"Plausibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you would say if, in some of these moments of unnecessary intermingling with questionable things and doubtful people, you were brought suddenly to this, that you had to formulate into some kind of plausibility your reason for being there? I am afraid it would be a very lame and ragged set of reasons that many of us would have to give. Well! better that we should now have to answer the question 'What doest thou here?' than that we should have to fail ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hand with a great many vessels of water for the service of the bath, with all which they had much ado to extinguish the fire; and his body was so burned all over, that he was not cured of it a good while after. And thus it is not without some plausibility that they endeavor to reconcile the fable to truth, who say this was the drug in the tragedies with which Medea anointed the crown and veil which she gave to Creon's daughter. For neither the things themselves, nor the fire could ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... a certain plausibility in this reasoning, such conduct would appear to every one perfectly absurd; and yet many parents seem to act on a similar principle. A mother who is from time to time, during the week, fretful and impatient, evincing no sincere and hearty consideration for the feelings, still less for the substantial ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... in my brother's schemes can hardly be ranked with follies: you, who know what scheme it was, who know the intoxicating influence of a specious project, and, especially, the wonderful address and plausibility of Catling, the adventurer who was my brother's prime minister and chief agent in that ruinous transaction, will not consider their adopting the phantom as any proof of the folly of either father or son. But let me return. To ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to the sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived stimulus and plausibility from the vista offered by the study of statistics, in which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book Sur l'homme appeared in 1835, discerned endless possibilities. The astonishing uniformities which statistical inquiry disclosed led to the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Dictator, and there was both love and respect mingled with the fear by which he governed. His father was a Presbyterian minister, who taught that slavery was divine, and both were generous and lenient masters. He was the embodiment of the slave power. All its brute force, pious pretenses, plausibility, chivalry, all the good and bad of the Southern character; all the weapons of the army of despotism were concentrated in this man, the friend of my friends, the man who stood ready to set me on the pinnacle of social distinction by his recognition. Across the body ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... same book is in great estimation among the learned in the oriental nations, and by the Indians, who cultivate this art, it is called aljabra and alboret; though the name of the author himself is not known.,' The uncertain authority of these statements, and the plausibility of the preceding explanation, have caused philologists to accept the derivation from al and jabara. Robert Recorde in his Whetstone of Witte (1557) uses the variant algeber, while John Dee (1527-1608) affirms that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Hungary in order to crush a turbulent aristocracy that "preach democracy with their tongues, while their whole lives consist in the daily exercise over their fellow-men of arbitrary power in the most repugnant form." This last pretext, so ostentatiously put forth, loses, however, even its plausibility when contrasted with the policy of the dynasty in 1848, for it is an undoubted fact that, although the reforms effected in our political institutions at that period were consented to by the dynasty without much hesitation, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... with contemporary life a novelist is goaded into too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... Priscilla's theory was new to him. It seemed to have a certain plausibility. He wanted to think it over before committing ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... descendants of the ancient Egyptians, who were scattered amongst the nations by the Assyrians. This belief they principally found upon particular parts of the prophecy from which we have already quoted, and there is no lack of plausibility in the arguments which they deduce therefrom. The Egyptians, say they, were to fall upon the open fields, they were not to be brought together nor gathered; they were to be dispersed through the countries, their idols were to be destroyed, and their images were to cease ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... even hope, not without some plausibility, that moral progress may be all the more rapid in the future because the limit of what may be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far off. The conquest of distance is the great material fact that makes for world-organization; and distance cannot, after all, be ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... of the word Misr (a corruption of Massar); the word Massar is compounded of the two Arabic words Ma and Sar; i.e. Mother of Walls. Possibly some Arabic professor versed in bibliographic lore, to favor a darling hypothesis, has transmuted Massar into Misr, to strengthen the plausibility of the ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... gratuitous addition to the theory, we come to examine the plausibility of the doctrine which assumes, that material atoms, constituted as they now are, are capable, without oversight or direction, of forming a universe like our own, and producing all the animated tribes ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... on the points, but, in the investigation, I was led to see that these were the sources whence misconception would be the most likely to arise, and where evil-minded persons might pretend a wrong, with some show of plausibility, without really any shadow of grounds in truth. I would not only shun every evil, but every appearance of evil, or what might be ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... we might save ourselves by climbing up on the rocks, and abandoning our horses to their fate. It would be no worse for them than starving and freezing to death in the mountains. Divested of its verbal plausibility, his plan was nothing more nor less than a grand thirty-mile race with a high tide along a narrow beach, from which all escape was cut off by precipitous cliffs one and two hundred feet in height. If we reached the ravine in time, all would be well; but if not, our beach would be covered ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... laws which the statute-making power would not dare to enact, even in the absence of written constitutional prohibitions, because the community would rise in rebellion and fight; and this gives some plausibility to the proposition that the law, if not a part of morality, is limited by it. But this limit of power is not coextensive with any system of morals. For the most part it falls far within the lines of any such ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... fiery than philosophic. Wilson's character was the grand object of attack and defence, and round it all the hard fighting was done. Though it was pure and blameless, it offered some points which an unscrupulous adversary might readily misconstrue, with some show of plausibility. His free, erratic life, his little imprudences, his unguarded expressions, and the reckless "Chaldee MS.," might, with a little twisting, be turned to handles of offence, and wrested to his disadvantage. But the fanatic zeal of his opponents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... unconscious that his conclusions were prearranged by his sympathies. No philosophic creed of any importance has ever been constructed, we may well believe, without such sincerity and without such plausibility as results from its correspondence to at least some aspects of the truth. But the result is sufficiently shown by the perplexed controversies which arise. Men agree in their conclusions, though starting from opposite premises; or from the same ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... phantasma, which man has never seen; which exists not upon the least shadow of evidence—which has not even the lowest dictates of sense and plausibility in its favour—on this Ignis fatuus, eluding the grasp, and for ever mocking the folly of its pursuers, thou canst build thine hopes, because it flatters thy wishes ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... "If Boswell had not been a great fool he never would have been a great writer." This is one of those paradoxical statements to which Macaulay likes to give a glittering plausibility. It is true that Boswell wrote a great book, and it is also true that in some regards he was what we are accustomed to designate as a fool; but to connect the two as cause and effect is like saying that a man was a great ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... whether to count on Lockwood as an ally or not. My estimation of him had been rising and falling like the barometer in a summer shower. I had been convinced that he was against us. But his manner and plausibility now equally convinced me that I had been mistaken. I felt that it would take some supreme action on his part to settle the question. ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... should be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—to express it in a word—the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,—the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,—which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of philosophy, which fill the world with splendour for a while, and then sink and are forgotten, the candidates of learning fixed their eyes upon the permanent lustre of moral and religious truth, they would find a more certain direction to happiness. A little plausibility of discourse, and acquaintance with unnecessary speculations, is dearly purchased, when it excludes those instructions which fortify the heart with resolution, and exalt the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... thou, there he also'?" I confess to Thee, O Lord, that to the best of my remembrance (and I have oft spoken of this), that Thy answer, through my waking mother, -that she was not perplexed by the plausibility of my false interpretation, and so quickly saw what was to be seen, and which I certainly had not perceived before she spake, -even then moved me more than the dream itself, by which a joy to the holy woman, to be fulfilled so long ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... why he came there, who and how many are his comrades, what he wants in such a desert place, and why he carries arms, though spoken with a cunning plausibility, has no effect upon the knowing sailors. They proclaim him and his party, some eight or ten men, who are clamorously squabbling in the jungle at no great distance, to be a rough and lawless set of marauders, fearing to come out and show themselves on being challenged, and further insist ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... co-existence between two phenomena, there are therefore also propositions which assert resemblance between them; as, This color is like that color; The heat of to-day is equal to the heat of yesterday. It is true that such an assertion might with some plausibility be brought within the description of an affirmation of sequence, by considering it as an assertion that the simultaneous contemplation of the two colors is followed by a specific feeling termed the feeling of resemblance. But there would be nothing gained by incumbering ourselves, especially ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... great many perfectly well-meaning people, for some months, before I even knew that it had ever been made. A very intelligent and a perfectly candid Frenchman mentioned it one day, in my presence, admitting that he had been staggered by the boldness of the proposition, as well as by the plausibility of the arguments by which it had been maintained. It was so contrary to all previous accounts of the matter, and was, especially, so much opposed to all I had told him, in our frequent disquisitions ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the great heavy-headed clock in the passage. He did not appear at all to know that he had come down in the world through being sold by auction for two pounds ten. He said with great plausibility, "My worth is not to be measured by the amount of money I can command; I am the same personage as before." And I thought it a very true observation, but the philosophy thereof was a little discounted by his haughty demeanour, which had certainly gone up as he himself had come down; and that is ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... word "before" denoted precedence in time, and the first beast passed off the stage of action when the two-horned beast came on, just as Babylon gave place to Persia, which then exercised all the power of Babylon before it, there would be some plausibility in the claim. But the word rendered "before" is [Greek: enopion] (enopion) which means, literally, "in the presence of." And so the language, instead of proving what is claimed, becomes a most positive proof that these beasts are distinct and ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... of society. Such was the theory of martial law which Opimius's bold action gave to his successors. Its weakness lay in the circumstance that it was unknown to the statutes and to the courts; its plausibility was due partly to the fact that, since the desuetude of the dictatorship, no power actually existed in Rome which could legally employ force to crush even the most dangerous popular rising, and partly to the peculiarities of the movement which witnessed the first exercise of this ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... measures of the administration which did not originate with, or were approved by, Mr. Jefferson; and the character of the secretary became thereby seriously compromised before the American people. He was charged, with great plausibility, with being the author of many anonymous political articles in Freneau's paper; but he solemnly declared the accusation to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... tradition is a floating and rather indefinite one. It has some plausibility but there is nothing which to my mind can be dignified by the name of proof. The facts of the Turner case will be found in a Report by Mr. (afterwards Chief) Justice Powell to Sir Peregrine Maitland's Secretary Edward ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Leigh's first meeting in his professional life with that malign experience, injustice in the garb of plausibility, from which there is no appeal. He could not bring himself to acquiesce in silence, though he knew that explanation ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... "You would be pale too if you had nothing to eat." He could hardly speak the words and felt his strength falling. But there was some plausibility in his reply; and the ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... explanation of this apparent contradiction in the author's attitude is to be found in what has been said of its manner of composition. Goethe began it in his romantic youth, and availed himself recklessly of the supernatural elements in the legend, with the disregard of reason and plausibility characteristic of the romantic mood. When he returned to it in the beginning of the new century his artistic standards had changed, and the supernaturalism could now be tolerated only by being made symbolic. Thus he makes ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... given, or from its typographical beauty, or from the plausibility of its new readings, this edition continued in favour, and even 'rose to the price of 10l. 10s. before it was reprinted in 1770-1, while Pope's, in quarto, at the same period sold off at Tonson's sale for 16s. per copy.' Bohn, ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... go into Thibet since the Nepauese were driven out, but only very rarely. I will have all the rig and quaint outlandish gear that Halton brought away. So you see we are the 'Ever Victorious Army.' Yes. Prince Djiddin will be a go." And the others were fain to agree in the plausibility of the scheme. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... 'detain;' and this, it appears to me, has much the same force and intention as the previous words. It is to be noted, however, that it is separated from them by the disjunctive 'or;' and, therefore, it might be argued with some plausibility that any act of forceful or fraudulent detention, after notice, by persons who have originally acquired a child's custody in a lawful way, came within the section. The point is new, and of great importance; ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... an excess of hospitality; and the most marked attention was offered to the Master of Ravenswood, in particular, by their noble entertainers. The truth was, that Lord Bittlebrains had obtained his peerage by a good deal of plausibility, an art of building up a character for wisdom upon a very trite style of commonplace eloquence, a steady observation of the changes of the times, and the power of rendering certain political services to those who could best reward them. His ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... to suggest to my friend, when expatiating on this theme, an inquiry as to how far subsequent events had obliterated the impressions that were then made, and as to the plausibility of reviving, at this more auspicious period, his claims on the heart of his friend. When he thought proper to notice these hints, he gave me to understand that time had made no essential alteration in his sentiments in this respect; ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... opposite direction uninjured, and in some instances forming long ridges of detritus along the surface. These are curious considerations, and it has become a question of much interest, by what means, and under what circumstances, was such a current produced. One hypothetical answer has some plausibility about it. From an investigation of the nature of glaciers, and some observations which seem to indicate that these have at one time extended to lower levels, and existed in regions (the Scottish Highlands an example) where ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... establishments are too commonly in all moral senses anachronists. We hear it alleged with some plausibility against Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though otherwise conceived in a spirit proper for bringing out the whole sentiment of his pathetic situation, that the king is too Protestant, and too evangelical, after ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... hostilities arose between the advocates of segars and their opponents, which occupied the attention of thousands, who took a lively interest in the successful issue of the controversy. By the advocates for the practice it was urged with some plausibility of statement, that as to the pleasure of a segar, none but those who used them ought to express an opinion upon the point—that to appeal to experience, tobacco was in more universal use among nations than bread corn—that it had been known to stay the plague, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... again—the same, familiar, disarming plausibility of Martin's, the old trick of making her seem to be ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... cadence. This rhythmical measure he proceeds to show in Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, and even Wyatt; and thus concludes, that, it was first abandoned by Surrey, in whom it very rarely occurs. This hypothesis, it should be observed, derives some additional plausibility from a passage in Gascoyne's 'Notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English,' printed in 1575. 'Whosoever do peruse and well consider his (Chaucer's) works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one selfsame ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of people all over this country. These losses are doubtless irreparable so far as the stocks in question are concerned. The losers will have to look elsewhere for recovery. That they will do so with good courage is not to be doubted. It might be argued with reasonable plausibility that Americans are the greatest fatalists in the world; the readiest to take chances and the least given to whining when the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... of all his teachings and his hopes? What would this be but to imbitter his reflections needlessly. Such were the specious reasons with which I fed my self-love, and satisfied my conscience; but now, as I read his name in that terrible catalogue, their plausibility served me no longer, and at last I forgot ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... urgency of her affairs endure the delays of Parliamentary assistance. And for such aids it is likewise apparent that she received more, and that with the love of her people, than any two of her predecessors that took most; which was a fortune strained out of the subjects, through the plausibility of her comportment, and (as I would say, without offence) the prodigal distribution of her grace to all sorts of subjects; for I believe no prince living, that was so tender of honour, and so exactly stood for the preservation of sovereignty, was so great a courtier ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... patrimony with your own discredit. He is always slighting the general opinion, and wondering why such and such men should be applauded. Commend a good divine, he cries postilling; a philologer, pedantry; a poet, rhiming; a school-man, dull wrangling; a sharp conceit, boyishness; an honest man, plausibility. He comes to publick things not to learn, but to catch, and if there be but one solecism, that is all he carries away. He looks on all things with a prepared sourness, and is still furnished with a pish beforehand, or some musty proverb ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... island and that there is also a communication between Cygnet and Collier's Bays, behind the islands of the Archipelago, where it is also probable there is an opening trending to the south-east. The great rise and fall of the tides in the neighbourhood of Point Gantheaume gives a plausibility to this opinion; and the only thing that I know against it is the trifling depth of the water between that point and Cape Villaret. This however may be caused by the numerous banks and channels existing there, and which, of themselves ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... how the Third Act of a comedy which had tied itself in this kind of a knot simply could not be played. The author had completely sacrificed plausibility, and it was not uninteresting to see him twisting and turning, hedging and bluffing to save it; and a little uncomfortable to note the conviction oozing away out of the performers.... Queer also that it isn't more generally recognised that to come to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... now no one to look after them; Junior must be started right at learning the business of which he would soon be the head, as his uncle had shown himself far too easy-going for large executive responsibility. So, I stayed on, doing just enough to keep a face of plausibility upon my pretexts for not returning to Washington. The fact was that Carlotta's death had deepened my mood of distaste into disgust. It had set me to brooding over the futility and pettiness of my activities in politics, of all activities of whatever kind. I watched Ed and my children ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... thus the fictitious rigid body of reference is of no avail in the general theory of relativity. The motion of clocks is also influenced by gravitational fields, and in such a way that a physical definition of time which is made directly with the aid of clocks has by no means the same degree of plausibility as in the special theory ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... 1836, 1857, and 1877, and by panics we do not mean such local whirlwinds as have desolated Wall Street, but wide-spread commercial crises, affecting all branches of business. This periodicity is ascribed, and with much plausibility, to the fact that inasmuch as panics are the result of certain mental conditions, they recur as soon as the experience of the previous one has lost its influence, or, in other words, as often as a new ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... into a continuous narrative. The adroitness with which this is done makes the poem rank as a masterpiece of construction. The atmosphere of romantic fable in which it is enveloped even gives it a certain plausibility of effect almost amounting to epic unity. In the fabulous superhuman element that appears in all the stories, and in their natural surroundings of wood, or mountain, or sea—always realised with fresh enjoyment and vivid form and colour—there ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... on the occupations of those by whom the ruins had been formerly possessed, they wandered for some time from one moss-grown shrine to another, under the guidance of Oldbuck, who explained, with much plausibility, the ground-plan of the edifice, and read and expounded to the company the various mouldering inscriptions which yet were to be traced upon the tombs of the dead, or under the vacant niches of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... convinced of Mayer's ignorance. Finding him at the hotel had done half, his arguments and manner the rest. And during the drive back his explanation of Chrystie's disappearance had retained a consoling plausibility. She held to it fiercely, conned it over, tried to force herself to see the girl impishly bent on a ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... have this effect, care much about its truth or falsehood,—might be disposed to assert that the ignorant and debased part of the population, of this Christian and Protestant country, are but so much the worse for the riddance of some parts of the superstitions of former ages. He might allege, with plausibility, that the system which imposed so many falsehoods, vain observances, and perversions of moral principles, acknowledging nevertheless some correct rules of morality, as an external practical concern, had the advantage of enjoining them, as far as it chose to do so, with the force of superstition, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... coincidence in minute details; yet it seems only by these that the kingdom of Ulysses, or any other, can be identified, as, if such as idea be admitted, every small and rocky island in the Ionian Sea, containing a good port, might, with equal plausibility, assume the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the facts of Alberti's life are to be found in the Latin biography included in Muratori. It has been conjectured, and not without plausibility, by the last editor of Alberti's complete works, Bonucci, that this Latin life ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... which he was a proficient. His splendid appearance, his captivating address, his thorough familiarity with the modes of society, gave him the entree to many houses where his talents amply requited the hospitality he received. He possessed, amongst his other gifts, an immense amount of plausibility, and people found it, besides, very difficult to believe ill of that well-bred, somewhat retiring man, who, in circumstances of the very narrowest fortunes, not only looked and dressed like a gentleman, but actually brought up a daughter ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of personal pronouns being a proof of Japanese "impersonality," i.e., of lack of consciousness of self, this very deficiency may, with even more plausibility, be used to establish the opposite view. Child psychology has established the fact that an early phenomenon of child mental development is the emphasis laid on "meum" and "tuum," mine and yours. The child is a thoroughgoing individualist in feelings, conceptions, and language. The first personal ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... provisions of the instrument as a whole yield but one meaning. The treaty is not broad enough to sustain the passage of troops in time of war. Nor would there seem to be any plausibility in the claim that certain mutual explanations exchanged between the two Governments at the time of the signing of the treaty gave tenable ground for the fulfilment of such a right as that which was ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... honest as Jamie was, Black Jock's plausibility appealed to him, and he began to think that Walker perhaps was not so bad as he was made to appear. Again, Jamie knew that Rundell was a man of hasty temper and impulsive judgments, and could not brook trouble, and he began ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... magician. If you do not know, you must confess that you are bringing an accusation of the nature of which you are entirely ignorant. To think that you should be so ignorant not only of all literature, but even of popular tales, that you cannot even invent charges that will have some show of plausibility! For of what use for the kindling of love is an unfeeling chilly creature like a fish, or indeed anything else drawn from the sea, unless indeed you propose to bring forward in support of your lie the legend that Venus was ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... as a very odd speech, for the Zulus generally attack an enemy first and take his cattle afterwards; still, there was a certain amount of plausibility about it. While I was still wondering what it all might mean, the Zulus began to run past us in companies towards the river. Suddenly a shout announced that they had found the spoor of the cattle, and the whole Impi of them started down it at a run till they vanished over a rise ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... her cleverness might have saved her, had she been of one of those "good families" whom fashionables the world over recognize, regardless of their wealth or poverty, because recognition of them gives an elegant plausibility to the pretense that Mammon is not the supreme god in the Olympus of aristocracy. But—who were the Rangers? They might be "all right" in Saint X, but where was Saint X? Certainly, not on any map in the ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... people at hand with a great many vessels of water for the service of the bath, with all which they had much ado to extinguish the fire; and his body was so burned all over that he was not cured of it a good while after. And thus it was not without some plausibility that they endeavor to reconcile the fable to truth, who say this was the drug in the tragedies with which Medea anointed the crown and veils which she gave ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... conversation, for neglecting everything not essential to her present plausibility. "A woman like Lady Fanny can have no 'grounds' for anything—for any indignation, I mean, or for any revenge worth twopence. In this particular case at all events they've been sacrificed with such extravagance that, as an injured wife, she hasn't had the gumption to ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... are undoubted—they are known and acknowledged throughout Europe. The gentlemen of the law, who fill her benches of justice, and who are heard at the bar, are eminently distinguished by the powers of reason, and by plausibility of address.... Our historians have not been numerous. Some, however, who have unrolled our records of truth claim a considerable portion of praise.... The prospect before us is now brightening. Histories have been promised from pens which have raised ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... to hang together. A certain plausibility creeps into it. The late Nutcombe was crazy about golf. The governor used to play with him now and then at Walton Heath. It was the only thing Nutcombe seemed to live for. That being so, if you got rid of his slice for him it seems to me, that you earned your money. The ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... of knowledge of the great world, she had considerable knowledge of human nature, which stood her wonderfully in stead. She had no notion of being made sport of for the elegantes, and, with all Lady Masham's plausibility of persiflage, she never obtained her end, and never elicited anything really absurd by all attempts to draw her out—out she would not be drawn. After an unconquerable silence and all the semblance of dead stupidity, Lady Bearcroft suddenly showed signs of life, however, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... DENNIS EADIE's Disraeli for a good deal. Where it was at all possible—which it was in general; Mr. PARKER only sprinkled his extravagances—the ease and plausibility of it were quite admirable. This adroit player gave us the tact, the wit, the gallantry, the generosity, the romantic exuberance. It was a fine performance, and it will be finer as its firm outline is filled in. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... the vast sums it cost the Roebuck-Langdon clique to maintain the prices of National Coal, and so give plausibility to the fiction that the public was buying eagerly. In the third week of my campaign, Melville was so deeply involved that he had to let the two others take ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... apologies, therefore, in which men take refuge as an excuse for their devoting themselves with more plausibility to mere inactivity do certainly not deserve to be listened to; when, for instance, they tell us that those who meddle with public affairs are generally good-for-nothing men, with whom it is discreditable to be compared, and miserable ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the book are Oriental, and are known to have been current in Persia and Arabia eight hundred years and more before the dates the Church assigns to them as facts. As for the true Western figments, they lack the Oriental plausibility. Think you I am credulous enough to believe that St. Ida joined a decapitated head to its body? that Cuthbert's carcass directed his bearers where to go, and where to stop; that a city was eaten up of rats to punish one Hatto for comparing the poor to mice; that angels have ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... people met, The Case of Summerfield was on men's tongues. Was Caxton's contention possible? Was it true that, by the use of potassium, water could be set on fire, and that any one possessing this baneful secret could destroy the world? The plausibility with which the idea was presented, the bare directness of the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too real to be invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination. People could not decide where ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... her mother's antiquated simplicity in supposing that to be still a grave and operating principle which was a bygone barbarism to himself and other absentees from the island. His father, as a money-maker, might have practical wishes on the matter of descendants which lent plausibility to the conjecture of Avice and her mother; but to Jocelyn he had never expressed himself in favour of the ancient ways, old-fashioned as ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... plausibility—he could convince people, against their instincts, even against their wills, that he was telling the truth. And Mary, after a swift ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... unamiable disposition, took down the rifle as an act of self-assertion, and walked out into the twilight with it on his shoulder. It was simply a contradictious action, as there was no warranty for it in vert and venison. But he had to garnish his action with an appearance of plausibility, and nothing suggested itself. The only course open to him was to get away out of sight, with implication of a purpose vaguely involving fire-arms. A short turn in the oak-wood—as far, perhaps, as Drews ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... externals or clothes of men. It is necessary to look behind them and beyond them if we would reach the genuine human heart. One of the reasons why he detested what he called stump oratory was because he believed it to be a great school of insincerity. Its end was not truth, but plausibility. It was the effort of interested men to throw opinions into such forms as might most captivate uninstructed men; to keep back every unpopular side; to magnify everything in them that was seductive. He once said to me that two great curses seemed to him eating away the heart ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... apprehension as to the insecurity of slavery as a hypocritical pretext for revolution; believing that the more absorbing motive was to establish an order of nobility, either with or without monarchy. There is some plausibility for giving the ambitious motive the greater prominence; but a more severe analysis of the whole question will, it is believed, place slavery perpetuation in the foreground as the origin of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... undertaken to guide and control me. If they failed they, more than I, must answer for the failure. Sophistry of this kind passes well enough with one who wants excuses, and may even array itself in a cloak of plausibility; it was strong in my mind by virtue of the strong resentment from which it sprang, and the strong ally to which its forces were joined. Passion and self-assertion were at one; my conquest would be two-fold. While the Countess ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment,—would not have shown himself inferior to the duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... foregoing samples will suffice. So far is his law of evolution of the sciences from being tenable, that, by following his example, and arbitrarily ignoring one class of facts, it would be possible to present, with great plausibility, just the opposite generalisation to that which he enunciates. While he asserts that the rational order of the sciences, like the order of their historic development, "is determined by the degree of simplicity, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... own composition at all is a matter of uncertainty; there would be nothing in the least unusual about any composer taking another man's air as a theme for variations, and it has been suggested, with some plausibility, that the tune is that of an old ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... midst of the actual ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of direct participation, at all. There presumably was the interest—in the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so many wonders ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... through his light-coloured hair, and a gaze which usually settles in fixed admiration on his faultless boots, can be no one but Howard Tracy; the third, a fellow with far more meaning and strength in his face, betrays himself to be Mackworth, by the insinuating plausibility and Belial-like grace of his manner and aspect. A dangerous serpent this; one never sees him, or hears him speak, or observes the dark glitter of his eye, without being reminded of a cerastes lythely rustling through the ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... universally recognized as a great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... with what seemed absolute frankness about her future life in the cottages, answering little questionings of Lady Shuttleworth's with a discretion and plausibility that would have warmed Fritzing's anxious heart, dwelling most, for here the ground was safest, on her uncle, his work, his gifts and character, and Lady Shuttleworth, completely fascinated, had offered her help of every sort, help in the arranging of her little ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... take, for the protection of all other people, whatever pains or trouble he takes for his own security—to watch, for instance, as vigilantly that his neighbour's house as that his own is not broken into. And while the one solitary claim of any plausibility to universal equality of treatment requires to be largely qualified before it can be conceded, there is no other claim of the kind which does not carry with it its own refutation; there is no other which does not partake of the absurdity patent in the communistic notion that all the members ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... think, considering his youth, that he deserved great credit for his discretion and judgment; for I believe that many an older man might have been deceived by the plausibility of their manners and ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... knowledge, owes it to a decent regard to the opinions of others, to produce some credible testimony in favor of his veracity. I am peculiarly placed in regard to these two great essentials having little more than its plausibility to offer in favor of my philosophy, and no other witness than myself to establish the important facts that are now about to be laid before the reading world for the first time. In this dilemma, I fully feel the weight of responsibility under which I stand; ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... particular measures, if there happened to be any variations of mode or sentiment in the application of different bodies, to take occasion, from these variations, to reject the whole as inconsistent. This scheme had been practised with much plausibility on the question of reform. No reform, they contended, was practicable, which would content the nation; because of the many petitions which had been presented from the different counties, cities, and ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... poetic method with his philosophical idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,' ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the "Yellow Emperor": Mei Yao-ch'en asks, with some plausibility, whether there is an error in the text as nothing is known of Huang Ti having conquered four other Emperors. The SHIH CHI (ch. 1 ad init.) speaks only of his victories over Yen Ti and Ch'ih Yu. In the LIU T'AO it is mentioned that he "fought seventy battles ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Bengal it is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only a few of the most enlightened amongst them have so far even recognized the necessity of making some attempt to bridge if they wish to give the slightest plausibility to their professions. It would be less far-fetched, though the analogy would still be very halting, to compare the position of the Bengalee "moderates" with that of the middle classes in England before the ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... as one of the two infinite divine attributes cognizable by us has, with a certain amount of plausibility, been urged as a note of materialism. And this reproach has been supported by reference to his insistence that in man the body and the soul are only two different aspects of the same thing; for to him the ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... the other wofully deprived of its end. Another savant detects no less than eight fragments, with interpolations; though perhaps no biblical critic ejusdem farinae has yet detected eight Isaiahs. There are about ten other theories of similar plausibility and value. Meanwhile Baumeister argues that the Pythian Hymn (our second part) is an imitation of the Delian; by a follower, not of Homer, but of Hesiod. Thus, the Hesiodic school was closely connected with Delphi; the Homeric with Ionia, so that Delphi rarely occurs ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... had only negative doctrines, and had a disdain of those inquiries which sought to penetrate the mysteries of existence. They did not believe that absolute truth was attainable by man. And they attacked the prevailing systems with great plausibility. Thus Sextus attacked both induction and definitions. "If we do not know the thing we define," said he, "we do not comprehend it because of the definition, but we impose on it the definition because we know ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... plausibility of what he had said actually cover the truth? Did she owe that first golden hour with Rodney, his passionate thrilling avowal of his life's philosophy, to nothing deeper in herself than her unconscious power of rousing in him an equally unconscious, primitive sex desire? Was the fine mutuality ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... hour, and, admitting it did start before you, you had plenty of time to water the saddle stock and overtake it before it could possibly reach the herd. I can tell a lie myself, but a good one always has some plausibility. You rascals were up to ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... from an apprentice boy in the coal trade, to a post-captain in the royal navy, he has had no opportunity of cultivating letters. After this account of myself, the public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed book-maker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man, zealously exerting himself in the service of his country, and determined to give the best account he is able of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... coolness, availed himself of the interval to try every influence he could once have set in motion, and as it were to gather his strength for a mighty tussle with the king of terrors, when his pale fingers should tap at his cell door. I have seen two of his letters, written with consummate plausibility and adroitness, and which have given me altogether a very high idea of his powers. But they were all received with a terrifying coldness or with absolute silence. There was no reasoning against an intuition. Every human ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... be maintained with some plausibility that the rural schools of the West are superior to those farther east. The East is conservative and slow to change. The West has fewer traditions to break. Many strong personalities of initiative and push have come out of the East ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... J. D. Baldwin, author of "Prehistoric Nations," declares that this system of village-communities existed in India long before the Aryan conquest. He attributes it to Cushite or AEthiopic influence, and with great plausibility. Nevertheless, the same system flourished in prehistoric Greece, even till the Roman conquests. Mr. Palgrave observed it existing in Arabia. "Oman is less a kingdom than an aggregation of municipalities," he remarks; "each town, each village has its separate existence and corporation, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... necessity of personal experience consisted in the power of choosing and applying what had been read, and of discriminating by the light of analogy the practicable from the impracticable, and probability from mere plausibility. Without a judgment matured and steadied by actual experience, a man would read to little or perhaps to bad purpose; but yet that experience, which in exclusion of all other knowledge has been derived from one man's life, is in the present day scarcely worthy ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fantastic story is that it lacks artistic measure and objective plausibility. Immermann, omnivorous reader that he was, wrote this part of his book, not from life, but from other books. And even granting that he carried out his plan with a reasonable degree of cleverness, the average reader is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... avaricious designs, and screen his name from opprobrium, he told the world that I was hopelessly insane; and that the discovery of this fact, one hour after his marriage, had induced him to send me abroad under the care of a faithful and judicious nurse. To give plausibility to this statement, a paragraph was inserted in the New York papers announcing that I was a raving maniac and an inmate of an English asylum for lunatics. Mr. Clayton, my lawyer, was the sole surviving witness of my final interview, and of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Phrygia, and those of Cybele his mistress, like their worship, much resembled those of Adonis and Bakchos, Osiris and Isis. Their Asiatic origin is universally admitted, and was with great plausibility claimed by Phrygia, which contested the palm of antiquity with Egypt. They, more than any other people, mingled allegory with their religious worship, and were great inventors of fables; and their sacred traditions as to Cybele and Atys, whom all admit to be Phrygian Gods, were very ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... (The Castaway) as a piece of homely, effective narrative. (Defoe wrote for the man in the street. He was a literary jack-of-all-trades whom dignified authors of his day would not countenance, but who possessed genius.) It relies upon directness and plausibility of substance and style rather than temerity of phrase. Yet it never sags into tameness. Notice how everyday expressions ("My business was to hold my breath," "I took to my heels") add subtly to our belief that what Defoe is telling us is true. Notice also that such expressions ("the least ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... separate Education," because it is said, with some plausibility, that the manner in which theology mixes up with history and moral philosophy renders common instruction in them almost impossible. The reasoning is pushed too far. Yet the objection should be well weighed; though we warn those who push it very far not to fall ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... is probably a Swiftian plausibility to give an air of truth to his remarks. Certain parts of America were at that time reputed to be inhabited ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Emancipation Proclamation at least a year too late; but we must now see that the time selected for its promulgation was as skilfully chosen as its aim was laudable. Had it come out a year earlier, in 1861, the friends of the Rebels could have said, with much plausibility, that its appearance had rendered a restoration of the Union impossible, and that the slaveholders had no longer any hope of having their property-rights respected under the Federal Constitution. But by allowing seventeen months to elapse before issuing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... thought a perplexing and moving question, and at last frames a conclusion with painstaking precision in perfectly clear language, it is not pleasant to have that accurate utterance misstated with tireless reiteration, and with infinite art and plausibility. But for this vexation Lincoln could find no remedy, and it was in vain that he again and again called attention to the fact that he had expressed neither a "doctrine," nor an "invitation," nor any "purpose" or policy whatsoever. But as it seemed not altogether ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Sibyl of Rizpah and Vastness and Lucretius and The Voyage, to whom it must seem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are—(but they scarce count)—who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was not uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility to infuriate whatever poet-sects there ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... phenomena, on the other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... about space) unmeaning. Like space it has been realized gradually: in the Homeric poems, or even in the Hesiodic cosmogony, there is no more notion of time than of space. The conception of being is more general than either, and might therefore with greater plausibility be affirmed to be a condition or quality of the mind. The a priori intuitions of Kant would have been as unintelligible to Plato as his a priori synthetical propositions to Aristotle. The philosopher of Konigsberg supposed himself to be analyzing a necessary ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... than weakened their ascendency. But the present crime was known to be too common, to permit so lavish an expenditure of their immunities, and the old inquisitors opposed the wish of their younger colleague with great plausibility, and with some show of reason. It was finally resolved that they should themselves decide ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... simply nugatory, nothing short of destructive; and though there is a great notion just now that the British Constitution admits of being fitted upon every people under heaven, from the Blacks to the Italians, I do not know what has occurred to give plausibility to the anticipation. England herself once attempted the costume of republicanism, but she found that monarchy was part of her ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... real zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cast out as in old times, is puerile; but Hawthorne was, in other tales, not averse to a naturalistic explanation of his mysteries, as if a basis of matter of fact, however irrelevant essentially, gave more plausibility to their truth. If the snake is "egotism," if it is the torture of self in a man, if its cure is the loss of self in love, then making the snake real and physical is absurdity; medicine and morals are confounded; the scientific fact has nothing to do with the artistic meaning ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... while looking at a stage-setting more colossal than any ever contemplated by dramatist before. We should see a wide stretch of the plain of Shinar; in the foreground a tower so tall as to give color of plausibility to a speech which prates of an early piercing of heaven and so large as to provide room for a sleeping multitude on its scaffoldings. Brick kilns, derricks, and all the apparatus and machinery of building should be on all hands, and from the summit of a mound should ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of course paid by the consumers in the Confederate States, in the form of an additional per centum on the prices of merchandise. Some suppose this arrangement has the sanction of certain members of our government. The plausibility of this scheme (if it really exists) is the fact that steamers having munitions of war rarely get through the blockading fleet without trouble, while those having only merchandise arrive in safety almost daily. Gen. D. Green intimates that Mr. Memminger, and Frazer & Co., Charleston, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... Plea for a New Type of Play. The Period of Pragmatism. The Undramatic Drama. The Value of Stage Conventions. The Supernatural Drama. The Irish National Theatre. The Personality of the Playwright. Themes and Stories of the Stage. Plausibility in Plays. Infirmity of Purpose. Where to Begin a Play. Continuity of Structure. Rhythm and Tempo. The Plays of Yesteryear. A New Defense of Melodrama. The Art of the Moving-Picture Play. The One-Act Play in America. Organizing an Audience. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... philosophy of the dark ages,—that philosophy which Puseyism, in its work of diffusing over the present the barbarism and ignorance of the past, would so fain revive and restore, and which has been ever engaged, as its proper employment, in imparting plausibility to error and absurdity, and in furnishing apology for crime. The third was the Spirit of Laws, by Montesquieu. It placed legislation on the basis of philosophy; and straightway law began to spring up among the nations out of a new soil. The fourth and last great ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... said, "has all the plausibility of his class. He has learned it in the money school, where these things become an art. He believes himself secure—he is even now seeking for me. He is all prepared with his story. No, my ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... subject, which (in truth) seem such incoherent shreds, that it is impossible to tie them together; and therefore, what I purpose is, to answer such objections to the Test, as are advanced either by this author, or any other which have any appearance of reason, or plausibility. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... that the messages were on a lower wave length than any receiver then in existence could receive with any degree of clarity, and the additional fact that they appeared to come from an immense distance lent a certain air of plausibility to these ebullitions in the Sunday magazine sections. For some weeks the feature writers harped on the subject, but the hurried construction of new receivers which would work on a lower wave length yielded no results, and the solemn pronouncements ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... his head, and declined further experiment. Indeed he went further, and characterized the Baron as the most intolerable formal pedant he had ever had the misfortune to meet with, and the Chief of Glennaquoich as a Frenchified Scotchman, possessing all the cunning and plausibility of the nation where he was educated, with the proud, vindictive, and turbulent humour of that of his birth. 'If the devil,' he said, 'had sought out an agent expressly for the purpose of embroiling ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... say that the views of the United States on these questions were exactly contrary to those of the English. Such vital differences could, then, only be settled by war; and war was accordingly declared in June, 1812. It was a bold step for the young nation, but there was enough of plausibility in the English claims to make it evident that they could never be set aside by diplomacy; and so, with hardly a thought of the odds against her, the United States dashed in to win justice at the muzzles of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Chris raised a feeble lamentation, but he was evidently a person whose objections nobody was accustomed to heed. Captain Magnus, who might with plausibility have urged claims superior to those of all the rest, assented to the arrangement with a willingness which filled me with boding. I had caught his restless furtive eye fixed gloatingly upon me more ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day, the judge could hardly have been ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the Christians—this attempt to suppress religion thought to be hostile to the imperial authority, and not without some plausibility, since many Christians refused to be enrolled in the armies, and suffered death sooner than enlist—was the last great act of Diocletian. Whether wearied with the cares of State, or disgusted with his duties, or ill, or craving rest and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... included by it? The positive school contend that it is general happiness; and there, they say, is the answer to the great question—What is the test of conduct, and the true end of life? But though, as we shall see in another moment, there is some plausibility in this, there is really nothing in it of the special answer we want. Our question is, What is the true happiness? And what is the answer thus far?—That the true happiness is general happiness; that it is the happiness of men in societies; that it is happiness equally distributed. But this ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... method of attack by which some men have assaulted revealed religion, we might with as good color, and with the same success, make the wisdom and power of God in his creation appear to many no better than foolishness. There is an air of plausibility which accompanies vulgar reasonings and notions, taken from the beaten circle of ordinary experience, that is admirably suited to the narrow capacities of some, and to the laziness of others. But this advantage is in a great measure lost, when a painful, comprehensive ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... possibly divest herself of responsibility. Of course she could not for one moment imagine that her father had lifted his hand against Oliver; but his visit to the house shortly before the murder gave a certain air of plausibility to the tale: and for this Lesley ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack upon Christianity were mere sound and fury, signifying nothing, then there would be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and a great deal of point and plausibility—there are, in brief, bullets in the gun, teeth in the tiger,—and so it is no wonder that they excite the ire of men who hold, as a primary article of belief, that their acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring Jahveh ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... body may nevertheless be unable to "fret" a different body which is considerably softer and thinner, if the "texture" does not admit the small particles.[55] Reasoning by analogy served to explain the logical plausibility. In other words, he was very open-minded. He refused to dismiss all such claims, and provided analogy as a reason for keeping his mind open; yet he refused to accept particular claims of medicine that dissolved stones, because the evidence ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... world—the natural; and there is no connection between them. This is very convincing if we find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds. But if we find it impossible to believe this—and surely the impossibility is patent—its plausibility is gone. It is a shining example of this false abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and death, that ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... plea of immemorial occupancy or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... probability, likelihood; credibleness[obs3]; likeliness &c. adj.; vraisemblance[Fr], verisimilitude, plausibility; color, semblance, show of; presumption; presumptive evidence, circumstantial evidence; credibility. reasonable chance, fair chance, good chance, favorable chance, reasonable prospect, fair prospect, good prospect, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... these contentions there lies, beneath the surface plausibility, not so much a confusion of thought as a failure to recognize an essential difference of conditions. Even on shore the protection of private property rests upon the simple principle that injury is not to be ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... on the order of the world, whether well-founded or not (to Mina they seemed to possess much plausibility), did not advance matters. A silence fell between the two, and Cecily walked again to the window. The sun was setting on Blent, and it glowed in ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... himself. Such do not know Mrs. Eddy. She does an inordinate deal of protecting, but in no distinctly named and specified case in her history has Number Two been the object of it. Instances have been claimed, but they have failed of proof, and even of plausibility. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... (1)—yet for the most part without great success in the way of finding a solution. The supposition that (1) the creed, rite or legend in question has sprung up, so to speak, accidentally, in one place, and then has travelled (owing to some inherent plausibility) over the rest of the world, is of course one that commends itself readily at first; but on closer examination the practical difficulties it presents are certainly very great. These include the migrations of customs and myths in quite early ages of the earth across trackless ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... account for the soldier's absence in other ways than by desertion, some of his comrades going so far as to express the opinion that he was murdered at the instigation of his captain. None of these theories, however, seem to be more than conjectures with various degrees of plausibility. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... accident to his head, and that when he left the hospital, found that he had entirely lost his memory; that, while in this state of oblivion, he had married again and then, when his memory returned, realised to his horror his unfortunate position. Plausibility would seem to have been one of Holmes' most useful gifts; men and women alike—particularly the latter—he seems to have deceived with ease. His appearance was commonplace, in no way suggesting the conventional criminal, his manner courteous, ingratiating and seemingly candid, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... whatever their reasons, they meant by these laws relating to aliens to put the acquirement of citizenship under more stringent regulations, and to check the growth and promulgation of seditious doctrines. If it be true, as is sometimes maintained with some plausibility, that citizens, to be intrusted with self-government, should be endowed with a certain degree of intelligence and virtue, then the aim of the framers of the laws, in the first case, was a good one; and, in ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... legend or any traces of Judaic symbolism and traditions existed either in the monuments of the period or in the ritual of the masons before the fourteenth century, it is surely reasonable to recognize the plausibility of the contention put forward by a great number of masonic writers—particularly on the Continent—that the Judaic elements penetrated into Masonry by means of the Templars.[295] The Templars, as we have already seen, had taken their name from ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... judgment on her without a full knowledge of the minute particulars, and, moreover, a pretty fair capacity to understand such details and their various relations. Before proceeding with the narrative of the event referred to, we may remark that while, on the one hand, it may be argued, with great plausibility, that her numerous disasters and misfortunes prove that she is unfitted for the navigation of the sea, it may, on the other hand, be argued, with equal plausibility, that the very fact of her having come through such appalling trials unconquered, though buffeted, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... accuracy of execution, this may rank with the best in Europe. We can trace the beginnings of this lighter and most graceful work as early as the thirties, and it might be contended with a certain plausibility that it began at the Universities. Certainly the two earliest examples known to me—the copy of her Statutes presented to Charles I. by Oxford in 1634, and the Little Gidding Harmony of 1635, the tools employed in which have been shown by Mr. ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... piece of mockery, of false tinsel and fringe and folly and pretence, is your stage-player beside one of these fellows! Who is going to sit three weary hours at the Haymarket, bored by the assumed plausibility of the actor, when the real, the actual, the positive thing that he so poorly simulates is to be met on the railroad, at the station, in the club, on the chain-pier, or the penny steamer? Is there any one, I ask, who will pay to see the plaster-cast when he can ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... military classes maintain that it is either derived from the baculus or staff with which knights were usually invested, or from bas chevalier, an inferior kind of knight; the literary classes, with more plausibility, perhaps, trace its origin to the custom which prevailed universally among the Greeks and Romans, and which was followed even in Italy till the thirteenth century, of crowning distinguished individuals with laurel; hence the recipient of this ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... that he was a man of parts, conscientiousness, and plausibility, besides being educated and a wreck to his appetites. He told me all about it. Colleges had turned him out, and distilleries had taken him in. Did I tell you his name? It was Clifford Wainwright. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Mahomet, she gained a young, handsome, and affectionate husband. Twenty years of constancy, of kind and respectful attention, on the part of Mahomet, fully justified her choice. It may, indeed, be imagined, and we confess the supposition bears the appearance of some plausibility, that the affection of Cadijah was not uninfluenced by the handsome person and insinuating eloquence of her youthful suitor. And we cannot refuse our applause to the conduct of Mahomet, who, whatever might have been her motives, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and his friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility, their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth? In the physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his very essence lie in the confusion ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... arguments with which his adversaries endeavour to overwhelm him. He was particularly admirable on Monday last in the house of Signor Frederico Ghisilieri; and what especially pleased me was, that before replying to the contrary arguments, he amplified and enforced them with new grounds of great plausibility, so as to leave his adversaries in a more ridiculous plight, when he ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... remain behind and collect a fresh cargo ready for their return, after which he meant to perambulate the continent of America, and show his countrymen the path to unbounded wealth. Jones, it seems, was so much taken with the plausibility of a scheme, which presented at once the prospect of adventure, fame, and profit, that he advanced money to Ledyard to purchase a part of the cargo for the outfit; but, being suddenly called away to L'Orient, to look after his prize concerns, his zeal for this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... class, a class so numerous in all the countries of Europe in the Middle Ages? We are perfectly contented to form no opinion upon the subject; but if compelled to express one, we should say that this last supposition (which is no novelty) possessed decidedly more likelihood than any other. Its plausibility will be confirmed by attending to the apparent signification of the name Robin Hood. The natural refuge and stronghold of the outlaw was the woods. Hence he is termed by Latin writers silvatious, by the Normans forestier. The Anglo-Saxon robber or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... if they contravene their favorite theories or doctrines, are to them unmeaning twaddle; though they are always ready to press the good book into their service, so far as they are able by forced constructions of detached passages, to give plausibility to their own ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... deserves more particular notice, that of a young man named Angukualak, the son of a most noted sorcerer, Uiverunna. His parents had instructed him in all the secrets of their art, and his confession gives at least plausibility to the opinion, that the influence of Satan is permitted to be sometimes visibly exercised, in the dark places of the earth, though, while the effects of that influence are palpable in the perpetration of the grossest vices and most barbarous cruelty, it is very immaterial ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous |
