"Reasoning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are things which cannot be made to assimilate. As well might you say, it is a matter of indifference whether you throw bread into the river or eat it, because in either case it is bread destroyed. The fault of this reasoning, as in that which the word tribute is made to imply, consists in founding an exact similitude between two cases on their points of resemblance, ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... idle to translate into other words what could only lose its energy and fitness by the change. Examined point by point, and word by word, the most discriminating intellects have been able to discern no train of thoughts in the process of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably to the conclusion which ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the other hand, sufferers compelled to remain here generally become, after a few years, hopelessly insane. In the opinion of Dr. Miskievitch the affliction is largely due to a total inertia of the reasoning faculties, which after a time becomes a positive torture to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Septuagint version of the Scriptures, thought that man's creation took place about six thousand years before the Christian era. Strong confirmation of this view was found in a simple piece of purely theological reasoning: for, just as the seven candlesticks of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the existence of seven heavenly bodies revolving about the earth, so it was felt that the six days of creation prefigured six thousand years during which the earth in its ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is not a common-place pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, HAMLET is the most remarkable ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... flat-topped mountain, with the feeling of his fate upon him, Bill Sandersen pushed his mustang through the late evening, while the darkness fell. He had long since stopped thinking, reasoning. There was only the strong, blind feeling that he must meet Sinclair face to face and decide his destiny ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... of Stewart and the burning anger he had caused her to feel for herself, Madeline tried to keep her mind on other things. But thought of him recurred, and each time there was a hot commotion in her breast hard to stifle. Intelligent reasoning seemed out of her power. In the daylight it had been possible for her to be oblivious to Stewart's deceit after the moment of its realization. At night, however, in the strange silence and hovering shadows of gloom, with ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... shook a troubled head. He was obviously questing back through Ernest's reasoning in ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Reasoning upon the grounds that we have named, the Sultan had ordered Aphiz to be drowned in the Bosphorus, as we have seen, and the deed was performed by the regular executioners of government. The Sultan was supreme, and his orders were obeyed without question; this being the ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... 'not, on account of the designation of the (effect as the) non-existent; we reply, not so, on account (of such designation being due to) another attribute, (as appears) from the complementary passage, from Reasoning, and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... first time, to think what she was doing, and to wonder if she were doing right. Her anger at her aunt, and the utter disappointment and homesickness of her Boston visit, had swept away, for a few moments, all her power of reasoning. To get home, to see her mother,—to hide her head on her shoulder and cry,—this was the one thought that had turned itself over and over in her mind, on that quick ride from Beacon Street, and in that hour spent in the dark corner ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the signal outside. The express was at hand. He was not a man capable of much reasoning at short notice, and he had already drawn a number of unfavourable inferences from the conduct of the two people who had just been hanging about the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suffer the slavery of fear. The dead rule them because they do the same things which their ancestors did, the same things their descendants will do. But man is not the slave of fear; he is its collaborator and sometimes its master. Man is a progressive and reasoning being, and can change his condition to suit his desires. Man was a slave to his surroundings in former times, in remote ages, but when he conquered nature and exploited her, he burst the fatal bondage in which other created things still remain prisoners. What matters to ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be required. Let him ask himself whether he is doing what he requires of himself. If he answer, "I can do it without Christianity anyway," I reply, "Do it; try to do it, and I know where the honest endeavour will bring you. Don't try to do it, and you are not man enough to be worth reasoning with." ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... nof'n ter do wid dat; dat 'longs to dem as made it; none o' my lookout; dono nof'n 'bout it, an' doan' want ter hear nof'n about it!" said Flor; for, reasoning on the old adage of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, she thought it more important just at present to save her body than to save her soul, admitting that she had one, and felt haste to be of more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... the matter. Really, you're come out of it very well. Now, look here, which would you rather be owed for? A clockwork man—which is broken, and you can have it back—or a tandem bicycle, an enlarging camera, a kodak, and a magic-lantern? What?" His reasoning was too subtle for the uneducated mind. The man retired, puzzled, and unpaid, and Ukridge kept ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... the responsibility altogether. After all, her step-mother was a woman quite old enough to manage her own affairs. If she wished to foolishly imperil her health why need Esther care? Why indeed? But this train of reasoning never lasted long. Always there came a counter-question, "If you do not care, who will?" And the dearth of any answer settled the burden more firmly upon her rebellious shoulders. For one thing there was always the inner knowledge ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... reasoning, we would have to admit God created all the evils of this world, for we see these evils every day, and then I would have to admit that God made me sick, and I can never believe that, for Genesis 1, ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... was and what she thought she could be, between her brief moment of triumph and the long years of her undoing, between the trivialness of what she did and the heaviness of her punishment. These contrasts are developed not by reasoning but by action, each action plunging Madame Loisel deeper and deeper into misery. The author's attitude toward his work forms also a part of the real background. Maupassant shows neither sympathy nor indignation. ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... among the brethren made out to live cheerfully and to work vigorously. While Clifton madly sought a position of intelligence and satisfaction beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess. And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... That many undertakings, national as well as individual—but especially the former—are held to be specially brought to a glorious and successful issue, which never could be so regarded on any other process of reasoning, must be clear to all men. Therefore the precedents would seem to show that Mr Pecksniff had (as things go) good argument for what he said and might be permitted to say it, and did not say it presumptuously, vainly, or ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... just that degree would his life be successful. But these three seemed to declare, with the confidence of those who state an axiom, that in just that degree was his life a failure. Of course they could not demonstrate their contention as he could demonstrate his, but the absence of reasoning did not appear to shake their assurance in the smallest. Here then was another apparent conflict of instinct with reason: their instinct with his reason. Perhaps he might have dismissed the whole thing as merely their religion, but that his father, with that mysterious letter ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the globe when the species are definitely circumscribed. As evidence of the fixity of generic types and the existence of a higher and free causal power, I have made use of a method which appears to me new as a process of reasoning. The series of reptiles, for instance, in the family of lizards, shows apodal forms, forms with rudimentary feet, then with a successively larger number of fingers until we reach, by seemingly insensible gradations, the genera Anguis, Ophisaurus, and Pseudopus, the Chamosauria, Chirotes, Bipes, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the time when the land of the community was regarded as the reserved hunting-ground of the tribal chief, or at least as the private estate of the national monarch. But in so far as this passionate desire for extending the superficial territory under the central government is a reasoning desire, in so far that is as attempts have been made to justify by retrospective theories the almost instinctive achievements of painting the map red, it is fairly clear (although the issues have been confused by altruistic ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... detached portions that it would be consumed by combustion." The two lamps were doubtless distinct inventions; though Davy, in all justice, appears to be entitled to precedence, not only in point of date, but as regards the long chain of inductive reasoning concerning the nature of flame by which his result ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... make Edith my sister. Surely, Southey, we shall be frendotatoi meta frendous—most friendly where all are friends. She must, therefore, be more emphatically my sister.... C——, the most excellent, the most Pantisocratic of aristocrats, has been laughing at me. Up I arose, terrible is reasoning. He fled from me, because "he would not answer for his own sanity, sitting so near a madman of genius." He told me that the strength of my imagination had intoxicated my reason, and that the acuteness of my reason had given a directing influ-* ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... now too plain. This child must have been akin to some great scholar, who taught her his own lore, and too much learning hath assuredly made her mad; but I will humour her, and then will try to bring her poor wits home. Thus reasoning, I placed her by my side, and cast my arms around her, and then I whispered, 'Tell me of thyself.' 'That will I,' she replied. 'I am Peace, and I come both in storms and after them. I came to Joan the Maid, on her stone scaffold in the Market ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... instead by my dragoman's brother, and his rage had been uncontrollable when he saw the coveted animal caracolling before him. Moreover, he had a spite against me, and he thought that if he killed his own horse I should give him a better one, by some process of oriental reasoning which I do not pretend to understand. However, he was, mistaken, for I mounted him after that on the vilest old screw in ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... the old woman's reasoning, he immediately laid his shoulder bare, and the mark being found, as predicted, upon the left one, both he and his companions were filled with delight at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... them for his comfort and health he ought to pay for them. In other words, his duty or obligation to pay rests rather on the ground of an implied contract (which has been already explained) than of an express one. The force of this reasoning ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... Beryl's reasoning seemed logical and Robin put aside a tiny doubt she had as to her right to "help herself" to even a very small volume. Some day she could explain to her Aunt Mathilde that she had given it to a nice old lady who ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... This reasoning of Dr Brown's is founded upon an assumed analogy between the structure of the optic nerve, and the structure of the olfactory nerves and other sensitive nerves, and is completely disproved by the physiological observations of Treviranus, who has shown that no such analogy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... juristic reasoning is applicable to a feeling which lies at the heart of national sentiments, sentiments of patriotism and of devotion to country, which are as deep rooted in the souls of millions as are the love of family and the belief ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... gesture, even to the ingenuousness of the noble statesman's admiration of her, for the confusion of her unmanly and unworthy husband. And Emma was nevertheless a thoughtful person; only her heart was at the head of her thoughts, and led the file, whose reasoning was accurate on erratic tracks. All night her heart went at fever pace. She brought the repentant husband to his knees, and then doubted, strongly doubted, whether she would, whether in consideration for her friend she could, intercede with Diana to forgive him. In the morning she slept ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had a class in geometry recite for my edification. I soon saw that the young girl who had been chosen as the star pupil to wrestle with the pons asinorum was giving an exhibition of memorizing and not of mathematical reasoning. I asked the principal if my surmise were correct. He replied without hesitation, "Yes, it was entirely a feat in memory. Females have only low reasoning power." I urged that if this were so, it would be well to train the faculty, but he countered ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... by Major-General Brock, "a proclamation as remarkable for the solid reasoning and dignity of its language, as that of the American ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... not time to finish his reasoning, for at that moment he thought that he heard a slight rustle of leaves ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... North Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress, to the members of the Provincial Congress, under date of December 1, 1775, occurs the admission that "in our attention to military preparations we have not lost sight of a means of safety to be effected by the power of the pulpit, reasoning and persuasion. We know the respect which the Regulators and Highlanders entertain for the clergy; they still feel the impressions of a religious education, and truths to them come with irresistible influence from the mouths of their spiritual pastors. * * * ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... death was no evil? And did he despise pain, or make any attempt at showing his disregard of it? You can hardly answer this question by looking for a man's indifference when undergoing it. It would be to require too much from philosophy to suppose that it could console itself in agony by reasoning. It would not be fair to insist on arguing with Cato in the gout. The clemency of human nature refuses to deal with philosophy in the hard straits to which it may be brought by the malevolence of evil. But when you find a man peculiarly on the alert to avoid the recurrence ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... GAMP have also avoided this error: the method they have adopted is shrouded in mystery—I scarcely feel competent to criticize it. MRS. GAMP says "if Zuzu makes 4 while Lolo makes 3, Zuzu makes 6 while Lolo makes 5 (bad reasoning), while Mimi makes 2." From this she concludes "therefore Zuzu excels in speed by 1" (i.e. when compared with Lolo; but what about Mimi?). She then compares the 3 kinds of excellence, measured on this mystic scale. JANET takes the statement, ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... person of its representative, and a principle than the life of its exponent. Men sacrificed themselves in battle not so much to save the life of a commanding officer, as to avert the loss his cause would suffer by his death. Parity of reasoning dictated acceptance ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in the matter, characteristically followed this reasoning completely, and said so. "Yes, that's your way of looking at it, sir, and I don't say it isn't perfectly sound—from ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... science; and with this change came, in the main, improvement. But the great defect of the time was that this newly liberated spirit of free inquiry was not kept in check by any sufficient previous discipline in logical methods of reasoning. Hence the possibility of the wild theories that then existed, followed out into action or not, according as circumstances favoured or discouraged: Arthur Hacket, with casting out of devils, and other madnesses, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... at the eager reasoning. Betty was a bright, gay girl. What occult quality was sweetness? And Doris had been in a convent. That startled him the first moment. The old strict bitterness and narrowness of Puritanism had been softened and refined away. The people who had banished Quakers had for a long ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... appears again and again in the pages of that work, is the last man in the world to recommend a pitiful attempt, by scattered examples, to renovate the face of society, instead of endeavouring, by discussion and reasoning, to effect a grand and comprehensive improvement in the sentiments of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... my philosophic friend," the deacon interposes, earnestly. "Upon that you northerners who come out here to sustain the cause of slavery for the south, all make fools of yourselves. This continual reasoning upon Bible philosophy has lost its life, funeral dirges have been played over it, the instruments are worn out. And yet, the subject of the philosophy lives,—he belies it with his physical vigour and moral action. We doubt the sincerity of northerners; ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... School of Athens. Among the wonders of art with which the School of Athens abounds, we may select that of four youths attending to a sage mathematician, who is demonstrating some theorem. One of the boys is listening with profound reverence to the reasoning of his master; another discovers a greater quickness of apprehension; while the third is endeavouring to explain it to the last, who stands with a gaping countenance, utterly unable to comprehend the learned man's discourse. Expression, which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... in a good and watching Providence, but the events of the last few months had choked that belief. If there was a God who guarded us, why should He have allowed the existence of my wife to be sacrificed to the carelessness, and all my hopes to the villainy, of Sir John Bell? The reasoning was inconclusive, perhaps—for who can know the ends of the Divinity?—but it satisfied my mind at the time, and for the rest I have never really ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... observed in different parts of their orbits, also led him to conclude that the Earth was not the central body round which they accomplished their revolutions. As a combined result of his observation and reasoning Copernicus propounded the theory that the Sun is the centre of our system, and that all the planets, including the Earth, revolve in orbits around him. This, which is called the Copernican system, is now regarded as, and has been proved to be, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Here we call the attention of all friends to public morality, and we appoint them judges of our method of procedure. We shall attempt to be particularly liberal in our estimations, particularly exact in our reasoning, in order that every one may accept ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... had noted that Aunt Nettie and all the others who emphasized Poppy's imperfections were people whom Poppy, in her turn, for some reason could not endure. This point she tried to make once when Poppy had been convicted of a felonious scratch, but of course the grown-ups couldn't follow her reasoning. Long since she'd given up trying to make clear the real merits of her pet; she only knew that Poppy was more loving and lovable, more sympathetic and comprehending, than the majority of humans. She could count on Poppy's never jarring ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... back to the slowly burning fire. But solitude and inaction became unbearable. "Regretting never mended wrong; if I cannot get the best, I can try for the second best. And perhaps the lad is not beyond reasoning with." Then he rose, and with a decided air and step ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... with for a long time before discovering that they are deaf? Talking with poor Jaffray's parrot was like that. It was only occasionally—not often, mind—that her phrases argued an utter lack of reasoning power. She had been educated to what I suppose to be a point very close to the limit of a parrot's powers. At a fair count she had memorized a hundred and fifty sentences, a dozen songs, and twenty or thirty tunes to whistle. Many ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... in De Lacy's bosom, his engagements as a crusader became more and more burdensome to him. The Benedictine Abbess, the natural guardian of Eveline's happiness, added to these feelings by her reasoning and remonstrances. Although a nun and a devotee, she held in reverence the holy state of matrimony, and comprehended so much of it as to be aware, that its important purposes could not be accomplished while the whole ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... those wild regions, a fact which the deep solitude of all around had tempted them madly to doubt—unknown even to themselves. Besides, it suggested the idea of an owner to the horse; and by a natural and easy process of reasoning they concluded that the owner must be a human being, and that, when at home, he probably dwelt in a house. What more probable than that the house was even ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... recall how Marguerite had given herself to me, and ask myself by what right I wrote her an impertinent letter, when she could reply that it was not M. de G. who supplanted me, but I who had supplanted M. de G.: a mode of reasoning which permits many women to have many lovers. At another moment I would recall her promises, and endeavour to convince myself that my letter was only too gentle, and that there were not expressions forcible enough to punish a woman who laughed ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... educated reasoning faculties keyed to the highest pitch of immediate action, he had difficulty as scant in accounting for her presence there. What he did not quite comprehend was why Maitland had used her so kindly; for it had been plain enough that that gentleman had surprised her in the act of safe-breaking ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... power of expression in such sublime accord with the intellect and memory that served it, and he knew so well how to express his conceptions by draughtsmanship, that he vanquished with his discourse, and confuted with his reasoning, every valiant wit. And he was continually making models and designs to show men how to remove mountains with ease, and how to bore them in order to pass from one level to another; and by means of levers, windlasses, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... still clinging about him, after more than forty years of voluntary exile, which Madelon could well appreciate, though she could not have defined it; for a child judges more by instinct than reflection, and it was through no long process of reasoning that she had arrived at the certainty that she would be met here by neither contempt nor indifference. Moreover, his generally lofty and slightly incomprehensible style of conversation, and the endless stores of learning with which she had innocently accredited him, had surrounded ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... who was applied to, in the times of terror, to use his endeavours to save one of his friends from the scaffold. I am afraid, said he, that my speaking in his favor would only injure him." The prefect smiled at my quotation, but continued that train of reasoning, which, backed as it is with four hundred thousand bayonets, always appears the soundest. A man at Geneva said to me, "Do not you think that the prefect declares his opinion with a great deal of frankness?" "Yes," I replied, "he says with sincerity that he is devoted to the man ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... There was no reasoning with this sot of a Pipman! He edged round Pelle with an uncertain smile, gazed inquisitively into his face, and kept carefully just out of his reach. "You're angry, aren't you?" he said confidingly, as though he had been speaking ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... at the Somme, a few days' march from the capital! But the awakening was as free from disturbance as the dream had been. Paris felt absolute confidence in the army, in Joffre; and the Parisian reasoning was expressed in one phrase, "The army has retreated, but it is neither destroyed nor beaten; as long as the army is there, Paris has nothing to fear...." And when Sunday the thirtieth of August came, Paris was as calm and confident as it was on the ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... Dr. Dudley brought the matter to a climax by driving over to see the father of little Chris. Perhaps a talk with him would put things in a different light. Thus reasoning, he rang the doorbell at Mr. ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... This reasoning will seem satisfactory to us or otherwise, according to the views we like to entertain in respect to the genuineness of the sense of generosity and honor which is so much boasted of as a characteristic of the ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... ever since she awoke from her trance at Kor. Next morning, however, Hans came to tell me that she was changed and that she wished to speak with me. I went, wondering, to find her in the sitting-room, dressed in European clothes which she had taken from where she kept them, and once more a reasoning woman. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... my despair grew comfort, slowly at first, and more vigorously anon. The sudden shock of the news had robbed me of some of my wit, and had warped my reasoning. Later, as the pain of the blow grew duller, I came to reflect that what she had done was but a proof—an overwhelming proof—of how deeply she had cared. Such hatred as this can be but born of a great love; reaction is ever to be measured by the action that occasions it, and a great revulsion ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... B., behavior of dancer; structure of ear; deafness of dancer; hearing in young. Ray filters. Reactions, to sounds; to disagreeable stimuli; valueless. Reasoning, implicit. Reconstruction method. Records, of markings of dancers; of time; of errors; of path. Red, stimulating value of; vision. Reference numbers to literature. See Literature on Dancer. Reflected ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... Mr Strickland, who has devoted an amazing amount of labour and research to the elucidation of this mysterious question, and Dr Reinhardt of Copenhagen, were the first who referred the dodo to the pigeon tribe, having arrived almost simultaneously, by two distinct chains of reasoning, at the same conclusion; and their opinion is corroborated by a dissection that was lately made of part of the head ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... testimony, which is available in con-nexion with questions of fact, is unavailable in connexion with general truths; and logical proof is obtainable only in that comparatively narrow sphere where reasoning is based—as in mathematics—upon axioms, or—as in certain really crucial experiments in the mathematic ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the inevitable reasoning of young men. They commonly believe that the city licenses the criminal resorts which its police protect, and they are not conscious of bad citizenship in supporting resorts which are in such ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... accepted her world, in other words, as she finds it, with a philosopher's shrug. But the philosopher is lined with the logician; for this system of life has accomplished the miracle of making its women logical; they have grasped the subtleties of inductive reasoning. Marriage, for example, they know is entered into solely on the principle of mutual benefit; it is therefore a partnership, bon; now, in partnerships sentiments and the emotions are out of place, they only serve to dim the eye; those commodities, therefore, are best conveyed to other markets ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... love him with all the strength of my passionate nature, and this, I think, is proper to my youth and sex. If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one's love for other reptiles and animals. I think that this must be so. I love certain birds because of their song; but I do not love Adam on account of his singing—no, it is not that; the more ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... as the reach of their guns. Naturally, we have the police on our side, but the brigands are far more powerful. As our innkeeper said this morning: "The police, they go away; ma the banditti they stay." In the face of this logical reasoning we understood that the only thing to be done was to treat with the Gray-feet, to try a "job," in fact. The mayor said something of this to the old man, who consulted his sons, and it is the conditions of this treaty ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... sure, to return to the limited perfection of the serene and approved classics; yet perchance it is the last word of all philosophy that the astounding circumambient Universe is almost entirely unperceived by our senses and reasoning powers. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... been leaving the country of their birth, they would not have sorrowed; but as it was, bidding farewell to a land of foreigners, almost as hostile to freedom as their own, they felt not otherwise than joyful, and their bosoms were full of thoughtful, reasoning gladness. The parting kiss of that young wife must have tried, somewhat, the firmness of her husband, yet not enough to cloud his bright anticipations of the future. A different mood than that imagined by Mr. WEIR should have pervaded the group, if we are not widely ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... made an effort to slip off to sleep. But the ideas returned one by one. The dull labour of his reasoning began again; and he soon found himself in a sort of acute reverie that displayed to him in the depths of his brain, the necessity for his marriage, along with the arguments his desire and prudence advanced in turn, for and ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... that she should have promised Hicks to practice a song with him, and no process of reasoning could have made it otherwise. The imaginary opponent with whom he scornfully argued the matter had not a word for himself. Neither could the young girl answer anything to the cutting speeches which he mentally made her as he sat alone chewing the end of his cigar; and he was not moved by ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Lord John's reasoning to the British towns of London or Glasgow or Aberdeen, and shows what absurd results it would produce. He admits fully that Nova Scotia cannot be independent, and that there are limits beyond which, were her responsible Executive mad enough to pass them, the governor might rightly ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... reasoning and reflective process. It is the purely "intellectual" type of mental operation. It deals wholly in abstractions. Abstractions are constructed out ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton
... facts, let us pursue the reasoning a little further, and observe certain subordinate actions. The respective flocculi must be drawn not towards their common centre of gravity only, but also towards neighbouring flocculi. Hence the whole assemblage of flocculi will break up into groups: ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... to recall a playful remark of his upon another occasion. The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) the unfairer part of creation, put forth by Miss Parthenia Almira Fitz, are too well known to need more than a passing allusion. It was during these heats, long since happily allayed, that Mr. Wilbur remarked that 'the Church had more trouble in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her relations with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds. Two men might smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together as friends. According to Harmony's ideas, a ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... But in spite of reasoning, such terrible fear seized the man again that he put out the torch a second time, and trembling, his teeth chattering, he pushed up to one ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... He heard another voice, reasoning in reply, that resembled Mimi's. Hadn't that girl gone home yet? And he heard Sissie's voice and Charlie's. But for ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... hope that his state might permit some faint exercise of the reasoning faculty, O'Flaherty walked towards the small den they had designated as the mess-room, in search of his ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... a murmur of applause at the conductor's compact reasoning, and it gave him pleasure—you could see it in his face. But the Major was not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sure of what I have seen, sure that there was not in my reasoning any defect, no error in my declarations, no lacune in the inflexible sequence of my observations, I should believe myself to be the dupe of a simple hallucination, the sport of a singular vision. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... less self-esteem than myself—or who had led a more honest early life—might have doubted his own reasoning at that moment. I didn't. The ship on the ways still resembled a warship to six places. And knowing human nature the way I do, that was too much of a coincidence to expect. Occam's razor always points the way. If there are ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities than the people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "If your reasoning powers were in their normal condition," said the Professor, compassionately, "you would see that the mere production of an empty bottle can be no proof of what it contained—or, for that matter, that it ever contained ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... about this Forefathers' Day? In Brooklyn they say the Landing of the Pilgrims was December the 21st; in New York you say it was December the 22d. You are both right. Not through the specious and artful reasoning you have sometimes indulged in, but by a little historical incident that seems to have escaped your attention. You see, the Forefathers landed in the morning of December the 21st, but about noon that day ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... carry valuable minerals. It is clear that in some fashion these minerals are primarily segregated within the earth. Causes of this segregation are so involved with the problem of the origin of the earth as a whole that no adequate explanation can yet be offered. Our inductive reasoning from known facts is as yet limited to the segregation within a given mass of magma, and even here the conditions are only dimly perceived. A discussion of these ultimate problems is beyond the ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... volcanic rocks are of very recent origin is shown by the fact, ascertained by Verbeek, that beneath them occur deposits of Post-Tertiary age, and that these in turn rest on the Tertiary strata which are widely distributed through Sumatra, Java, and the adjoining islands. According to the reasoning of Professor Judd, the Krakatoa group at an early period of its history presented the form of a magnificent crater-cone, several miles in circumference at the base, which subsequent eruptions shattered into fragments or blew into the air in the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny. The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that magnificent poem ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Alas! how easy we satisfy ourselves when it suits our views. I had left him my property, I had educated him, and I said, by being brought up in a humble position, he will be cured of pride, and will make a better man. Bad reasoning, ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... the Uitlanders, judging from a long and bitter experience, felt that they would not and could not. They may say that this is no time to part from those with whom they associated themselves in times of peace. Such reasoning may provide an excuse in the Transvaal, but no such plea will avail for those without the Transvaal who have let the day of opportunity go past, and who cry out their frightened protest now that the night ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... acknowledge it, and, in his own person, was the first object on which to exercise a wish hitherto unknown to her, to be herself loving and lovable. The boy's firm faith, which was not to be shaken by any reasoning or by any of the myths which she knew, touched her deeply and led to her asking Hannah what was the real bearing of one and another of his statements. It had always seemed a comfort to her that the miseries of our earthly life would come ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... really top-flight investigator, had developed intuitive thinking to a fine art. Ever since the Lancaster Method had shown the natural laws applying to intuitive reasoning, no scientist worthy of the name failed to apply it consistently in making his investigations. Only when exact measurement became both possible and necessary was there any need to apply ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... unequal to his own, his aunt would address him on his weakest side. With his notions of dignity, he would probably feel that the arguments, which to Elizabeth had appeared weak and ridiculous, contained much good sense and solid reasoning. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... regarded transportation as a commodity to be bought and sold, like so much sugar or wheat or coal, and they believed that the ordinary principles which regulated private bargaining should also regulate the sale of the article in which they dealt. According to this reasoning, which was utterly false and iniquitous, but generally prevalent at the time, the man who shipped the largest quantities of oil should get ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... the same vacillation and confusion of thought—the same feminine inability to be constant to one train of reasoning. But those just given suffice. What weight can we attach to a man's philosophy, who after telling us that consciousness may possibly be an inherent property of matter, of which 'the receit of reason is a limbec only,' adds in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is why women remain children all their lives, for they ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... certain "feelings," "wants" and "desires." The "I" of such a man is a physical "I," the body representing its form and substance. Not only is this true of the savage, but even among so-called "civilized" men of to-day we find many in this stage. They have developed powers of thinking and reasoning, but they do not "live in their minds" as do some of their brothers. They use their thinking powers for the gratification of their bodily desires and cravings, and really live on the plane of the Instinctive Mind. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... never heard him more animated or more impressive than on this night. He absolutely broke down all resistance. His mind seemed richer than ever, and his combination of facts and reasoning appeared to me unequalled by even his greatest previous efforts. I should have almost pronounced him to be inspired by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Boccaccio's, in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their speeches are like tirades from a tragedy of Racine. But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda argues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own argument and carries it out ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Censure for such Employment of his Pen. On the contrary, such sort of Attacks upon such Persons are the most meritorious Parts of a Man's Life, recommend him as a Person of true and sincere Religion, much more than the strongest Reasoning, and the most regular Life; and pave the way to all the Riches, and Pleasures and Advantages or Life; not only among those, who, under the Colour of Religion, are carrying on a common Corporation Cause of Wealth, Power, and Authority, but among many well-meaning ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... man's reason by reason; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed: 'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far fetched) that they made little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... age has, also, its peculiar impress of thought and reasoning in religious, not less than in secular matters. Although the gospel itself remains always the same, and those who sincerely embrace it have also substantially the same character from age to age, there is, nevertheless, continual progress and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... But, in general, the strong governments and orderly societies of modern Europe have made it infinitely easier for men of no particular virtue to live a decent life, infinitely easier also for men of no particular reasoning power or scientific knowledge to have a more or less scientific or sane view of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... darker complexion than those recruited at the North, and this is inexplicable except on the supposition that freedom, even more than slavery, tends thus far to amalgamation. What further step in reasoning this suggests, it is, fortunately, not needful to inquire; like all other mysteries of human destiny, this will safely work itself out. It is not for nothing that the black man thrives in contact with the white, while the red man dies; and there certainly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the current of subtle and cogent reasoning that ran through the passionate address of the exiled king, crying for vengeance, but above all for justice. The answer of Jugurtha's envoys was brief and to the point. They had only to state their fictitious case. A plausible case was all that was needed; their advocates would do the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... observed by Barry Cornwall, "that the songs which occur in dramas are more natural than those which proceed from the author in person." With equal force does the reasoning apply to the romance, which may be termed the drama of the closet. It would seem strange, on a first view, that an author should be more at home in an assumed character than his own. But experience shows the position ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that Christ exceeded not the space of forty days in His fasting, He did it to the imitation of Moses and Elias; of whom, the one before the receiving of the law, and the other before the communication and reasoning which he had with God in Mount Horeb, in which He was commanded to anoint Hazael king over Syria, and Jehu king over Israel, and Elisha to be prophet, fasted the same number of days. The events that ensued and followed this supernatural fasting ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... capable of cool thought at the time; but the sudden rush of hope when he heard of his child being near, combined with the agony of disappointment on seeing her torn, as it were, out of his very grasp, was too much for him. His reasoning powers were completely overturned; he continued to buffet the waves with wild energy, and to strain every fibre of his being in the effort to propel himself through the water, long after the ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... the most evident and convincing reasons, then, why we should put our trust in God above all else is that He alone can satisfy and give us rest. Only God is able adequately to respond to all the needs of our being. The simplest process of reasoning should assure us of this, when once we perceive the vastness of our wants and the impossibility of their satisfaction through the medium of created things. We know our nature, which has come from the source and essence of truth, cannot be false. Neither can our unlimited ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... the credit of getting rid of the Britons by telling the officer that he might easily judge how numerous and strong were his master's, the French King's, subjects, in that region, from seeing them on the river in small boats—a piece of reasoning which was rather ingenious than ingenuous. It had its effect in sending away the Briton with "a flea in his ear." "English Turn," the name given to a great bend in the stream some miles below New Orleans, keeps alive the memory of that piece of shrewdness. Not far distant, by ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... the portrait is ill-drawn or ill-painted, all the reasoning in the world and the praise of all the sycophants will not save the picture from contempt and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... irregularities), that, with a single glass of wine, his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost, and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. Possessing his reasoning faculties in excited activity, at such times, and seeking his acquaintances with his wonted look and memory, he easily seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and was accused, accordingly, of insulting arrogance and bad-heartedness. In ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... said no more. Johnson also saw that it was no use reasoning with his wife. Her appetite for the drink was unquenchable. It was clear that she loved it better than husband, children, home, conscience, soul. Alas! poor Thomas's was a heavy burden indeed. Could ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson |
