"Sophistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regiments. They were to be commanded by Macarthy, who had been severely wounded and taken prisoner at Newton Butler. His wounds had been healed; and he had regained his liberty by violating his parole. This disgraceful breach of faith he had made more disgraceful by paltry tricks and sophistical excuses which would have become a Jesuit better than a gentleman and a soldier. Lewis was willing that the Irish regiments should be sent to him in rags and unarmed, and insisted only that the men should be stout, and that the officers should not ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings are merely sophistical—that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are conscious that we are free; we know—we are as sure as we are of our existence—that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we choose. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... this truth to its full extent when they have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its recognition has ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... wish, as a feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to retaliate on such critics—who on their part no doubt exhibited some ill-founded convictions while attacking others—that he penned the APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For himself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, of the school ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... barbarism. But if the common sense of the Anglo-Saxon race did not almost universally denounce this hideous custom, I would bring Sextus Empiricus to show that the first laws ever enacted were to prevent men from devouring each other; and even this may be declared, by our sophistical emancipationists, to be one of the first violations of natural right. If the right of cannibalism is claimed, then will nature assert its wrong, and vindicate civilization. But if cannibalism is rejected by the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... and moral sense as the code itself? Do you give the name of method to an alphabetical, chronological, analogical, or merely nominal classification of subjects? Do you give the name of method to these lists of paragraphs gathered under an arbitrary head, these sophistical vagaries, this mass of contradictory quotations and opinions, this nauseous style, this spasmodic rhetoric, models of which are so common at the bar, though seldom found elsewhere? Do you take for philosophy this twaddle, this intolerable pettifoggery adorned with a few scholastic trimmings? No, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover—if lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... things in the original Essay, which scarcely any writer would venture upon, except as professed exercises of ingenuity, and which have been since in part retracted. But a wrong bias was thus given, and the author's theory was thus rendered warped, disjointed, and sophistical from the very outset. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... and too much weight to his fancies; to raise the man too high in his courage and conceit; to make his pretences seem worthy the considering and canvassing. Briefly, perverse obstinacy is more easily quelled, petulant impudence is sooner dashed, sophistical captiousness is more safely eluded, sceptical wantonness is more surely confounded in this than in the simple way ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... called a busy and successful career. The Christian is taught rather to love God and to be interested in his neighbour than to love respectability and to make a fortune. Indeed, to make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which requires a somewhat sophistical defence. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mistress Nutter; "and proceeds to use all those sophistical arguments, which we have so often heard, to pervert her mind, and overthrow her principles. But Alizon is proof against them all. Religion and virtue support her, and make her more than a match for her opponent. Equally vain are the spirit's attempts to seduce her by the offer ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... attendants of Antony's eldest son by Fulvia, and used to be invited pretty often, among other companions, to his table, when he was not supping with his father. One day another physician had talked loudly, and given great disturbance to the company, whose mouth Philotas stopped with this sophistical syllogism: "In some states of fever the patient should take cold water; everyone who has a fever is in some state of fever; therefore in a fever cold water should always be taken." The man was quite struck dumb, and Antony's son, very much pleased, laughed aloud, and said, Philotas, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... turns easily to caricature; it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets. It is psychology of the first degree—elementary psychology—just as the colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true grandeur, in this ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... jokelets and beat them up small, In sophistical fudge, with no logic at all; Then pepper the mixture with snigger and jeer; Add insolent "sauce," and a soupcon of sneer; Shred stale sentiment fine, just as much as you want, And thicken with cynical ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... every man's experience, to prove that we often act purely from a regard to the happiness of others, and are therefore social beings; and it is not necessary to be a consummate judge of the deceptions of language, to despise the sophistical trifler, who tells us, that, because we experience a gratification in our benevolent actions, we are therefore exclusively and uniformly selfish. A correct examination of facts will lead us to discover that quality which is common to all virtuous actions, and which distinguishes them from those ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... Crisis of Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, some needed ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... universal scepticism;—was I then so to distrust the common conscience, as to believe that the Spirit of God pronounced Jael blessed, for perfidiously murdering her husband's trusting friend? Does any Protestant reader feel disgust and horror, at the sophistical defences set up for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and other atrocities of the wicked Church of Rome? Let him stop his mouth, and hide his face, if he dares to justify the foul ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... such is the divine gift of language possessed by Plato in the Symposium and Phaedrus. From this there are many fallings-off in the Laws: first, in the structure of the sentences, which are rhythmical and monotonous,—the formal and sophistical manner of the age is superseding the natural genius of Plato: secondly, many of them are of enormous length, and the latter end often forgets the beginning of them,—they seem never to have received the second thoughts of the author; either the emphasis is wrongly placed, ...
— Laws • Plato
... great scale in Rome was a formal declaration of war against faith and morals. It was occasioned by the occupation of Oropus by the Athenians, a step which they commissioned three of the most esteemed professors of philosophy, including Carneades the master of the modern sophistical school, to justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with the circumstances of the case, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... findeth not itself satisfied on this point. But ever methinketh that these things, with which you rather convince and conclude me than induce a credence and persuade me that every man is in prison already, are but sophistical fancies, and that except those that are commonly called prisoners, other men are not in any prison ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read in eighteen-forty. They may have served ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... many persons mere casuistry, mere sophistical juggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing as relative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference which rests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of labor and trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very little labor and no skill ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... reprehensible expansion. Poems were sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate—which seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and showed especially scant respect for the 'Protestantism of the Protestant religion.' The father warned him grimly that he was not going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... concludes: "If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored,—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man,—such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... revived the hopes of the latter by one of his most studied speeches. It was, however, defective in temper, and although received with cheers by the opposition, failed to convince any one that reform was either the unjust or dangerous thing which he represented it. The speech was specious, sophistical and acrimonious; its effect upon the country was to strengthen the public prejudice against the anti-reformers. The Hon. Mr. Stanley, secretary for Ireland, made his reply to Sir Robert effective by illustrations drawn from the condition and wants of Ireland, its yearnings ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with a lengthened perturbation of the eyelids. "It would be possible to suggest a variety of objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind," he said at last, smilingly reflective. "Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the path." He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: "Is there likely to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... all ages, been open to the imputation of endeavoring to prove the most general facts of the outward world by sophistical reasoning, in order to avoid appeals to the senses. Archimedes, says Professor Playfair,(240) established some of the elementary propositions of statics by a process in which he "borrows no principle from experiment, but establishes ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... treasures of learning to Monasteries,[14-*] or to persons of rank and fortune. Yet, even with all the advantages of wealth, Libraries were extremely scarce and scanty; and principally consisted of books of devotion and superstition, legends, or the sophistical disquisitions of the schoolmen. An acquaintance with the Latin classics was a rare qualification, and the Greek language was almost unknown in Europe; but the Art of Printing had scarcely become general ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... and they and their families left to starve; their estates double taxed to carry on a war they had no hand in, and you got nothing by. What account can you give of the multitudes you have forced to comply, against their consciences, with your new sophistical politics, who, like new converts in France, sin because they cannot starve? And now the tables are turned upon you; you must not be persecuted; it ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... short, all that constitutes what we call formal logic, in its widest acceptation. At this point, the far-famed scholastic intellect, with its subtleties, its fine distinctions, its nice questions, its sophistical conclusions, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... verities! And what reception do the conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice, or sophistical evasions and insulting vituperation. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... species of prudence would bid him shun; but when the alternative was, being at eternal warfare with myself, on account of habitual follies, to give them no worse name, which no general example, no licentious wit, no sophistical infidelity, would, to me, ever justify, I must have been a fool to have hesitated, and a madman to have made another choice. Besides, I had in "my Jean" a long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery among my hands, and who could ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... which a wicked man gets rid of conscientious troubles—at least for a time. One way is by stout-hearted defiance of God, and ignoring of Conscience altogether. The other is by sophistical reasoning, and a more or less successful effort to throw dust ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... was very skilful in all matters of natural philosophy. On my return, I paid him a visit. He. pitied me very much, and advised me, with much warmth and kindness of expression, not to amuse myself any longer with such experiments as these, which were all false and sophistical; but that I should read the good books of the old philosophers, where I might not only find the true matter of the science of alchymy, but learn also the exact order of operations which ought to be followed. I very much approved of this wise advice; but before I acted upon it, I went back ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... scorn of consequences, which at times made him almost an iconoclast. His whole life was dedicated to one high end, the aim of preaching the need of principles based on the widest induction and the most penetrating thought, as the only refuge amid the storm and welter of sophistical philosophies and ecclesiastical intrigues. The union of faith with knowledge, and the eternal supremacy of righteousness, this was the message of Acton to mankind. It may be thought that he sometimes exaggerated his thesis, that he preached it ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... admission of this does not help us to understand the rational ground or basis in human nature on which the convention proceeds. Socrates first of all intimates to Hermogenes that his view of language is only a part of a sophistical whole, and ultimately tends to abolish the distinction between truth and falsehood. Hermogenes is very ready to throw aside the sophistical tenet, and listens with a sort of half admiration, half belief, to the speculations ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... a sophistical ring in the speech of Phaedrus, which recalls the first speech in imitation of Lysias, occurring in the Dialogue called the Phaedrus. This is still more marked in the speech of Pausanias which follows; and ...
— Symposium • Plato
... repeated overthrows. He therefore explains to him the nature of the process to which he is being subjected. The two strangers are not serious; there are jests at the mysteries which precede the enthronement, and he is being initiated into the mysteries of the sophistical ritual. This is all a sort of horse-play, which is now ended. The exhortation to virtue will follow, and Socrates himself (if the wise men will not laugh at him) is desirous of showing the way in which such an exhortation should be carried on, according to his own poor notion. He ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... before you can know what faith to give him. One man may make mistakes in names, and dates, and references, and yet have a real substance of truthfulness in him, a wish to enlighten himself and then you. Another may not be wrong in his facts, but have a declamatory or sophistical vein in him, much to be guarded against. A third may be both inaccurate and untruthful, caring not so much for anything as to write his book. And if the reader cares only to read it, sad work they make between them of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... of miracles in the world's history is also according to law,—parts, though minute parts, of a universal plan, and permitted for reasons worthy of the Creator. To both, or neither, is the same answer open. Your objection is, I think, a mere sophistical evasion of the difficulty. There is no difference whatever in the nature of the events, except that the variation from the 'established series of sequences' is infinitely greater in those portentous revolutions of the universe to which the geologist points ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the Drapier's Letters are sophistical, his statements grossly exaggerated, and his advice sometimes shameless, as, for instance, in recommending what is now but too well known as 'boycotting.' The end, however, was gained, and the Dean was treated with the honours of a conqueror. On his return from England in 1726, a guard of honour ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... not name to thee so salutary an advice as to dismiss thy innocent and unsuspicious prize, did not I know thee too obstinate and headstrong to listen to the voice of wisdom. Essay then thy base and low-minded temptations, thy corrupt and sophistical reasonings, to tarnish the unsullied purity of her mind, and it is well. If by such a wretch as thee she can be seduced from the obedience of virtue and the Gods, then let her fall. She were then a victim worthy of thee. But if thou essayest the means of tyranny and force, the attempt will ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... characteristically, (1) 'Quietness.' 'But Temperance is a fine and noble thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as quickness.' He tries again and says (2) that temperance is modesty. But this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt. This time he gives a definition ...
— Charmides • Plato
... utilitarian. Science had no charm to him, since it was directed to utilitarian ends and was uncertain. His sayings had such a lofty, hidden wisdom that very few people understood him: his utterances seemed either paradoxical, or unintelligible, or sophistical. "To the mentally proud and mentally feeble he was equally a bore." Most people probably thought him a nuisance, since he was always about with his questions, puzzling some, confuting others, and reproving all,—careless of love or hatred, and contemptuous of all conventionalities. So severely ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... please," said her sophistical brother. "You know words mean nothing in themselves. If I choose to call my hat my cadwallader, you would understand me just as well, after I had once explained it to you, that by cadwallader I meant this black thing that I put upon my head; ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... criticism of the demonstrations is introduced later in close connexion with Bacon's new method; they are the rival modes of procedure, to which his own is definitely opposed. The philosophies which are "redargued" are divided into three classes, the sophistical, of which the best example is Aristotle, who, according to Bacon, forces nature into his abstract schemata and thinks to explain by definitions; the empirical, which from few and limited experiments leaps at once to general conclusions; and the superstitious, which corrupts philosophy by the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a sophistical argument He says when he is coming, and that's all I want to know here's a letter, I see, from that silly Mrs. Barker—her husband has quite given up drink, and earns good wages, sad the eldest boy ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Logos-Christ necessarily appeared as soon as the Logos was definitely hypostatised. In the so-called Monarchian struggles of the 3rd century the disputants made use of these two Logoi, who formed excellent material for sophistical discussions. In the Strom. Clement did not reject the distinction between a [Greek: logos endiathetos] and [Greek: prophorikos] (on Strom. V. 1. 6. see Zahn, l.c., p. 145 against Nitzsch), and in many passages expresses ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in influence over him the more I should lose. So you see it would not be natural for me to advise him to take a step which would ultimately prove very detrimental to my interests. If you can prove that my reasons are either trifling or sophistical, speak openly: I will tell M. Dandolo that my mind has changed; Madame Tripolo will become his wife when we return to Venice. But let me warn you that thorough ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... supporters in Italy,—in the Italian Government unfortunately,—is truly pitiable, and unworthy of being seriously debated, in the view of those who are at all acquainted with the history of modern Greece. But since, in these times of vain questions and useless and sophistical debates about the peoples of the East, much has been written and argued on this question in the European press, we think it may not be out of place to give some information on the political and intellectual state ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... intellectual life of the Greeks; in the circle of the imperial court, with its intrigues, its fashions, its favoritisms; at a time when outwardly much respect was paid to the forms of religious life, but when the great and vital dogmas of the Church were made the sport of witty sophistical disputations; when those who endeavored to lead an earnest Christian life met with nearly as much to oppose them as in periods of active persecution; such were her environments. They were little favorable to the strength of mind, the ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... resolution[79] in their State Convention, yet some of their members were averse to all affiliations with the dreaded question, as to them, what the people might drink seemed a subject of greater importance than a fundamental principle of human rights. Intelligent black men, believing the sophistical statements of politicians, that their rights were imperiled by the agitation of woman suffrage, joined the opposition. Thus the campaign in Kansas was as protracted as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Napoleon, what has the Northern war done for the greatest warriors but destroy the flower of their armies and the prestige of their name? Our maps, in placing the North at the top, and the South at the bottom of the sheet, impress us, by what may seem a sophistical analogy, with the imagination that Huns or Moguls, Kalmucks or Cossacks, have been a superincumbent mass, descending by a sort of gravitation upon the fair territories which lie below them. Yet this is substantially true;—though the attraction towards the South is of a moral, not of a physical ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... efforts to prove that men suspected of atheism had not denied God, because they would not have been understood had they attempted to say—"They have denied God perhaps, but that is no reason for killing them." Thence arose the sophistical apologies for certain doctrines, apologies made with a good intention, but which trouble the sincerity of history. These are the brands of servitude, which must disappear where liberty prevails. We ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... are the work of God, so valour is made by Him and placed in the heart of stout champions, and freedom therewithal to use it as they will, for good or evil."—Fstbrra Saga (1852), p. 12: one of the sophistical additions to the story: see below ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... ideal Stoic nor self-conscious martyr; but more like an Homeric hero fighting his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. He never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but elevated thoughts were always his chief consolation. Conversation about great writers and thinkers always ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... seem to have opened his eyes with some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should suppose him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... shadows of these old systems still remain; and according to Fitzjames it would still in strict law be a penal offence to publish Renan's 'Life of Christ.'[178] The attempt to explain the law as referring to the manner, not the matter, of the attack is, he thinks, sophistical and the law should be simply repealed. A parallel case is that of seditious libels; and there is a very curious history connected with the process by which we have got rid of the simple, old doctrine that all attacks upon our rulers, reasonable or ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... is evident from the care and expense bestowed upon our poet's education. Under the tutorship of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, he had studied both natural philosophy and rhetoric in its sophistical form. In gymnastic exercises he exhibited a successful prowess, being twice victorious in the Eleusinian and Thesean games. Of his skill in painting, some specimens were ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... scholiasts, and commentators; and remains inexplicable to the present day. Such works Charpentier admirably compares to those subterraneous places, where the air is so thick and suffocating, that it extinguishes all torches. A most sophistical dilemma, on the subject of obscurity, was made by Thomas Anglus, or White, an English Catholic priest, the friend of Sir Kenelm Digby. This learned man frequently wandered in the mazes of metaphysical subtilties; and became perfectly ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... leather envelope with the state seal, and then circulated as if it were the coin it purported to be. Mieris, Beschryving der Munstn, 1726, explains the saga of Dido's ox-skin by means of this leather money. Certain it is, however, that the surprise with which the sophistical dialogue, Eryxias, mentions the matter, is a proof how foreign it was to the Greeks. Concerning the Roman plated denarii which were stamped with the silver coins, but which were also accepted by the state treasury, see Mommsen, R. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the Spectator on the Children in the Wood. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of Mr. Baxter under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... works by which the breach was to be forced, and took upon himself the task of justifying innovation, and securing its reception with a hesitating public. Hence his criticism at this period was, as he himself has styled it, "polemical" and "aggressive." It was, however, neither violent nor sophistical. On the contrary, it was distinguished by the candor and the suavity of its tone. Goethe, who watched from afar a movement which, directly or indirectly, owed much to German inspiration, was particularly struck with this trait. "Our scholars," he remarked to Eckermann, "think ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul—or across whatever ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... impulses render her at moments more prudent than the Servite Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had; more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... Rupert in another and a scientific age; nor was it unopposed: in the place of the foreign scholasticism formerly so repugnant to its doctrines, those of Schelling were opposed by a reaction of the superficial mock-enlightenment and sophistical scepticism predominant in the foregoing century, more particularly of the sympathy with France, which had been rendered more than ever powerful in Germany by the forcible suppression of patriotism. Abstract philosophy, despising nature and ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... the great man paid for scorning all new knowledge as idealogie. The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling. He once said to Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only one who knows trade secrets."[230] ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... estate upon him. It is interesting to note that the jealous Yen-tsz (who was much admired as a companionable man by Confucius) protested against this grant, on the ground that "men of his views are sophistical rhetoricians, intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity; incompetent to administer the people; wasting time and money upon expensive funerals. Life is too short to waste in trying to get to the bottom of these inane studies." From this it will be seen that Lao-tsz ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid dullness, as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Things are indeed Niceties, worthy to be known; but in the mean Time, I'm afraid our Entertainment should seem rather a Sophistical one, than a Poetical one: At another Time, if you please, we'll hunt Niceties and Criticisms for ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... preserved in its then existing condition, and without Ahaz continuing on the throne. The Babylonish captivity intervened, and yet Messiah was to be born. Isaiah would thus have made himself guilty of a false sophistical argumentation."—We answer: What they, at that time, feared, was the total destruction of state and people. This appears sufficiently from the circumstance that the prophet takes his son Shearjashub with him; and indeed the intentions of ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... at the procedure adopted, had it not been for the extraordinary haste, which seemed to indicate that it was undesirable or impossible to wait until Livia should have given birth to her child, and which made it necessary to trouble the pontifical college for its somewhat sophistical consent. For all were accustomed to seeing the marriages of great personages made and unmade in this manner and on such bases. Why, then, were these nuptials so precipitately concluded, apparently with the consent of all concerned? ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... "Now, that is sophistical. Then, again, I am afraid I could not tell it to you without crying, because you seem rather a manly man, and some of it might revolt you, and you might sympathize right out, and then ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... party should know the felt wound; he remembered that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to hope the latter might ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... voluptuousness or terrific chastisements of his designs. He has all the old monachal contempt of woman. He is cerebrally chaste. Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de reellement obscenes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... "Without having the less, he could not have the greater, in which that is contained." Sophistical; ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... We are sure that we do not wish to represent him unfairly. For we admire his genius; we love the kind nature which appears in all his writings; and we cherish his memory as much as if we had known him personally. But we must plainly say that his argument, though ingenious, is altogether sophistical. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... disturbing forces of a nature calm only on the surface. Nothing is more baffling than the incomplete revelations of a very complex order of mind, with its many-sided sympathies and its apparent contradictions. The self-justification she puts forward for her errors is sometimes sophistical, but not for that insincere. She is not trying to make us her dupes; she is the dupe herself of her dangerous eloquence. But her moral worth so infinitely outweighed the alloy as to leave but little ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... his character which certainly may excite a smile, his reverence for him is still visible, and he takes every opportunity of contrasting his gigantic grandeur with the petty refinements of Euripides. With infinite cleverness and inexhaustible flow of wit, he has exposed the sophistical subtilty, the rhetorical and philosophical pretensions, the immoral and seductive effeminacy, and the excitations to undisguised sensuality of Euripides. As, however, modern critics have generally looked ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 423: an attack on Socrates, unfairly taken as an embodiment of the deleterious and unsettling "new learning," both in the form of Sophistical rhetoric and "meteorological" speculation. Worthy Strepsiades, eager to find a new way to pay the debts in which the extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him, seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory of Socrates, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... client, and he strove by special pleading to convince his companions in that frigid jury-box that they sojourned in a bower of roses, beset only by benignant zephyrs. He drew upon a fund of gaiety, wit, and anecdote, sophistical, but crowned with success. His cheerfulness communicated itself irresistibly. Each one hastened to contribute his own quota toward the general optimism. Even the lady passenger was ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts to bolster up the fable, and which finally is discredited and repudiated when the fable is finally proved to be a fable? If Satan had wished to devise the best means of discrediting "Revelation" he could not ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... these human chattels renders an outlet indispensable, or they will soon cease to be profitable by the excess of their numbers. To these facts we owe the figments which have rendered the Southern school of logicians a little presuming, perhaps, and certainly very sophistical. Among other theories we find the bold one, that the Territories of the United States are the property, not of the several States, but of their individual people; in other words, that the native of New York or Rhode Island, regardless of the laws of the country, has ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... more than she had bargained for. She would believe in the mysterious woman and leave him free to carry out any mission, however sophistical or chivalrous, he would. But she had not expected to enter the arena with him and defend the martyr thrown to the wild beast of marital savagery. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... as is now contended, could defeat it. No, we have not erred! The Constitution is still the object of our reverence, the bond of our union, our defense in danger, the source of our prosperity in peace. It shall descend, as we have received it, uncorrupted by sophistical construction, to our posterity; and the sacrifices of local interest, of State prejudices, of personal animosities, that were made to bring it into existence, will again be patriotically ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... Roman histories—to Livy and Caesar especially; to Niebuhr, Mommsen, Arnold, and Liddell. See also Durny, Hist. des Romains; Michelet, Hist. de Rom. Napoleon's History of Caesar should be read, admirable in style, and interesting in matter, although a sophistical ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... that in the Greek story "vice is advocated by no sophistry." On the contrary, what makes this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story. Professor Rohde (516) has rudely torn the veil from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... know all the sophistical arguments, and they are many, for capitalizing earning capacity. It is a very attractive and interesting argument, and in some instances it is legitimately used. But there is a line you cross, above which you are not capitalizing your earning capacity, but ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... third of the whole. This is the relative proportion of the importance of the Colonies at these two periods, and all reasoning concerning our mode of treating them must have this proportion as its basis, or it is a reasoning weak, rotten, and sophistical. ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... your argument on the first day for the seventh, I see by the Advocate of Dec. 16th, your exulting reply to J. B. Cook. Because he has not met every point of your twisted, sophistical argument, you now think it will stand forever. You say "The position I have taken will stand the onset of all while the eternal rock of inspiration stands secure; hence with confidence calm as heaven, I take my pen to reply," &c. We read that "the Devils believe ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... excessive taxation, which oppressed the nation and made it discontented and rebellious. The fourth most prominent cause of agitation was the writings of infidel philosophers and economists, whose unsound and sophistical theories held out fallacious hopes, and undermined those sentiments by which all governments and institutions are preserved. These will be incidentally presented, as thereby we shall be able to trace the career of the remarkable man ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... facts. But the most elaborate work on the subject is the Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, inspired and partly written by Franklin. It is hotly partisan, and sometimes sophistical and unfair. Articles on the quarrel will also be found in the provincial newspapers, especially the New York Mercury, and in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1755 and 1756. But it is impossible to get any clear and just view of it without wading through the interminable ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... waiting for this unnerved hand to gain strength to hold it. For you must know that in my descent into this valley I have met with many a slip and fall, and have suffered the consequences: Apollyon has come forth to bar my way, and I have not done with him yet, nor he with me. I have answered all his sophistical arguments, have resisted all his temptations, and it has come to a life-and-death struggle between us. With what deadly fury his thrusts and cuts are made, my poor wife will tell you. My days are comparatively peaceful; I feel that I am near the green meadows, beautiful with ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... we care nothing about the sophistical subtlety by which they teach that bread and wine leave or lose their own natural substance, and that there remain only the appearance and color of bread, and not true bread. For it is in perfect agreement with Holy Scriptures that there is, and remains, bread, as Paul himself calls it, 1 Cor. 10, ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... this resolution is as clumsy as its assertions are base and sophistical. The meaning intended to be expressed is simply, that the Constitution of Ohio, neither in terms nor by implication, confers on such residents as are negroes or mulattoes, any right to offer a petition to the legislature for any object whatever; nor imposes on ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... be true, That they are as Magpies at the door, Saints in the Church, Goats in the Garden, Devils in the House, Angels in the Streets, and Syrens at the Windows; if Nature does not make them appear Beautiful, Art shall, as Paintings and other sophistical Helps; whence comes this Proverb among them, If God make them tall and Fat (a goodly Woman being a Title of great Value among them) they will make themselves fair. In fine, The Gentry are very Rich, live of all Men the most careless and contented ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... Gustave Le Bon maintains, in his brilliant, but sophistical, work on "The Psychology of Peoples," that the "soul of a race" unalterably determines even its art. He states that a Hindu artist, in copying an European model several times, gradually eliminates the European characteristics, so that, "the second or third copy ... will have become exclusively ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... appeals. Demagogues and partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every extremity, and keep in the golden mean ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of the bent of their desires. Wherefore, by my story I purpose at one and the same time to shew you how great is the folly of all such, and how much greater is the folly of those who, deeming themselves mightier than nature, think by sophistical arguments to bring that to pass which is beyond their power, and strive might and main to conform others to their own pattern, however little the nature of the latter may brook such treatment. Know then that there was in Pisa a judge, better endowed with mental than with physical vigour, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and that the two should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity in such works of an intermediate period as 'Cleon', 'A Death in the Desert', the 'Epistle of Karshish', and 'James Lee's Wife'; the sophistical ingenuities of 'Bishop Blougram', and 'Sludge'; and the sad, appealing tenderness of 'Andrea del Sarto' and 'The Worst ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... After that he proceeds at once to enumerate the infim species under each of the two main heads. We shall presently imitate this procedure for reasons of expediency. For the whole phraseology of the subject is derived from Aristotle's treatise on Sophistical Refutations, and we must either keep to his method or break away from tradition altogether. Sufficient confusion has already arisen from retaining Aristotle's language ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... zealots in the Eucharistic controversy, the Wuertemberg preacher, Erhard Schnepf, "I hear that you will not leave Blarer (preacher at Constance) unmolested in the confession, with which Luther and Philip (Melanchton) are still satisfied, but press upon him with sophistical language, and have made many persons anxious lest you would break down more than you build up, which I myself do not yet accuse you of, but should it happen, it will grieve many a pious man. Hence, it is my prayer, that you will proceed gently; be no disputer ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... and Lawyers of Pickwick." It may be thought that no judge of the pattern of Stareleigh could be found now, but we could name recent performances in which incidents such as, "Is your name Nathaniel Daniel or Daniel Nathaniel?" have been repeated. Neither has the blustering of Buzfuz or his sophistical plaintiveness wholly gone by. The "cloth" was represented by the powerful but revolting sketch of Stiggins, which, it is strange, was not resented by the Dissenters of the day, and also by a more worthy specimen in the person of the clergyman at Dingley Dell. There are ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves as a protection against sophistical fallacy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... of this time arose among the Greeks of Asia or Egypt, peoples who were subtle, sophistical, and disputatious. The heresies were usually attempts to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. The most significant of these heresies was that of Arius; he taught that Christ was created by ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wirepullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical motions or other clever trickery. Great national issues really turn, according to this judgment, upon the arts of political management, the play of the adroit tactician and the complete canvasser. This is the 'work' that tells; elections, the sane expression of the national ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... world the fact that the United States has power over the ballot in States, mention may be made of a case which, in 1866, came before Justice Strong, then a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, but since a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. For sophistical reasoning it is a curiosity in legal decisions. One point made by Judge Strong was, that congress may deprive a citizen of the opportunity to enjoy a right belonging to him as a citizen of a State even the right of voting, but cannot deprive him of the right itself. This is on a par with saying ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... I and the first half of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; the first book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result. To this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to the question—What is justice, stripped ...
— The Republic • Plato
... side his son Pantagruel born, so fair and so great, he knew not what to say nor what to do. And the doubt that troubled his brain was to know whether he should cry for the death of his wife or laugh for the joy of his son. He was hinc inde choked with sophistical arguments, for he framed them very well in modo et figura, but he could not resolve them, remaining pestered and entangled by this means, like a mouse caught in a trap or kite snared in a gin. Shall I weep? ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Examination of the False Assumptions, and Refutation of the Sophistical Reasonings, which have brought on this Civil War. By George Junkin, D.D., LL.D. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... should present, exact of them satisfaction therefor. But it was knocking at a deaf man's door, as they did not regard these protests or even take any notice of them; on the contrary they have sought many subterfuges, circumstances, false pretences and sophistical arguments to give color to their doings, to throw a cloud upon our lawful title and valid rights, and to cheat us out of them. General Stuyvesant also has had many questions with them, growing out of this matter, but it remains ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... second century. We meet here for the first time a remarkable effort of pagan thought, endeavouring to extinguish the new religion; the definite statements of a mind that investigated its claims and rejected it. Most of the objections of Celsus are sophistical; a few are admitted difficulties; but the philosophical class of them will be seen to be the corollary from ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... under their guidance; they were reproached with being the first to sell knowledge for money, for they not only demanded pay from those who came to hear their lectures, but they undertook, for a certain sum, to give young men a complete sophistical education. Pupils flocked to them in crowds, and they acquired such riches as neither art nor science had ever before earned among the Greeks. If we consider their doctrines philosophically, they amounted to a denial or renunciation of all true science. They were able to speak with equal plausibility ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... The sophistical papists assert that a person is able by natural strength to love God long before grace has entered his heart, and to perform works of real merit. They believe they are able to fulfill the commandments of God. They believe they are able to do more than God expects of them, so ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... the West Indies." This was his invariable attitude from first to last, and it was no mere scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in Taxation No Tyranny, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves," and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men "who are now repining under English ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... most licentious principles; by dictatorial arrogance,[183] by gross invective, and by airy sarcasm;[184] the bitter contempt which, with its many little artifices, lowers an adversary in the public opinion, was more peculiarly the talent of one of the aptest scholars, the cool, the keen, the sophistical Hurd. The lowest arts of confederacy were connived at by all the disciples,[185] prodigal of praise to themselves, and retentive of it to all others; the world was to be divided into two parts, the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... is, through voluntary and unassisted cooeperation. Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain. The Progressive watchword, "right makes might," sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success. More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of his struggle with the Progressives into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... any kind, could ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believe there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some kind of conviction, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His 'private judgment' indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The right of private ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... imagine that their reason governs words, whilst in fact words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary these ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... and reliable are these straightforward statements of those American historians of the times, and the verdict of even a Boston jury, than the sophistical, elaborate, and reiterated efforts of Mr. Bancroft, in the 43rd and 44th chapters of his History, to implicate the soldiers as the provoking and guilty causes of the collision, and impugning the integrity of the counsel for the prosecution, the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... have realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them. If, then, Tracts for the Million seem a necessity, they also seem an impossibility; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... were partly solid and partly sophistical. They were solid, so far as they asserted that the exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country. They were solid, too, in asserting that no prohibition could prevent their ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... so it is at their own still greater peril, that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to their force, whenever they are assured that their authority would be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen to any sophistical objection of the impossibility of knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not. Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... observed that the greater part of this remarkable speech consists of an elaborate endeavour on the part of the Mytilenaeans to justify themselves. The arguments employed were entirely sophistical, for the Lesbians had no real grievance—and the statement that they were in danger of losing their independence was a pure invention. But they spoke to a partial audience, and the Spartans had already prejudged the case in their favour. It was ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... Historia is in three sections: books I. and II. deal with generalities; books III. and IV. with the physical geography and natural history of Mexico and Peru; books V., VI. and VII. with the religious and political institutions of the aborigines. Apart from his sophistical defence of Spanish colonial policy, Acosta deserves high praise as an acute and diligent observer whose numerous new and valuable data are set forth in a vivid style. Among his other publications are De procuranda salute Indorum libri sex (Salamanca, 1588), De Christo revelato libri novem ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "Every one," says Coverdale, "doth his best to be nighest to the mark. And though they cannot all attain thereto yet shooteth one nigher than another";[159] and again, "Sure I am that there cometh more knowledge and understanding of the scripture by their sundry translations than by all our sophistical doctors. For that one translateth something obscurely in one place, the same translateth another, or else he himself, more manifestly by a more plain vocable."[160] Occasionally the number of experimenters awakened some doubts; ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... the impossibility of living otherwise than by selling your labour, which has created the present Capitalist system, whose vices you begin to recognize." Besides, this way of reasoning is merely a sophistical justification of the evils of the present system. Wagedom was not instituted to remove the disadvantages of Communism; its origin, like that of the State and private ownership, is to be found elsewhere. It is born of slavery and serfdom imposed by force, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... being to demonstrate, by the force of example and contrast, the sophistical absurdity of absolute theories, that, however naturally and harmoniously their parts may be made to correspond in thesis and system as a whole, according to which the same consequences, upon a given principle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... man, with no natural gift for the pen, had developed a surprising amount of effective sarcasm, had all appeared in the local press; with Faversham's ingenious and sophistical replies. Tatham discussed them now with Undershaw in a tone of passionate bitterness. The doctor said little. He had his own ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he was presenting himself at Mr. Fossell's bank, and giving Mr. Fossell across the counter a number of plausible reasons why his pay should be handed to him as usual. He knew all the while that his arguments were sophistical and radically unsound; but he trusted that he was making them cogent. (Why is it that in dreams we feel no remorse for our sins, but only a terror lest we be found out? I cannot tell; but the best men and women of my acquaintance agree that it is so.) Mr. Fossell ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... thus expressed his opinion in writing: "I heard Mr. King on what is called the Missouri question. His manner was dignified, grave, earnest, but not rapid or vehement. There was nothing new in his argument, but he unravelled with ingenious and subtle analysis many of the sophistical tissues of slaveholders. He laid down the position of the natural liberty of man, and its incompatibility with slavery in any shape; he also questioned the constitutional right of the President and Senate to make the Louisiana treaty; but he did not dwell upon those points, nor draw ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... eminently religious men; but they did endless injury to the cause of religion by laying the foundations of a new theology, while equipping the defenders of it with the subtlest of all weapons of offence and defence, and with an inexhaustible store of sophistical arguments of ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the greatest imagination, the most intense feeling, in portraits. But I can't do that kind of thing, and I must stick to my little sophistical fantasies, or my bald reports of nature. But Miss Saunders, if she were not ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... persuading Pons to engage Mme. Cantinet as his nurse, Fraisier had sent for her. He had plied the beadle's wife with sophistical reasoning and subtlety. It was difficult to resist his corrupting influence. And as for Mme. Cantinet—a lean, sallow woman, with large teeth and thin lips—her intelligence, as so often happens with women of the people, had been blunted by a hard ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... in business or pleasure and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigator," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and could not have told for my life whether it was today in ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan |
