"Confounding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to avoid the confusion which arose from thus confounding the cause and effect, that modern chemists adopted the new word caloric, to denote the principle which produces heat; yet they do not always, in compliance with their own language, limit the word heat to the expression of the sensation, since they still frequently ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... and his sarcasm overwhelming. Unusually quick to perceive the weaker parts of an opponent's argument, his ingenuity would seize these and turn them upon him with a point and power not unfrequently confounding and destroying the effect of all he had urged. From Congress to the Gubernatorial chair of the State was the next step in his political career, and it was in this capacity that he rendered the most signal service to the State. As a lawyer, he was well aware of the wants ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Science, Spirit no more changes its species, by evolving matter from Spirit, than natural science, so-called, or material laws, bring about alteration of species by transforming minerals into vegetables or plants into animals,—thus confusing and confounding the three great kingdoms. No rock brings forth an apple; no pine-tree produces a mammal ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... reasonable character of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own person. Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding them. It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head perfectly cool on the subject of Miss Bretherton's artistic claims, but he was conscious that it was not always very easy to do—a consciousness that made him sometimes ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... laws are very considerable, both in bulk and number, according as the statutes declare; considerandi, considerando, considerandum; and are not to be meddled with by those that don't understand 'em. Law always expressing itself with true grammatical precision, never confounding moods, cases, or genders, except indeed when a woman happens accidentally to be slain, then the verdict is always brought in man-slaughter. The essence of the law is altercation; for the law can altercate, fulminate, deprecate, irritate, and go on at any rate. Now the quintessence ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... student on these benches will not commit the childish error of confounding a presumption against a particular class of agents with a condemnation of them. Mercury, for instance, is alien to the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence. Yet its efficacy in certain forms ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which combine a multitude of principles. . . . There are two sorts of mind: the one fathoms rapidly and deeply the consequences of principles—this is the observant and accurate mind; the other embraces a great multitude of principles, without confounding them—and this is the mathematical mind. The one is marked by energy and accuracy, the other by amplitude. But the one may exist without the other. The mind may be powerful and narrow, or it may be ample ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... not the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, and name the Most High by another name—by the name of Serapis—confounding the substance of the Invisible? Does not Egypt cry aloud for freedom?—and shall she cry in vain? Nay, nay, for thou, my son, art the appointed way of deliverance. To thee, being sunk in eld, I ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the girl was the fairest and most graceful of her time, more elegant than the gazelle however tender, than the gentlest zephyr blander and brighter than the moon at her full; for amorous fray right suitable; confounding in graceful sway the waving bough and outdoing in swimming gait the pacing roe; in fine she was fairer and sweeter by far than all her sisters. So, when she saw her suitor, she went to her chamber and strewed dust on her head and tore her clothes and fell to buffeting ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... (Gal 3:21). The which though they are not diametrically opposite one to another, yet do propound things so differently to man, that if he knows not where, when, and how to take them, 'tis impossible but that he should confound them, and in confounding of them, lose his own soul (Rom 9:31,32). The law is a servant, both first and last, to the gospel (Rom 10:3,4): when therefore it is made a Lord, it destroyeth: and then to be sure it is made a Lord and Saviour of, when its dictates ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and had taken away only the smaller ones, in the hope that by so doing they would lessen the crime. However, the governor resolved to act promptly and vigorously upon this first offence, and to avoid the common fault of Europeans, in confounding the guilty and the innocent together. By the help of an intelligent native, the tracks of three persons were found in the garden that had been robbed, and the footsteps were pronounced to be those of Peerat's two wives, and his son ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... him with respect. I have always felt the same for Alexander, with whom he has been classed as a madman by several writers, who have reasoned superficially, confounding the morals of the day with the few grand principles on which unchangeable morality rests. Making no allowance for the ignorance and prejudices of the period, they do not perceive how much they themselves are indebted to general improvement for the acquirements, and even the virtues, which they would ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the New Testament, the Imitatio Christi, the Confessions of S. Augustine, and the Pilgrim's Progress without feeling that Christianity in its origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. ...
— The American • Henry James
... besieged this town of Quebec, 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 here ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 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. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... those whose position was one of more delicate balance. He had a ruthlessness in tossing aside what might be called "non-essentials," that was dictated not so much by an under-estimate of their due importance, as by an impatience with those who over-estimated them, confounding the vessel ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... contemporaneous; and there are multitudes of accessory circumstances which may fully justify the assumption of such synchrony. But the moment the geologist has to deal with large areas, or with completely separated deposits, the mischief of confounding that "homotaxis" or "similarity of arrangement," which 'can' be demonstrated, with "synchrony" or "identity of date," for which there is not a shadow of proof, under the one common term of "contemporaneity" becomes incalculable, and proves the constant ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... corrects an error into which several historians have unintentionally fallen by confounding Lieut. Col. Campbell, a brave officer of a South Carolina regiment, who was mortally wounded at the battle of the Eutaw Springs, with Col. Wm. Campbell, of Virginia, one of the heroes of King's Mountain, who died a natural death ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... sufferings have occasioned, and while those desires to remedy it, with which his penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this scientific ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... opinion of people one despises Camors refused, hesitated, made objections, and consented Confounding progress with discord, liberty with license Contempt for men is the beginning of wisdom Cried out, with the blunt candor of his age Dangers of liberty outweighed its benefits Demanded of him imperatively—the ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... interminable speakers, they make excellent lawyers, and know how to spin out a case or involve it in a labyrinth of figures of speech. Mungo Park, who frequently heard these special pleaders, says that in the forensic qualifications of procrastination and cavil, and the arts of confounding and perplexing a cause, they are not easily surpassed by the ablest pleaders in Europe. The following may serve as an example of their talent:—An ass had got loose and broken into a field of corn, much of which it destroyed. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... whatever be their crimes, if they have seen and abjured the folly of those crimes, receives them to favour. But the institutions of countries that profess to worship this God admit no such distinctions. They leave no room for amendment, and seem to have a brutal delight in confounding the demerits of offenders. It signifies not what is the character of the individual at the hour of trial. How changed, how spotless, and how useful, avails him nothing. If they discover at the distance of fourteen[G] or of forty years[H] an action for which the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the 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 ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... Nikolay induced his brother to explain his plan to him again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally confounding it with communism. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... must guard himself from confounding the Vowel-Sound of which we are here speaking, with the Consonant R, the alphabetical name of which is by a lax habit of pronunciation made to be nearly identical with this Vowel-Sound; while for this beautiful and brilliant and leading Vowel in the Alphabet ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that in their part of the Spanish frontier all were of the same mind, and that they cared as little for the Pope and his monks as they did for Don Carlos; for the latter was a dwarf (chicotito) and a tyrant, and the others were plunderers and robbers. I told them they must beware of confounding religion with priestcraft, and that in their abhorrence of the latter they must not forget that there is a God and a Christ to whom they must look for salvation, and whose word it was incumbent upon them to study on every occasion; whereupon they all expressed a devout belief ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... cast down the wall; Easy, as when a child upon the beach, In wanton play, with hands and feet o'erthrows The mound of sand, which late in play he rais'd; So, Phoebus, thou, the Grecian toil and pains Confounding, sentest panic through their souls. Thus hemm'd beside the ships they made their stand, While each exhorted each, and all, with hands Outstretch'd, to ev'ry God address'd their pray'r: And chief, Gerenian Nestor, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... he go? The one occupation of her life has been, for some time back, to follow Mr. Snagsby to and fro, and up and down, and to piece suspicious circumstances together—and every circumstance that has happened has been most suspicious; and in this way she has pursued her object of detecting and confounding her false husband, night and day. Thus did it come to pass that she brought the Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn together, and conferred with Mr. Tulkinghorn on the change in Mr. Guppy, and helped to turn up the circumstances in which the present company are interested, casually, by the wayside, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the reason why many Scenes of our Tragi-Comedies carry on a Design that is nothing of kin to the main Plot: and that we see two distincts webs in a Play, like those in ill-wrought stuffs; and two Actions (that is, two Plays carried on together) to the confounding of the audience: who, before they are warm in their concernments for one part, are diverted to another; and, by that means, expouse the interest ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... 