read. Addison knew the policy of literature too well to make his enemy important by drawing the attention of the publick upon a criticism, which, though sometimes intemperate, was often irrefragable. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... repulsive to his mind than dogmatism. As an orator, he was accustomed to hear arguments put forward with equal persuasiveness on both sides of a case. It seemed to him arrogant to make any proposition with a conviction of its absolute, indestructible and irrefragable truth. One requisite of a philosophy with him was that it should avoid this arrogance[73]. Philosophers of the highest respectability had held the most opposite opinions on the same subjects. To withhold absolute assent from all doctrines, while ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... very lowest calculation, lived close upon the Apostles' time, and who, according to the firm conviction of many, had all of them conversed with the Apostles, and heard the word of truth from their mouths. I do from my heart rejoice with you, that these holy men bear direct, clear, and irrefragable testimony to those fundamental truths which the Church of Rome and the Church of England both hold inviolate—the doctrine of the ever-blessed Trinity, with its essential and inseparable concomitants, the atonement by the blood of a crucified ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... the cold mathematics of the engineers who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a forest of scrub pine and pinon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... neither, I assure you, Mr. Cargill," answered the Lady Penelope. "I never withdraw my countenance from any one but on the most irrefragable grounds. I could tell you of an intimate friend of my own, whom I have supported against the whole clamour of the people at the Well, because I believe, from the bottom of my soul, she is only thoughtless—nothing in the world but thoughtless—O Mr. Cargill, how can you look across the table ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... sons of Constantine to continue their good work of stripping the temples and melting down the images;—in special connection with a visit paid by them that year to Britain[337] (our last Imperial visit), when they had actually been permitted to cross the Channel in winter-time; an irrefragable proof of Heaven's approval of their iconoclasm. It is highly probable that they pursued here also a course at once so pious and so profitable, and that the fanes of the ancient deities but lingered on in poverty and neglect ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying.... It does honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei!—But how did they light upon it?" He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some tree or stone which had witnessed the apparition, had marked the miracle. What ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... article, after triumphantly expressing his belief that his "main conclusions are irrefragable," he ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... the measure, or we use other arguments, which, good as they may be, are too refined to be very popular. Ambrose rested his resistance on grounds which the people understood at once, and recognized as irrefragable. They felt that he was only refusing to surrender a trust. They rose in a body, and thronged the palace gates. A company of soldiers was sent to disperse them; and a riot was on the point of ensuing, when the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... unprofitable to bestow on these professions a somewhat more critical examination than they have hitherto received, in order to ascertain how far they rest on an irrefragable basis; or whether, after all, it might not be well for palaeontologists to learn a little more carefully that scientific "ars artium," the art of saying "I don't know." And to this end let us define somewhat more exactly the extent of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... is often out of all proportion to the authority that fortifies it. There are sweeps of generalization quite permeable to objection, which yet find metaphysical support; there are irrefragable dogmas which the mind drops as futile and fruitless. It is recorded of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, that it found reception from no physician then over forty years old. We believe the splendid nebular construction of Laplace has its own difficulties; yet what noble or aspiring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included—to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "No one will get at my ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Flourens should be unable to perceive the logical necessity of these simple arguments, which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin's reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other passages of his work ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... life had not shown him incapable of a base assassination, and justified him from that imputation in the eyes of his very enemies, it was in vain for him, at present, to make his apology, or plead the many irrefragable arguments which he could produce in his own favour: and that, however he might regret the necessity, he was so far from being ashamed of his truce with Saladin, that he rather gloried in that event; and thought it extremely honourable, that, though abandoned by all ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... arise taxing prudence of the longest forecast and decision of the firmest quality. How far is General McClellan likely to fulfill these conditions? What are the qualities of mind of which both his career and his Report give the most irrefragable evidence? ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... had been placed, with a pellicle of air, into which the germinating threads might pass and fructify, is perhaps the most satisfactory that has been adopted, though it requires nice manipulation. If carefully managed, the result is irrefragable, though doubts have been cast, without any reason, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... "Here is my irrefragable opinion—I want your love, and I give you mine. In love I recognise solely the principle of reciprocation, as it obtains in Nature. The law that I acknowledge is to follow unfettered our strong impression, to exchange happiness for happiness. This answers your question ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... identify the criminal; they make no direct, pungent, earnest appeal to the consciences of men-stealers." This was a damning bill, but it was true in every particular; and the evidence which Garrison adduced to establish his charges was overwhelming and irrefragable. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... still more the letters which I shall presently transcribe, afford irrefragable evidence of the baselessness of the often-heard statement that Chopin's intercourse was in the first years of his settlement in Paris confined to the Polish salons. The simple unexaggerated truth is that Chopin had always a predilection ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... was so strong upon her that she felt a certainty she had wings, wings within her which she could not spread, but of the existence of which this insurgent desire was the irrefragable witness. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... in amazement. He would have been sure that it was going down in the other part of the sky; but the proof before his eyes was irrefragable. ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... long period of prosperity after they had driven out the Israelites. Their national history, during a period of four hundred years, is recorded on their monuments; and, though not very intelligible in its details, it affords irrefragable proof that their country was always in a flourishing condition, and possessed a considerable commerce with other nations. The Egyptians, however, had as great an aversion to foreign traders as to shepherds; and it was long before they undertook any work ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... cave[413] in the recesses of the deep sea, between Tenedos and rugged Imbrus. There earth-shaking Neptune stopped his horses, loosing them from the chariot, and cast beside [them] ambrosial fodder to eat. And round their feet he threw golden fetters, irrefragable, indissoluble, that they might there steadily await their king returning, but he departed towards the army of ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... That he was cautious in his investments was evident. He had seen too much suffering through rashness in money affairs not to benefit by the experience. Thereby he made clear his desire for the rehabilitation of himself and family in the place where he was born. By 1598 we have irrefragable testimony to the position he had already taken, alike in the world of letters as in the social life of Stratford. In the autumn of that year appeared the perennial advertisement of Meres, the Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, Master of Arts of both Universities, who ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... of the Princes, the peasantry, the slaves, and various others; and one of the oldest legal documents which we possess—the "Russian Right" (Russkaya Pravda) of the Grand Prince Yaroslaff (1019-1054)—contains irrefragable proof, in the penalties attached to various crimes, that these classes were formally recognised by the legislation. Since that time they have frequently changed their character, but they have never at ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... can bring irrefragable proofs. Among the papers which your old servant Hib brought with him in a small box, there must be some letters from a certain Sonnophre, a celebrated accoucheur, your own father, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be as patient with you as I can. Many men would throw something heavy at your head for saying that. I don't. In spite of the fact that I spent hours proving to you by absolutely irrefragable evidence that Miss King is Mrs. Lorimer, I am still prepared to listen quietly to what you have to say. What convinces you that Miss King ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... rarely three, or five or six) of small degenerated vertebrae, and is a useless rudimentary organ with no actual physiological significance. Morphologically, however, it is of great interest as an irrefragable proof of the descent of man and the anthropoids from long-tailed apes. On no other theory can we explain the existence of this rudimentary tail. In the earlier stages of development the tail of the human embryo protrudes considerably. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the worth of the animal, the conscientious professor of knavery carries his goods to a more lucrative market. At the instance of Dashall, therefore, Sir Felix was determined to retain the animal until the claimant brought irrefragable proof of ownership. The fellow blustered,—the Baronet was immovable in his resolution;—when the other threw off all disguise, and exhibiting himself in pristine blackguardism, inundated Sir Felix with a torrent of abuse; who disdaining any minor notice of his scurrility, seized ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... it is not necessary to speak. The preceding volumes of this work have been written in vain, if the reader has not obtained from irrefragable testimony—the monarch's own especially—a sufficient knowledge of that human fetish before which so ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... earnest, accurate and daring, I should say—Read what you will: but at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to me—and I doubt not to him—whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but his premises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam"—on ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... adaptation to the heart of man. It was reserved for him to develop its analogy to the constitution and course of Nature; and laying his strong foundations in the depth of that great argument, there to construct another and irrefragable proof; thus rendering Philosophy subservient to Faith, and finding in outward and visible things the type and evidence of those ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... courage and self-possession of the President were as marked as his logic was irrefragable; but my outbreak, however illogical, served its purpose. No one was disposed to give mortal offence to one who showed himself so ready to resent it, though probably the apprehension related less to my swordsmanship than the favour I was supposed ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg |
