"Explicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impulse was explicable. She had often thought over the tales told of visits to the habitation of the "Good Folk" on Borough Hill, and the transfer of the pilgrimage to Thor's Stone. She had, of late, repeatedly asked herself whether, by a visit thither, she might not ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... 368: Another notion, less easily explicable and less commonly entertained, but interesting for its literary associations, was the notion of a mountain of loadstone in the Indian ocean, which prevented access to the torrid zone by drawing the nails from ships and thus wrecking them. This imaginary mountain, with some variations ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... must be consistent with the attributes of the Deity, if such a Being exists, Evolution must be consistent with those attributes. And, if so, the evolution of the universe, which is neither more nor less explicable than that of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... within the limits of coincidence. It certainly seemed odd that this one particular cleric should be so varying and elusive. It was singular that Paley, alone among men, should swell and shrink and alter like a phantom, while all else remained solid. But the thing was explicable; two men had been ill and there was an end of it; only I went again the next night, and a clear-coloured elegant youth with powdered hair bounded up to me, and told me with boyish excitement ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... probably very old, since the words of which they are composed are in many cases not retained in the colloquial tongue, in which they must once have been included, and are in some instances lost from the language altogether, so much so as to be only partially explicable even by scholars. The argument applies likewise, in their degree, to camps, barrows, and other ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... further that the necessity for taking out a license in India can inflict no greater slur than is cast on the English in England by their having to take out gun licenses, it is evident that the vehemently expressed desire for the repeal of this Act is only explicable when read along with the previously quoted remarks with reference to the native volunteering and the armed population in sympathy with them at their back, and with the detonating matter which appears in those seditious pamphlets to which ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... Smyrna, addressed more immediately to the Church of Philomelium but challenging at the same time a wider circulation [103:2]. The simplicity with which the narrators record omens and occurrences easily explicable in themselves, but invested by their surcharged feelings with a miraculous character, is highly natural. The whole narrative is eminently touching and instructive; but the details have little or no bearing on my immediate purpose. It is sufficient ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... in thanks, and announced that his mind was now at ease. By some mysterious process, not clearly explicable to himself, he contrived to lay aside a portion of his dress, and to dispose himself within the folds of balmy bedclothes that awaited him. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... may seem, they are in accordance with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral, and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... conclusions.[821] Mercury rotates synchronously with its revolution—that is, once in 88 days—on an axis sensibly perpendicular to its orbital plane. No certain signs of a Mercurian atmosphere are visible. The globe is seamed and furrowed with long narrow markings, explicable as cracks in cooling. It is, and always was, a dead world. From micrometrical measures, moreover, the inferences were drawn that the planet's mass has a probable value about 1/20 that of the earth, while its mean density falls considerably short ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... point on which parallelism has amended materialism. We have seen that every materialist doctrine is the expression of this idea, that physical phenomena are the only ones that are determined, measurable, explicable, and scientific. This idea does wonders in the natural sciences, but is at fault when, from the physical, we pass into the moral world, and we have seen how the materialistic doctrine fails when it endeavours to attach the physical to the mental. There are then ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... etc. are found; circumstances that cannot be explained in the hypothesis of solution in the moist way.—He then answers;—"Not exactly, nor with certainty; which is not wonderful: But they are still less explicable in the hypothesis of dry solution, as must be apparent from what has been already said. How coal, an infusible substance, could be spread into strata by mere heat, is to me incomprehensible."—It is only upon the last sentence that I am here to remark: This, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... of but one motive why she should make herself instrumental in the accomplishment of my ruin. It was explicable only on the presumption that she was attached to Ijurra—that Rafael Ijurra was the lord of her heart. If so, he could easily bend it to his will—for this is but the sequence of the other—could influence her to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... and handed him over the wall and the gate to his father. The same moment the bailiff got away from Grizzie, and made at him, calling to the mastiff. But the dog, only half recovered from the effects of Cosmo's blow, either mistaking through bewilderment, or moved by some influence ill explicable, instead of attacking Cosmo, rushed at his master. Rage recalls dislike, and it may be he remembered bygone irritations and teasings. His lordship, however, suddenly became aware of his treacherous intent, and in a moment his ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... of Chymists seem to have duly consider'd how great Variety there is in the Textures and Consistences of Compound Bodie; sand [Errata: Bodies; and] how little the consistence and Duration of many of them seem to accommodate and be explicable by the propos'd Notion. And not to mention those almost incorruptible Substances obtainable by the Fire, which I have prov'd to be somewhat compounded, and which the Chymists will readily grant not to be perfectly ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the mystery of iniquity, the work of Antichrist among mankind. Under the influence of the historic method it assumed a different aspect, and the mystery became very explicable. Hobbes had struck the keynote in a passage of profound truth as well ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though, of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary, the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the South were played ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... some one will insist that we find many things in Scripture which seem in nowise explicable by natural causes, as, for instance, that the sins of men and their prayers can be the cause of rain and of the earth's fertility, or that faith can heal the blind, and so on. But I think I have already made sufficient answer: I have ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Stafford and Lois loved each other—with a love which was all too natural and explicable in the light of our present knowledge. It was necessary that he should be made aware that marriage between them was impossible—that they were, in fact, the children ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... understand the Germans. Some of their traits may possibly be explained by their history. Their passionate devotion to the State, their amazing vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanical efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal taskmaster. But the convulsions ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... that the present infinitive is the form in which a Latin or a Greek root is always given in Webster and other received lexicographic authorities. It is a curious fact, that, in all the school etymologies, the present indicative should have been given as the root, and is explicable only from the accident that it is the key-form in the Latin dictionaries. The change into conformity with our English dictionaries needs no defense, and will probably hereafter be imitated by all authors ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... the Hebrew communities are in a principal measure the descendants of the Ten Tribes, and of the other captivities preceding Christ, is a just, and fair, and sensible inference, which explains circumstances that otherwise could not be explicable. But let that pass. We will suppose all the Jews in all the cities of the world to be the lineal descendants of the mob who shouted at the crucifixion. Yet another question! My grandfather is a Bedouin sheikh, chief of one of the most powerful ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... pain, they dashed desperately forward, promising for a brief time to go to the front. The effort ended in promise. Next, the Byzantine and the Corinthian each made the trial with like result, after which they were practically out of the race. Thereupon, with a readiness perfectly explicable, all the factions except the Romans joined hope in Ben-Hur, and openly ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of an incident during the trial of Glengarry, in Scotland, for murder in a duel, which is, perhaps, explicable by this extraordinary attitude: A lady of great beauty was called as a witness and came into court heavily veiled. Before administering the oath, Lord Eskgrove, the judge (to whom this function belongs in Scotland), gave her this ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... at one period of history and have been held up as models of sanity at another. The most immediately destructive consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism. It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was under the first; it was undoubtedly least common ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd, with a pilgrim's hat of wide brim and long plumes to indicate the journey to Jerusalem. That the birth might be made more explicable, the curate had ordered her figure to be stuffed with rags and cotton under her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition. It was a very beautiful image, with the same sad expression of all the images that the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... has been [Pg 301] transferred into Greek, as is proved by the synonymous [Greek: dounai ten psuchen hautou] in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.—2. The fact that the same uncommon expression occurs not fewer than five times in the same discourse of Christ, and that so intentionally and emphatically, is explicable only when it was thereby intended to point to an important fundamental passage of the Old Testament.—3. In the discourses of our Lord, the expression is, no less than in the passage before us, used of His sacrificial death.—If, then, it be established ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... right before might, self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a volta face in nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes—in other words, so completely ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... psychological question now. In the last chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... think, that Fechner's ideas are not without direct empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of life which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but of which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness there is, or with dualistic theism that ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... such evidence would be adduced to her that she could have no choice but to judge and condemn him. Gilbert Grail had thought him infamous; perhaps Annabel would hesitate as little. She would have remarked a strangeness in his manner to her, explicable now. Believing, how she must scorn him! How those beautiful eyes of hers would speak in one glance of cold contempt, if ever he passed beneath them! She might take the nobler part; she might hold it incredible till she had a confession from his very lips. But were women magnanimous? And Annabel, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... are of a much more explicable nature. Mr. Huffman, the photographer of Miles City, informed me once when butchering some slaughtered elk he was charged twice by a she-bear and two well-grown cubs. This was a piece of sheer ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... dispute at rest, and enable the modern student distinctly to grasp and understand the great work of Amenemhat. Whatever may be the truth regarding "Lake Moeris," as this great reservoir was called, it is certain that it furnished the ancients one of the least explicable of all the many problems that the remarkable land of the Nile presented to them. Herodotus added to the other marvels of the place a story about two sitting statues based upon pyramids, which stood three hundred feet above ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... had not Gaertner expressly stated that he had during many years grown these two varieties together, and they did not spontaneously cross; and this, considering that the plants are monoecious and abound with pollen, and are well known generally to cross freely, seems explicable only on the belief that these two varieties are in some degree mutually infertile. The hybrid plants raised from the above five seed were intermediate in structure, extremely variable, and perfectly fertile.[226] No one, I believe, has hitherto suspected that these varieties of maize are distinct ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Segistan, to which Mechran appears to have been then joined, from the circumstance before related of the Polos having gone from China by sea to this kingdom. The strange application of Timochaim is probably corrupt, and may perhaps be explicable on the republication of the Trevigi edition of these travels; till then, we must ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... metallic clack, and others quickly joined the chorus, keeping up their strange music till morning. Like many Batrachians, this has a voice singularly unlike that of any other organised creature. The cries of beasts, birds, and insects are all explicable to our senses, and we can recognise most of them as belonging to such or such an order of animal; but the voices of many frogs are like nothing else, and allied species utter totally dissimilar noises. In some, as this, the sound is like the concussion of metals; in others, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... English, the beauty of Helen Keller's style would, in part, be explicable at once. But the extracts from Miss Sullivan's letters and from her reports, although they are clear and accurate, have not the beauty which distinguishes Miss Keller's English. Her service as a ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... word Torah to denote not the priestly but the prophetical instruction (i.10, ii.3, v.24, viii.16, 20, xxx.9); as both have a common source and Jehovah is the proper instructor (xxx.20), this is easily explicable, and is moreover full of instruction as regards the idea involved; the contents of the Priestly Code fit badly in with the Torah of i.10. Lastly, Micah's answer to the people's question, how a return of the favour of an angry God is to be secured, is of ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of the idea of the State among the peoples of the British Isles is explicable on geographical and historical grounds. For the idea of the State—that is to say, the idea of society politically organized as an indivisible unit under a sovereign government—although it has other and deeper sources of vitality, is specially ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... distribution, development, and mutual relations of species, can be shown to be deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, which he propounds, combined with the known facts of geological change; and that, even if all these phaenomena are not at present explicable by it, none ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... been developed under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best where it is directly useful, for example in regard to other people's characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity, for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... turning on some private jest then intelligible enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which have, both then and since, made that humour ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... underestimation or overestimation of a given standard is determined, among other factors, by the intensity of the stimulation employed. The apparently anomalous results obtained in the early investigations are in part probably explicable on ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... in the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount. Those "smiles to earth unknown," had then ceased for ever. The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his "long walks in the country." His wife never did this; she had not the physical strength to do it; and, if she had been the person referred to, Wordsworth ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... which period the gases were repeatedly analyzed. As a result of fifty-five experiments, twenty showed no alteration of oxygen consumption as the result of cooling, nine gave a lessened consumption, while the remaining twenty-six showed an increased using up of oxygen. This diversity of result is explicable on the basis of observations made by Prof. Zuntz, who was himself experimented upon, as to his subjective heat sensations during the experiments. He found that after the first impression due to the application of cold is overcome, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... dream containing a presentiment or rather a clairvoyance of a singular kind, hardly explicable as a mere coincidence, has occurred to me ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suppressing freedom of thought with relentless vigor, and quarantining herself and her dependencies against new ideas, conservatism grew to be her settled habit and the organs of government became ossified. Policies of commercial restriction which were justifiable or at least rationally explicable in the sixteenth century lasted on, proof against innovation or improvement, until the eighteenth century and later. Consequently from the middle of the seventeenth century at the period of the rapid rise of colonial powers of France, Holland, and England, the Spanish colonies find themselves ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramatic methods. But ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in which no man shall be dependent upon his neighbour in such a sense as to be able to neglect his own duties; in which there may be normally a reciprocity of good services, and the reciprocity not be (as has been said) all on one side. There is a very explicable tendency at present to ask for such one-sided reciprocity. It is natural enough, for reasons too obvious to be mentioned, that reformers should dwell exclusively upon the right of every one to support, and neglect to point out the correlative duty of every ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... stand only familiar images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but pigs. Simplicity, with mystery, is the keynote of all the pictures, and these are ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... of all morality and all religion.[U] Thus, instead of recognising in the facts of intelligence "an order of existence diametrically in contrast to that displayed to us in the facts of the material universe,"[V] he regards both classes of facts as of the same kind, and explicable by the same laws; he abolishes the primary contrast of consciousness between the ego and the non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... the Articles of War, of the Geneva Convention and the Fifth Amendment apply."[95] And the adherence of the United States to the Charter of London in August 1945, under which the Nazi leaders were brought to trial, is explicable by the same theory. These individuals were charged with the crime of instigating aggressive war, which at the time of its commission was not a crime either under International Law or under the laws of the prosecuting governments. It must be presumed that the President is not in ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... is a condensation of "Writers to the Signet"—a species of beatified solicitor holding a position so esteemed, so enviable, and so intensely reputable that the only scandal previously whispered in connection with a member of this class proved innocently explicable upon the discovery that he was affianced to the lady's aunt. The building in which the firm had their office formed one end of an austere range of dark stone houses overlooking a street paved with cubes of granite and confronted ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... some friends in France. His brother Ashton wrote to him from La Bourboule a letter (received on July 9th), in which he said: "To judge by the French newspapers, you are as popular in France as Pitt at the height of the great war." A note from the Memoir renders this state of feeling explicable: [Footnote: A very different current in French opinion from that of the newspapers found outlet in this letter from ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the stigma (whereas the small blue Lobelia is visited by bees and does set seed); I mention this because there are such beautiful contrivances to prevent the stigma ever getting its own pollen; which seems only explicable on the doctrine of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... as situated in events. I mean molecules and electrons. These objects are not recognised in isolation. We cannot well miss Cleopatra's Needle, if we are in its neighbourhood; but no one has seen a single molecule or a single electron, yet the characters of events are only explicable to us by expressing them in terms of these scientific objects. Undoubtedly molecules and electrons are abstractions. But then so is Cleopatra's Needle. The concrete facts are the events themselves—I have already explained to you that to be an abstraction ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... completely did James think the emotions were explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations which go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... implies, in the first place, a constant reference to tradition. The system has grown up without any reference to abstract principles or symmetrical plan. The legal order supposes a traditional common law, as the ecclesiastical order a traditional creed, and the organisation is explicable only by historical causes. The system represents a series of compromises, not the elaboration of a theory. If the squire undertook by way of supererogation to justify his position he appealed to tradition ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... reader will follow for himself the remaining phenomena of reversion, he will, I believe, find them all explicable on the theory that they are due to memory of past experiences fused, and modified— at times specifically and definitely—by changed conditions. There is, however, one apparently very important phenomenon which I do not at ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... or more explicable reason. It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mediterranean just before the second great outbreak in Sicily which darkens the close of the second century. The evil fate which made this island the theatre of the two greatest of the servile wars is explicable on many grounds. The opportunity offered by the sense of superiority in numbers was far ampler here than in any area of Italy of equal size. For Sicily was a wheat-growing country, and the cultivated plains demanded a mass of labour which was not ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern world if he ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... "surround the enemy rear." With his remaining ironclads Persano formed three divisions of three ships each and swung across the enemy's bows in line ahead. Just at the critical moment, and for no very explicable motive, he shifted his flag from the Re d'Italia in the center to the Affondatore, which was steaming alone on the starboard side of the line. The change was not noted by all his ships, and thus caused confusion of orders. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of Declan's name from the Acts of Patrick is a negative argument. It is explicable perhaps by the supposed irregularity of Declan's preaching. Declan was certainly earlier than Mochuda and yet there is no reference to him in the Life of the latter saint. Ailbhe however is referred to in the Tripartite Life of Patrick and ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... and women have belonged to the Society. And in all that time, they've worked hard, and worked sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They've worked impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... movement always occurs during the animal's attempts, whereas each of the others, on the average, occurs in only half the attempts. Thus the tendency to repeat a previous performance (which is easily explicable without the intervention of "consciousness") leads to a greater emphasis on the successful movement than on any other, and in time causes it alone to be performed. The objection to this view, if taken as the sole explanation, is that on improvement ought to set in till after the ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... in Tragedy, and wherefore they have become so common. I believe, however, that in the present case, the whole is here psychologically true and accurate. Prophetical dreams are things of nature, and explicable by that law of the mind in which where dim ideas are connected with vivid feelings, Perception and Imagination insinuate themselves and mix with the forms of Recollection, till the Present appears to exactly correspond ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... argued by Professor Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites. If the institution of marriage was thus originally based on the forcible transfer of a woman from her own to her husband's clan, certain Indian customs become easily explicable in the light of this view. We can understand why a Brahman or Rajput thought it essential to marry his daughter into a clan or family of higher status than his own; because the disgrace of having his daughter taken from him by what ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus. The efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon. After some protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system, I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the wind-and-silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy condition, which petrified after receiving its form. Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... that Carwin adopted, in some degree, a similar distinction. A tale of this kind, related by others, he would believe, provided it was explicable upon known principles; but that such notices were actually communicated by beings of a higher order he would believe only when his own ears were assailed in a manner which could not be otherwise accounted for. Civility forbade him to contradict my brother or myself, but ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... other and as utterly inexplicable and confusing as fossils are on the theory that they are special creations and are not the remains of animals that have once lived. It is the vast chaos of facts, which are explicable and fall into beautiful order on the one theory, which are inexplicable and remain a chaos on the other, which I think must ultimately force Darwin's views on any and every reflecting mind. Isolated difficulties and objections are nothing against ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... face as I saw it then, lying on the white pillow and turned toward the door, with the eager expression which her waiting for me had given it. Neither of us spoke for some seconds, and when we did speak we took refuge in commonplaces. Our hearts were too full—mine with a sudden and hardly explicable overflow of affection toward this beautiful being whom I had saved from dying; hers with a like affection for me, heightened a thousand fold by the intense love of love and of living that filled her whole soul and made her ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... on the sperm of man as to produce a creature imperfect in their legs. Others sayd it was the purity of the air about Orleans whence the city has the name of Aurelia. But what influence the air can have in this point is hardly explicable. Monsieur Ogilvy more rationally informed me that he took it to be a race and generation of peaple who transmitted it haereditarly to their posterity, for which I meit after[6l] a wery strong presumption: I saw a mother lame, not only the daughters lame, but in ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... grown. Apart from miraculous intervention, therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them is hidden from ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the animal is at such times in an excited condition from joy; and nerve-force will be generated in excess, which naturally leads to action of some kind. Not one of the above movements, so clearly expressive of affection, are of the least direct service to the animal. They are explicable, as far as I can see, solely from being in complete opposition or antithesis to the attitude and movements which, from intelligible causes, are assumed when a dog intends to fight, and which consequently ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... are generally very constant. When they extend to many islands, considerable variability appears; and when they have an extensive range over a large part of the Archipelago, the amount of unstable variation is very large. These facts are explicable on Mr. Darwin's principles. When a species exists over a wide area, it must have had, and probably still possesses, great powers of dispersion. Under the different conditions of existence in various portions of its area, different variations from the type ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... correct. Mr. Mansfield told me, that the largest portion of his answers is correct. Such points in regard to the relations in which the departed have been with the inquirers are revealed in the answers, as Mr. Mansfield could not know them. From this circumstance is also explicable, how people could be so moved, that he had received many thousands of letters, although each applicant had to send one dollar fee to the medium, and three dollars in case of a guarantee that either an answer, if received would be sent, or ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... of defence had spoken up for Robert, she felt hurt at his treatment of her old friend, and could only excuse it by a strong fit of conscious moodiness. His taking the curacy was only explicable, she thought, as a mode of showing his displeasure with herself, since he could not ask her to marry into Whittingtonia; but 'That must be all nonsense,' thought she; 'I will soon have him down off his high horse, and Mr. Parsons will never keep him to his engagement—silly fellow to have made it—or ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I could not do that. It would not be convenient." She hesitated here. "It would not be explicable." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... those, myself among the number, who consider the periodicity of the solar spots, that tide of spots which flows to its maximum and then ebbs to its minimum in a little more than eleven years, as only explicable on the theory that a small comet having this period, and followed by a meteor train, has a path intersecting the sun's surface. In an article entitled 'The Sun a Bubble,' which appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' for October 1874, I remarked that from ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... they may have vaguely connected their legend with the Egyptian myth of the slaying of Osiris (as king of Egypt) by his mighty brother Seth, who was in certain aspects a patron of foreigners. Phrasius, Chalbes and Epaphus (for the grandfather of Busiris) are all explicable as Graecized Egyptian names, but other names in the legend are purely Greek. The sacrifice of foreign prisoners before a god, a regular scene on temple walls, is perhaps only symbolical, at any rate for the later days of Egyptian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... an awkward hush. Most of the guests knew the doctor by sight, but in the explicable absence of their hostess, no one was sufficiently at ease to rise and bid the stranger welcome to another person's house. They tried to go on with their conversation, in apparent unconsciousness of the young man who stood in the doorway, reddening under their sidelong glances; but ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... to reconcile these two facts with the reasoning in the text. But to be sure, a wider induction is requisite for the establishment of any theory. This is not the place for it. The instances adduced by Dr H. in support of his theory, are explicable on another principle, viz. that every excitement of mind or body is followed by a depression precisely proportioned to its intensity. This seems a law in our economy, deducible from almost unlimited ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... change of tone a corresponding development in the author's own emotions ignores the objectivity of Shakespeare's dramatic work. All phases of feeling lay within the scope of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life or experience. In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men, acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder cast than ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... parentage. Such minor differences as there are between man and the higher ape—in the development of the cerebrum, the number of the teeth or ribs, the distribution of the hair, and so on—are quite explicable when we reflect that the two groups must have diverged from each other more than a ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... forte; and which (in the bustling ever- recurring semi-cadences) the master employs with more than surprising ease. But such things—even the greatest negligence (Achtlosigkeit) in the use of common-place phrases and sections— are explicable and excusable from the nature of this sort of Allegro, which is not meant to interest by means of Cantilena, but in which the restless incessant movement is intended to produce a certain excitement. It is a significant trait in the Allegro of the overture to Don Giovanni ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... ceases—the strengthening of passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of those habitually curbed—the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made of it—are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... The original is at Assisi with Datum apud Urbem Veterem X. Kal. Oct. pont. nostri anno quinto (September 22, 1220). It is therefore by an error that Sbaralea and Wadding make it date from Viterbo, which is the less explicable that all the bulls of this epoch are dated from Orvieto. Wadding, ann. 1220, 57; Sbaralea, vol. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... own. They are more robust in build, their language is distinct from Javanese though belonging to the same group, and even the alphabet presents idiosyncrasies. Their laws, social institutions, customs and calendar show many peculiarities, explicable on the supposition that they have preserved the ancient usages of pre-Mohammedan Java. At present the population is divided into the Bali-Agas or aborigines and the Wong Madjapahit who profess to have immigrated ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... the push of some explicable submarine current. It is like being in a captive balloon, except that the connecting cable extends stiffly upward instead ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of Christ's manhood is spoken of in terms which are only explicable, if it was a second form of being, preceded by a pre-existent form, and was assumed by His own act. The language, too, demands that that humanity should have been true essential manhood. It was ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... trained by his father, and at the age of four was a finished executant. But it is quite otherwise with Tiny Titus, who knows no music, and yet by the sole power of his genius comprehends the musical heights unattainable by adults. MOZART, in short, was an explicable miracle, while Tiny Titus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... my dear, explicable but unexplained. The most formidable men are her friends, and why? Nobody dares to fathom the mystery. Then is this person ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... say (I am off hard on the road to Borgo, drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: e.g. Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... seasoned with wisdom and wit and most capably played; Miss FAY COMPTON, admirable example of a pretty actress who won't let herself be captured by stage tricks, making everything explicable except her continued love for her intolerable bore (and Turk) of a husband; Mr. A.E. MATTHEWS handling a desperately unsympathetic part, which was already beginning to look impossible, with great adroitness; and Mr. STANLEY LOGAN, though badly hampered by a shocking cold and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... down and engage without further orders, keeping parallel to the French when within point-blank, the others following her as they could; a process which, from the varying distances, would expose each to a concentrated fire as they successively approached. Byng's action is only explicable to the writer by supposing that he thus by "steer with" understood "steer for;" for when, after the fleet tacked together, the new van ship (formerly the rear) did not of her own motion head for the leading enemy, he signalled her to steer one point, and then two points, in that ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... an explicable contradiction of the American birthright that to some of our people the military establishment is at best a necessary evil, and military service is an extraordinary hardship rather than an inherent obligation. Yet these illusions are rooted deep in the American tradition, though it is a fact ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... question from another point of view, are we not continually finding in schools and educational establishments pupils who, for no explicable reason, show a disposition for one branch of instruction only? They shine in this, but are dunces in every ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics —and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of the count, for some reason—when they are not elders ossified in tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily conservative in their tastes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... concluded her little story when a dozen of her neighbors rush forward to replace her. This eagerness is quite explicable, for this chapel is the one in which the Abbe Gelon hears confessions, and I need not tell you that when the Abbe Gelon confesses it is the same as if he were preaching—there ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... degrees: two minutes, south and one hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west," he said curtly, and turned away. There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment before they walked off, made a striking group. Their sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of the cities, at least, of the West. The founders of these cities are so largely men of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this tendency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Philadelphia that the educated classes of the Western cities looked as the cynosure of their eyes. Boston seemed to stand for something less material than these other cities, and the subtler nature of its influence ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... is not very explicable on any principles, as a detail not visible without search was sought and verified, and that by a habitual mocker at anything out of the common way. For example, Hone published a comic explanation, correct or not, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... which is also French, and comes from a work called in the English translation Tales to My Daughter. I include it for its quaint naivete, and also for its lesson of gratitude and minute thoughtfulness. But it was a sad oversight (not too explicable in a French romance) not to make Augustus marry the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... meet the Vanrenens in Paris," he said. "Business brought me here, and I was surprised to see Miss Vanrenen without her father. You will pardon my reference to your son, I am sure. His attitude is explicable now. He resented my offer of friendly assistance to the young lady. Perhaps he thought she might ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... teaching men trades when they had none. They learnt all this from him. The greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men. Everything else in Christian or secular history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved by the ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... became very naturally explicable to me. The man must have carried the invisible bird's nest which renders him who holds it, but not his shadow, imperceptible, and had now cast it away. I glanced round, soon discovered the shadow of the invisible nest itself, leaped up and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... nose, so that no part of the body is seen, and chatter away for hours, telling long stories. If in daylight they thus voluntarily deprive themselves of the possibility of making signs, it is clear that their preference for talks around the fire at night is explicable by very natural reasons wholly distinct from the one attributed. The inference, once carelessly made from the free use of gesture by some of the Shoshonian stock, that their tongue was too meager for use without signs, is refuted by the now ascertained ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... complain of her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains she now felt in her head. The origin of her cousin's present anger was the non-revelation of Brigaut's arrival. With Breton obstinacy Pierrette was determined to keep silence,—a resolution that is perfectly explicable. It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he was in Provins. What joy to have seen him! That single glimpse was like the look an ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self- consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as transcendental ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... troubles occur most frequently during the summer months, especially with infants and children, as in cholera infantum and summer complaint. The higher mortality of bottle-fed infants[119] in comparison with those that are nursed directly is explicable on the theory that cows' milk is the carrier of the infection, because in many cases it is not consumed until there has been ample time for the development of organisms in it. Where milk is pasteurized or boiled it is found that the mortality ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... the membrane that lines the abdominal wall and invests the abdominal organs. This is not the only operation that does good mysteriously; that of cutting out a bit of the iris in a form of deep-seated eye disease, glaucoma, that tends toward complete blindness, is hardly more explicable; neither is an incision of the capsule of the kidney for certain forms of Bright's disease, each of which stays the progress of the trouble in a goodly proportion ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... instantly discharged by a transference of the elementary particles of the opposite kind in opposite directions, but parallel to the current. Even the differences between common and voltaic electricity, when applied to effect chemical decomposition, which Dr. Wollaston has pointed out[A], seem explicable by the circumstances connected with the induction of electricity from these two sources (25.). But as I have reserved this branch of the inquiry, that I might follow out the investigations contained in the present paper, I refrain (though much ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... changed, and with that change the laird of Stanesland's curious movements became very explicable, for her face was singularly charming when she smiled. It was a rather pale but fresh and clear-skinned face, wide at the forehead and narrowing to a firm little chin, with long-lashed expressive eyes, and a serious expression in repose. Her smile was candid, a little ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... were not actually against Luis de Leon, they combined to reveal him in his least attractive posture. His comparative promptitude in accepting Mancio as patrono, his unwillingness to abide by his choice, his sudden hostility to Mancio, his final acceptance of Mancio, are all explicable variations. Nevertheless they showed a disregard for superficial consistency which might easily be misinterpreted as caprice. The bias of the court had been veering away from the prisoner for some time. His series of actions with respect to Mancio ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... was apt to maintain the habit in later life. It came out that the youth had taken the place of a comrade the night before, as extra duty, and this overwork had fatigued him so that his succumbing was at least explicable. This clue being in a letter he wrote home, his sister journeyed to the capital with it and showed it to ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... but they never surely thought it satisfactory to explain a particular effect by a particular cause, which was no more to be accounted for than the effect itself. An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... times powers of life and death over all the members of the household. In the ruder ages the father might either kill or sell his children; and afterwards, among the ruling classes his powers remained almost unlimited until modern times. Allowing for certain local exceptions, explicable by tradition, or class-exceptions, explicable by conditions of servitude, it may be said that originally the Japanese paterfamilias was at once ruler, priest, and magistrate within the family. He could compel his children ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... little pressure of the hand may be enough to call it out from its hidden nook within the heart. You can't tell me what it is to love, my boy, nor can I tell you, though we've both passed through the experience, the explicable part is a prominent part, I admit, if we analyse the little creeping sensations of gladness, that a touch of her hand, no matter how inadvertent, or the steady gaze of her deep eyes, could cause us to feel. Why, my dear boy, I am an old man now, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... quite simple; that is easily explicable. I am not his doll—his baby—his infatuation: his nature is. The judge and his late wife never had any children. The judge and his wife were past middle age when this treasure fell into their lap. One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and he stole half-way up the flight and again stood. Still all was silent. He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top—whence, turning his head a little, he could command the passage—when a sound arrested him. It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved along the passage ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... persons;[289] in the second, young men ran about the streets beating the women with strips of goatskin, the skin being that of a sacred animal—a proceeding that was regarded as purificatory, and seems to be naturally explicable as an expulsion of evil spirits or ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... of his eyes, however, is explicable by the fact that a trim little wench, a nursery-maid from some village hard by, with a round radiant face, with her hair trailing down her back in ribboned pigtails, is rummaging about the room as ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Knowing as we do that volcanoes abound on the sea floor, the question why we do not oftener see their explosions disturbing the surface of the waters is very interesting, but not as yet clearly explicable. It is possible, however, that a volcanic discharge taking place at the depth of several thousand feet below the surface of the water would not be able to blow the fluid aside so as to open a pipe to the surface, but ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have, for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... instinct making mistakes." Passing over the fact that instinct is again personified, the statement is still incorrect. Instinctive actions are certainly, as a general rule, performed with less uncertainty than deliberative ones; this is explicable by the fact that they have been more often practised, and thus reduced more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is more certain than that animals acting under the guidance of inherited experience ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... together with striking professional anecdotes then gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with aunt Kimble's annual failure to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's irascibility concerning the odd trick which was rarely explicable to him, when it was not on his side, without a general visitation of tricks to see that they were formed on sound principles: the whole being accompanied by a strong steaming odour ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Sunday afternoon had he and she reached a sort of intimacy—unspoken but real. He had liked her. He had even admired her. She was no ordinary being. And he had sympathized with her for Marguerite's quite explicable defection. He had often wished that those two, the charwoman and his beloved, could somehow have been brought together. The menaces of death had brought them together. Mrs. Lob was laid out in the bedroom which he had once entered. Mrs. Lob had been dying while he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... aptitude that begins when practice ceases,—the strengthening of the passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of those habitually curbed,—the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, intellectual, according to the use made of it—are all explicable on this principle. And thus they can shew that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences; an influence which, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... itself, the dynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the picture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views themselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is never explicable except by itself, ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... ideas have their root in experience, but he urges at the same time, with the Germans, that there are innate ideas. The conscious life of the individual, that cannot be understood from the experience of the individual, becomes explicable from the inherited experience of the race. Even the intellectual form which is the condition of the individual's apprehension is gradually made up out of the experience of the race, and consequently innate without for that reason being independent of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at the dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty of which we can see the end." He knew how to evoke a kind of beauty that was both aerial and enchanted; but it was a clarified and lucid beauty, even then: it was never dim or wavering. He would never, as I have said, have comprehended ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... things: 1. Either to assign real and adequate causes, the natural or necessary result of which must be to produce the present diversity of species and their actual relations; or, 2. To show the general conformity of the whole body of facts to such assumption, and also to adduce instances explicable by it and inexplicable by the received view, so perhaps winning our assent to the doctrine, through its competency to harmonize all the facts, even though the cause of the assumed variation remain as ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... forward, and projected his lips in the direction he sought to indicate,—a mode of indication, I may add, almost universal in Central America, and explicable only on the assumption that it costs less effort than to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of national pride should follow so many disasters by land is explicable only through the battle of New Orleans, whose crowning victory changed the aspect of prior engagements in the public memory, while it placed a new value on the marksmanship of the American soldiery. Charges made by veterans of ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... XVIth century B.C. The Egyptian pronunciation of their name is Khiti, with the feminine Khitait, Khitit; but the Tel el-Amarna texts employ the vocalisation Khati, Khate, which must be more correct than that of the Egyptians, The form Khiti seems to me to be explicable by an error of popular etymology. Egyptian ethnical appellations in iti formed their plural by -atiu, -atee, -ati, -ate, so that if Khate, Khati, were taken for a plural, it would naturally have suggested to the scribes the form Khiti ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Most likely an encounter had taken place. The Europeans may have been driven to the use of arms: they may possibly have destroyed plantations and burnt huts. In such a case their hostile reception of D'Entrecasteaux would be explicable. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... at Yellowstone Park, in America, visitors are carefully watched to see that they do not make the geysers work artificially by means of soap. [Footnote: Hardly explicable in such small quantities by chemistry or physics.] Remembering this experience the last time he went to Iceland, he packed some 2lb. bars of ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... soon has excellent reasons for the belief that many other phaenomena are consequences of the affections of other beings, more or less like itself. And having thus good evidence for believing that many of the most interesting occurrences about it are explicable on the hypothesis that they are the work of intelligences like itself—having discovered a vera causa for many phaenomena—why should the child limit the application of so fruitful an hypothesis? The dog has a sort of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... slanting, as in the two other A's in the inscription. Besides, the middle cross stroke of the A is wanting; and the second descending bar of the letter is quite deficient in length—a deficiency not explicable by mutilation from the weathering of the stone, as the stone happens to be still perfectly entire both at the uppermost and the lowest end of this bar or line. This last reason is also in itself a strong if not ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... had been an uncommonly vivid dream, produced in that sensitive nature by the uncanny sounds of the wind in the chinks and crannies of the ancient chamber. Had not Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, which we studied hard on that day, proved all such phantoms to be explicable? The only person we told was Griff, who was amused and incredulous. He had heard the noises—oh yes! and objected to having his sleep broken by them. It was too had to expose Clarence to them—poor Bill—on whom they worked ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see how the rise of pressure observed by Mr. Ferranti and Mr. Kapp could be due to resonance. Mr. Kapp's experiment was not conclusive, for the length of spark is not an accurate measure of electromotive force. As regards Mr. Mordey's observation, he thought the action explicable on the theory of the leading condenser current acting on the field magnets. The same explanation is also applicable to the Deptford case, for when the dynamo is direct on, the condenser current is about 10 amperes, and this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing in the mediaeval civilization of the fifteenth century; of elements of civilization which ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... all these categories is supposed to be the truth- relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known, yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable, explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... barrel retain no trace of this when they have been fired, although at any rate the portion covering the tip is not exposed to friction on the part of the rifle, and lastly the base of the bullet has no other explicable reason for its innocuousness than subjection to a certain degree of heat. While not claiming any cauterising action on the tissues by the bullet, I should therefore still be inclined to allow the probability of the heat to which the surface of the bullet ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... camps full of distrust of each other. The Ambassadors of the Great Powers knew the Kaiser intimately enough to realize what his intentions, in spite of everything, were, and it required an untruthfulness only explicable by the psychological effect of war to permit the suggestion of a hateful and distorted picture of him as a tyrant seeking for the domination of the world and for ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... Volcanic eruptions are easily explicable on this principle,—the volcano being simply a vent for the passage of heated and molten matter, which the elevating pressure of the liquid below tends to eject. It is a well-known fact that volcanoes and earthquake-centres are nearly all situated on the borders ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... of surcharged steam within them, which is steam to which an additional quantity of heat has been communicated subsequently to its generation, so that its temperature is greater than is due to its elastic force; and on this hypothesis the observed facts relative to corrosion become to some extent explicable. Felt, applied to the outside of a boiler, may accelerate its internal corrosion by keeping the steam in a surcharged state, when by the dispersion of a part of the heat it would cease to be in that state; boilers in which there is a large accumulation of ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat no phantom, the ghostliest ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... out. It cost him his living: but the Marquis, being what is called a good fellow in the main, bore him no grudge; nay, rather liked his spirit, and afterwards showed himself a good friend to the amount of twenty guineas, to which the Marchioness (but this is more explicable) added five ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... monetary considerations seriously to concern him, he might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, and an occasional gambling flyer, his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams |