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 by the Judge; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... debate, and it must have for its honest purpose the clearing up of questions and the establishing of the truth. Too much political discussion is not to honest purpose, but only for the confounding of an opponent. I am often reminded, when political debate gets warm and we begin to hope that the truth is making inroads on the reason of those who have denied it, of the way a debate in Virginia once seemed likely ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... remain in that state of blissful vital harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and divisions of the middle ages—the one, that old dualism of the inner man, the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have so often alluded—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision of the 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 facts ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a seconding of that; a breach of order by some individual of warm temperament; half a dozen would rise to set him right; a dozen to put them down; and the vociferation and gesticulation would become loud and confounding." ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the Church of Rome, Confounding in itself two governments, Falls in the mire, and ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... to a rack on the wall. "Do you mind if I get down maps? These French ones are very good." He spread a sheet of canvas on the table, thereby confounding ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... neglected every means of confounding the impostor, took every step he would have done, if convinced that Perkin was the true duke of York. His utmost industry was exerted in sifting to the bottom of the plot, in learning who was engaged in the conspiracy, and in detaching the chief supporters. It is said, though not affirmatively ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... explained away as only a partial, imperfect, mutilated sovereignty. Paradoxical theories of "divided sovereignty" and "delegated sovereignty" have arisen, to create that "confusion of ideas" and engender those "mischievous and unfounded conclusions," of which Judge Story speaks. Confounding the sovereign authority of the people with the delegated powers conferred by them upon their governments, we hear of a Government of the United States "sovereign within its sphere," and of State governments "sovereign in their sphere"; of the surrender ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... if his meditations, misled by a pride of which he is hardly conscious, bring him to the precipice where Buddha was lost. Besides, I am well aware of all the differences, and I am not going to insult our contemporary philosophers by confounding them indiscriminately with Buddha, although addressing to both the same reproof. I acknowledge willingly all their additional merits, which are considerable. But systems of philosophy must always be judged by the conclusions to which they lead, whatever road they may follow in reaching ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... said Varney, "and confounding his old and new devotions. He must have more need of prayer ere I am done with him.—What ho! holy man, most blessed penitent!—awake—awake! The devil has not discharged you ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... dear," he said, smiling; "we shall have the roses in your cheeks again, I hope, in a few weeks. What I want you to do is to distinguish between God's and man's religions. You have erred from confounding the two. Our loving Father wants a joyous, willing obedience; He allows no one to come between Him and us poor sinners, but our one Mediator and great High Priest, to whom we must confess our sins. He invites us to come direct to Him ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... At these words, the boy no longer [attempted], as before, to move the impious hags by soothing expressions; but, doubtful in what manner he should break silence, uttered Thyestean imprecations. Potions [said he] have a great efficacy in confounding right and wrong, but are not able to invert the condition of human nature; I will persecute you with curses; and execrating detestation is not to be expiated by any victim. Moreover, when doomed to death I shall have expired, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... she indulged herself and the girls, while they, their heads full of last night's party and Mary Morton and Robert Hazlewood, listened as civilly as they could, quite unable to keep the thread of her discourse, confounding in her history Robert Hazlewood's mother with his grandmother, and wondering all the while when she would stop, that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... entertained of them by others; many, it is to be feared, mistake a hot zeal for orthodoxy, for a cordial acceptance of the great truths of the Gospel; and almost all of us, at one time or other, are more or less misled by confounding the suggestions of the understanding with the impulses of the will, the assent which our judgment gives to religious and moral truths, with a hearty belief and approbation ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... telegraph at all but for the scientific interest which determined the experiments of Gauss and Weber. Mechanical Socialism, further, is founded on a false economic analysis which attributes all value to labour, denying, confounding or distorting the distinct functions of the direction of enterprise, the unavoidable payment for the use of capital, the productivity of nature, and the very complex social forces which, by determining the movements of demand and supply actually fix the rates at which goods exchange with ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... not make the stars and does not fill the 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... finally established. Since that time, whatever want of light we may have to lament is due to the loss of records, not to their original absence; due to the victorious destructions of time, not[20] to the error of the human mind confounding the provinces of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... composing and colouring the picture. A consequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision of the writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters. The Muse of most of them is an Aventuriere. She is clever, and a certain diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object of this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either, having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a nostalgie de la boue, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed in her course of deception when she is about ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sensible men. But his rather stately carriage produced no envy or ill-will among his humbler neighbors, for his superiority was never questioned. Men bowed to him with honest good-will, and boys, who had been flogged at school for confounding Congo and Coromandel, and putting Borneo in the Bight of Benin, made an awkward obeisance and stared wonderingly, as they met the man who had actually sailed round the world, and had, in his own person, illustrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... on earth"—"so big is it that all other big things,—Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids, Chicago,—all would be lost if tumbled into it." Naturally enough, illustrations as to size are sought for among other canons like or unlike it, with the common result of worse confounding confusion. The prudent keep silence. It was once said that the "Grand Canon could put a dozen ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... poor Unknown, who had to carry off, besides all the rest, one small bit of literal butter dug up in a Milesian stone jar lately from the bottom of some Irish bog. Great romance (i.e. absurd innocence of character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this mixed up with such eager curiosity, and enormous knowledge of the tattle and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... proof of anti-non-restraint opinion among the French physicians, in an interesting discussion at the Societe Medico-Psychologique. I wish here only to chronicle the fact, and would urge the necessity of not confounding honest differences of opinion with differences of humane feeling. The non-restrainer is within his right when he practises the system carried to its extremest lengths. He is within his right when he preaches its advantages to others. But he is not within his ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... remember this, mademoiselle, we are not all like-minded. Some of us would be satisfied with small concessions, some ask for more, some demand all; and as the Government higgles with some, and hangs the others, they mystify us all, and end by confounding us.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... interest and obtain unmerited praise. It is useless, however, to hope that things will change. So long as this giddy old world goes on waltzing in space, so long shall we continue to be duped by shams and pin our faith on frauds, confounding an attractive bearing with a sweet disposition and mistaking dishevelled hair and eccentric appearance for brains. Even in the Orient, where dogs have been granted immunity from other labor on the condition that they organized an effective street-cleaning department, they ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... be guilty of "respect of persons" in its grossest form, and with its worst effects. It is to reward or punish me for what I had nothing to do with; for which, therefore, I cannot, without the greatest injustice, be held responsible. It is to poison the very fountains of justice, by confounding all moral distinctions. What, then, so far as the authority of the New Testament is concerned, becomes of slavery, which cannot be maintained under any form nor for a single moment, without "respect of persons" the most aggravated and unendurable? ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 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 or ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... replied; "otherwise I should never console myself, for he has wounded me by confounding me ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... type had not much more to do with the study of new books than Stephen's turning the grindstone had with fighting in the lists; and the mistakes he made in spelling from right to left, and in confounding the letters, made him despair, and prepare for any amount of just indignation from his master; but he found on the contrary that Master Hansen had never had a pupil who made so few blunders on the first trial, and augured well ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... parties;—but if we can believe the positive testimony of Herodotus, such was the case: and the summons of Vashti to the annual festival, and the admission of Haman to the queen's table, are facts which support the affirmation of that historian. The doubts upon the subject appear to have arisen from confounding the manners of Assyrians, Medes, and Parthians, with those of the more Scythian tribes of Persis. We read in Xenophon that the Persian women were so well made and beautiful, that their attractions might easily have seduced the affections of the Ten Thousand, and have caused ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... loftier conceptions of divinity the earlier.] The winds are his breath, the sun his eye, the sky his garment. He rewards the good and punishes the wicked. Yet to the truly penitent he is merciful. It is absolutely confounding to pass from a hymn that celebrates the serene majesty and awful purity of Varuna to one filled with measureless laudations of Soma or Agni. Could conceptions of divinity so incongruous co-exist? That they could not spring up in the same mind, or even in the same age, is ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... completely confounding the unfortunate parson warned Beauchamp that he might have a shot in his locker: the parson heavily trodden on will turn. 'I suppose we must be hypocrites,' he said in dejection. Dr. Shrapnel was even more melancholy. He again offered to try his persuasiveness upon Jenny. Beauchamp declined to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... German theology, confounding divine and human laws, permitted no dual overlapping spheres of mundane and celestial rule as had all previous religious and, social orders since Christ had commanded his disciples to "Render unto Caesar—" There could ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... how is my intercourse with your father dangerous? Believe not so; his speech has already made impression on me in some particulars, and he listened with candour and patience to the objections which I made occasionally. You do Master Bridgenorth less than justice in confounding him with the unreasonable bigots in policy and religion, who can listen to no argument but what favours their ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... that his mode of proof, namely, assuming the thing to be proved, was a design to entrap the unwary? if so, it bangs Banagher. Was his confounding two mean proportionals with one mean proportional found twice over a trick of the same intent? if so, it beats cockfighting. That Nauticus is Mr. Smith appears from other internal evidence. In 1819, Mr. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark and leaf and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch, too; beyond those, at first, she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. Van ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... daylight, when we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most happy accident now favored us; a fog the most intense now prevailed; nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the poor only and the wretched resorted; ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a sudden shrilly sounding, Hideous yells and shrieks were heard; Then each heart with fear confounding, A sad troop of ghosts appeared, All in dreary hammocks shrouded, Which for winding-sheets they wore, And with looks by sorrow clouded, Frowning on ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... voluntary, we may advance by infinitesimal steps to a heat which compels involuntary withdrawal; and that there is a stage at which the voluntary and involuntary actions are mixed. But the difficulty of absolute discrimination is no reason for neglecting the broad general contrast; any more than it is for confounding light with darkness. If we are to include as examples of volition, all cases in which pleasures and pains "stimulate the active machinery of the living framework to perform such operations as procure the first and abate the last," then we must consider sneezing and coughing ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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 a waste ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... is mainly based upon an error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers and travellers,—the error of confounding as identical the merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus assigning to species wide areas in creation which in reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather family; for it consists of more ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... day, it is true, both the prickly-pear cactus and the American agave (which the world at large insists upon confounding with the aloe, a member of a totally distinct family) have spread themselves in an apparently wild condition over all the rocky coasts both of Southern Europe and of Northern Africa. The alien desert weeds have fixed their roots ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... has moons, but moons not hers! Lie mirror'd on her sea, Confounding her astronomers But, O ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Averse from, averse to, and in connection with them the English vulgarism 'different to;' the corrupt use of to in these cases, as well as in the Yankee 'he lives to Salem,' 'to home,' and others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose from confounding the two French prepositions a, (from Latin ad and ab), and in the other from translating the first of them. I once thought 'different to' a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my pointing it out to him in 'Henry Esmond,' confessed it to be an anachronism. Mr. Bartlett refers to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... engineers had to build ramps here. A warship, taking its line from an aeroplane, fired at the bridge from a range of 14,000 yards, got two direct hits on it and holed it in the centre, and there must have been thirty or forty shell craters within a radius of fifty yards. The confounding of the Turks was ably assisted ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... 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 ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... from literature, and habitually 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, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... entering into conversation with persons of learning, constantly making the grossest blunders in every sentence, without conveying one single idea fit for a rational creature to spend a thought on; perpetually confounding all chronology, and geography, even of present times. I compute, that London hath eleven native fools of the beau and puppy kind, for one among us in Dublin; besides two-thirds of ours transplanted thither, who are now naturalized: whereby that overgrown capital ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... few minutes. An occasional movement of the long oriental hangings attracted his attention. It dawned upon him that the little play was being overheard, whether by spies or conspirators he knew not. Resentment sprang up in his breast and gave birth to a daring that was as spectacular as it was confounding. With long, noiseless strides, he reached the door before Beverly could interpose. She half started from her chair, her eyes wide with dismay, her lips parted, but his hand was already clutching the curtain. He ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... scheme is yours, Dawson, we will all drink your health down south as soon as our work has been done. For the credit will be yours rather than ours. I will help you all I can; it is my duty and my very keen desire. A man who can make so brilliant a plan for confounding the enemy's spies is worth a statue of gold. He is even worth the sacrifice of two day's leave while one's ship is in dock. What do you ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... and influential hour rolled on, the terrors of the hateful Presence grew more confounding to the mortal senses of the victim, and the knot of the accursed sophistry became more inextricable in appearance, at least to the prey whom its meshes surrounded. He had not power to explain the assurance of pardon which he continued to assert, or to name the victorious name in ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... with a frown. And what am I? A man whom Washington Nodded approval of, and wrote it too! Yet here, in judgment and discretion both, Ripe to the dropping, scorned and ridiculed. Oh, Jefferson, what mischief have you wrought— Confounding Nature's order, setting fools To prank themselves, and sit in wisdom's seat By right divine, out Heroding a King's! But I shall keep straight on—pursue my course, Responsible and with authority, Though boasters gird at ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Albert Pike, in his letter, "Touching Masonic Symbolism," speaks of the "poor, rude, unlettered, uncultivated working Stone-masons," who attended the Assemblies, he is obviously confounding Free-masons with the rough Stone-masons of the Guilds. Over against these words, read a brilliant article in the Contemporary Review, October, 1913, by L.M. Phillips, entitled, "The Two Ways of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... as having been pointed out 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... toil. And the 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 ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... common (as it may once have been) name of Eachard, and at least twenty times by the wrong name. This, we admit, is a small matter; but what will some Edinburgh Reviewer (temp. Albert V) say if he finds a writer confounding Catherine and Thomas Macaulay as "the celebrated author of the great Whig History of England"—a confusion hardly worse than that of the two Eachards—for Catherine, though now forgotten by an ungrateful ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... by imaginary difficulties, the want of those solid objections which they endeavor in vain to find. The error which limits republican government to a narrow district has been unfolded and refuted in preceding papers. I remark here only that it seems to owe its rise and prevalence chiefly to the confounding of a republic with a democracy, applying to the former reasonings drawn from the nature of the latter. The true distinction between these forms was also adverted to on a former occasion. It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the ...
— The Federalist Papers
... says the Abbe Houteville[503], is the first in which we find these great characteristics, just reasoning, accuracy, and strength; he is extremely concise, but even this brevity will please us when we find it comprehends so many things without confounding them, or lessening their evidence or force: it is no wonder the book should be translated into so ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... country, and to its great disgrace, this employment of the dog has been accompanied by such wanton and shameful cruelty, that the Legislature—somewhat hastily confounding the abuse of a thing with its legitimate purpose—forbade the appearance of the dog-cart in the metropolitan districts, and were inclined to extend this prohibition through the whole kingdom, it is much to be desired that a kindlier and better feeling may gradually ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... tell the Reader that the last Civil War in this Lunar Country ended in the Victors confounding their own Conquests by their intestine Broils, they being as is already noted a most Eternally Quarrelling Nation; upon this new Breach, they that first began the War, turn'd about, and pleading that they took up Arms to regulate ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... a painter-poet. He did not credit the theory of the alienists, that the confusion of tone and color—audition coloree—betrayed the existence of a slight mental lesion; and he laughed consumedly at the notion of confounding musicians with madmen. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... dispirited wretch. I shut myself up; I tried to read. The singular brevity of my interview with the prince, from which I had expected great if not favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck by a cannon shot; my brains were nowhere. His perfect courtesy was confounding. I was tormented by the delusion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... attack that surprise one who knows him only through his Lettres Spirituelles, which tend towards the effacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is false. In his Traite de l'Existence de Dieu he shows himself a bold and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... thee, hail to thee, Famine! Thy throne is on blood, and thy robe is of rags; Thou devil which livest on damning; Saint of new churches, and cant, and GREEN BAGS, 45 Till in pity and terror thou risest, Confounding the schemes of the wisest; When thou liftest thy skeleton form, When the loaves and the skulls roll about, We will greet thee-the voice of a storm 50 Would be lost ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Holland not confounding—as so often has been the case—the precepts of moral philosophy with those of political economy, did not, out of fear for the doom of Jeroboam, forbid the use of starch. They simply laid a tax of a stiver a pound on the commodity, or ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hundred thousand crowns, which on his death he bequeathed him. Upon this accession of fortune, the Baron Casteja, as is but too frequent, fell to his old habit, and became as fond of gaming as ever. The poor lady saw this with the utmost concern, and dreaded the confounding this legacy, as all the baron's former fortune had been consumed by his being the dupe of gamesters. In deep affliction at the consideration of what might in future times become the Chevalier's fortune, she therefore entreated the baron to ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone: 'Neither confounding the persons, nor ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... was so exceedingly fervent, as, on some occasions, to get the better of his discretion; for, being a high churchman and of consequence a malcontent, his resentment was habituated into an insurmountable prejudice against the present disposition of affairs, which, by confounding the nation with the ministry, sometimes led him into erroneous, not to say absurd calculations; otherwise, a man of good morals, well versed in mathematics and school divinity, studies which had not at all contributed to sweeten and unbend the natural ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Health to the Tackers, my Boys, But mine A——se for the Tackers about; May the brave English Spirits come in, And the Knaves and Fanaticks turn out: Since the Magpyes of late, are confounding the State, And wou'd pull our Establishments down; Let us make 'em a Jest, for they Shit in their Nest, And be true to the Church and ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... the poor woman, who was palpably confounding imagination with reality, and after a pause ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... celestial benediction. It had the fervent support of the ministers, not only by prayers and sermons, but, in one case, by counsels wholly temporal. A certain pastor, much esteemed for benevolence, proposed to Pepperrell, who had at last accepted the command, a plan, unknown to Vauban, for confounding the devices of the enemy. He advised that two trustworthy persons should cautiously walk together along the front of the French ramparts under cover of night, one of them carrying a mallet, with which he was to hammer the ground at short ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... 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 ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... the Trinity," he murmured. "'Three in one; one in three. Without confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.' It's a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... he is commonly regarded as the "Father of Experimental Philosophy" and the originator of the inductive method. Men profess themselves followers of the "Baconian philosophy," sometimes confounding that with a servile attention to facts and a most unscientific scorn of theories; at other times implying that by the Baconian method is to be understood the one on which science has successfully been pursued. A rigorous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... true objectively. The sweet, the bitter, the hot, the cold, are simply creations of the mind; but in the outer object to which we append them, atoms and space alone exist, and our opinion of the properties of such objects is founded upon images emitted by them falling upon the senses. Confounding in this manner sensation with thought, and making them identical, he, moreover, included Reflexion as necessary for true knowledge, Sensation by itself being untrustworthy. Thus, though Sensation may indicate to us that sweet, bitter, hot, cold, occur in bodies, Reflexion teaches us that ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... nor would there be, so long as the promoters of sedition were rewarded with honour in proportion as sedition was successful. What and how important schemes Caius Canuleius had set on foot! that he was introducing confounding of family rank, a disturbance of the auspices both public and private, that nothing may remain pure, nothing uncontaminated; that, all distinction being abolished, no one might know either himself or those he belonged to. For what ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... the expression make it new? It may make it clear, or may make it elegant - but how new? You are confounding ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... grasping still his spear, Ulysses pierced Damastor's son, and, next, 340 Telemachus, enforcing his long beam Sheer through his bowels and his back, transpierced Leiocritus, he prostrate smote the floor. Then, Pallas from the lofty roof held forth Her host-confounding AEgis o'er their heads, With'ring their souls with fear. They through the hall Fled, scatter'd as an herd, which rapid-wing'd The gad-fly dissipates, infester fell Of beeves, when vernal suns shine hot and long. But, as when bow-beak'd vultures crooked-claw'd[106] 350 Stoop from the mountains ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... forms, which he calls Spirifer trigonalis, he says that it is so dissimilar to another extreme of the series, S. crassa, that in the first part of his memoir (published some ten years ago) he described them as distinct, and the idea of confounding them together must, he admits, appear absurd to those who have never seen the intermediate links, such as are presented by S. bisulcata, and at least four others with their varieties, most of them shells formerly recognised as distinct by the most eminent ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... take care of the garden. From hence to the convent is half an hour; in the way is shewn the head of the golden calf, which the Israelites worshipped, transmuted into stone. It is somewhat singular that both the monks and the Bedouins call it the cow's head (Ras el Bakar), and not the calf's, confounding it, perhaps, with the "red heifer," of which the Old Testament and the Koran speak. It is a stone half-buried in the ground, and bears some resemblance to the forehead of a cow. Some travellers have explained this stone to be the mould ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... that which was our home and our treasure box has now become a trap for the confounding of those who believe we are a ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton |
