"Sophistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became a form which apparently might have struggled in Thermopylae. Next to him was the Austrian diplomatist, the Sosia of all cabinets, in whose gay address and rattling conversation you could hardly recognise the sophistical defender of unauthorised invasion, and the subtle inventor of Holy Alliances and Imperial Leagues. Then came the rich usurer from Frankfort or the prosperous merchant from Hamburgh, who, with his wife and daughters, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... replied Mistress Nutter; "and proceeds to use all those sophistical arguments, which we have so often heard, to pervert her mind, and overthrow her principles. But Alizon is proof against them all. Religion and virtue support her, and make her more than a match for her opponent. Equally vain are the spirit's attempts ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... folded up, and I therefore considered that there could be no possible harm in inspecting them, more especially as I had received no injunction to the contrary. Perhaps there was something unsound in this reasoning, something sophistical; but a child is sometimes as ready as a grown-up person in finding excuses for doing that which he is inclined to. But whether the action was right or wrong, and I am afraid it was not altogether right, I undid the packet: it contained three books; two from their similarity seemed to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... with a lengthened perturbation of the eyelids. "It would be possible to suggest a variety of objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind," he said at last, smilingly reflective. "Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the path." He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: "Is there likely to be ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... refuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do the conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice, or sophistical evasions and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets. It is psychology of the first degree—elementary psychology—just as the colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic development ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... helpless a creature as a poor poet, a wife and family were incumbrances, which a species of prudence would bid him shun; but when the alternative was, being at eternal warfare with myself, on account of habitual follies, to give them no worse name, which no general example, no licentious wit, no sophistical infidelity, would, to me, ever justify, I must have been a fool to have hesitated, and a madman to have made another choice. Besides, I had in "my Jean" a long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of extension—remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension—are but sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it—to that whose reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality—it ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... fighting his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. He never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but elevated thoughts were always his chief consolation. Conversation about great writers and thinkers always seemed ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... and it was no mere scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in Taxation No Tyranny, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves," and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men "who are now repining under English ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... certainly may excite a smile, his reverence for him is still visible, and he takes every opportunity of contrasting his gigantic grandeur with the petty refinements of Euripides. With infinite cleverness and inexhaustible flow of wit, he has exposed the sophistical subtilty, the rhetorical and philosophical pretensions, the immoral and seductive effeminacy, and the excitations to undisguised sensuality of Euripides. As, however, modern critics have generally looked upon Aristophanes as no better than a writer of extravagant ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... characters of the nation, a man of brilliant talent and meritorious service, with secret impurity. The more meritorious such a man's services, the more damning the charges if they be established. Nor do we admit in such cases the sophistical argument, that the interests of public morality require the facts to be hushed up in order to avoid a scandal. Nothing is so imperative where guilt really exists as that it be confessed and expiated. The public conscience requires the ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... a new spirit, who detests what would now be called Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sophistical argument He says when he is coming, and that's all I want to know here's a letter, I see, from that silly Mrs. Barker—her husband has quite given up drink, and earns good wages, sad the eldest ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... of Socrates is another point in his answer, which may also be regarded as sophistical. He says that 'if he has corrupted the youth, he must have corrupted them involuntarily.' But if, as Socrates argues, all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to be admonished and not punished. In these words the Socratic doctrine of the involuntariness of evil ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... I know all the sophistical arguments, and they are many, for capitalizing earning capacity. It is a very attractive and interesting argument, and in some instances it is legitimately used. But there is a line you cross, above which you are not capitalizing ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... at a later period of his Life, to persuade himself "that shooting was almost an intellectual employment: it required so much skill to judge where to find most game, and to hunt the dogs well" (I. p. 43), was by no means so sophistical as he seems to have been ready ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic sentences by which the writer ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... was persuading Pons to engage Mme. Cantinet as his nurse, Fraisier had sent for her. He had plied the beadle's wife with sophistical reasoning and subtlety. It was difficult to resist his corrupting influence. And as for Mme. Cantinet—a lean, sallow woman, with large teeth and thin lips—her intelligence, as so often happens with women of the people, had been ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... in Westminster Hall, just outside the Club, and had saved himself by taking to his heels. The laughter over this made the last gentleman forget what he was saying; which gave opportunity to a fifth gentleman to rise and discourse at some length on the sophistical and abominable character of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... called the Missouri question. His manner was dignified, grave, earnest, but not rapid or vehement. There was nothing new in his argument, but he unravelled with ingenious and subtle analysis many of the sophistical tissues of slaveholders. He laid down the position of the natural liberty of man, and its incompatibility with slavery in any shape; he also questioned the constitutional right of the President and Senate to make ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the name of method to an alphabetical, chronological, analogical, or merely nominal classification of subjects? Do you give the name of method to these lists of paragraphs gathered under an arbitrary head, these sophistical vagaries, this mass of contradictory quotations and opinions, this nauseous style, this spasmodic rhetoric, models of which are so common at the bar, though seldom found elsewhere? Do you take for philosophy this twaddle, this intolerable ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Toulouse, there resided a monk who was very skilful in all matters of natural philosophy. On my return, I paid him a visit. He. pitied me very much, and advised me, with much warmth and kindness of expression, not to amuse myself any longer with such experiments as these, which were all false and sophistical; but that I should read the good books of the old philosophers, where I might not only find the true matter of the science of alchymy, but learn also the exact order of operations which ought to be followed. I very much approved of this wise ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... listening to the ring of sincerity in Gaston's voice, while he told of his youthful troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five-and-twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept them alike from corrupting influences and intercourse with men and women of the world whose sophistical reasoning and experience destroys the fair qualities of youth. Here was the ideal of a woman's dreams, a man unspoiled as yet by the egoism of family or success, or by that narrow selfishness which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion, self-sacrifice, and high demands of self; all ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... M. DANTES, last evening, in the Chamber of Deputies, was one of the most dangerous diatribes to which we ever listened—dangerous for the insidious and sophistical principles it advanced, and the almost fiend-like eloquence with which they were urged. Where are these things to stop? At what terrible catastrophe do these men aim? What crisis ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate—which seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and showed especially scant respect for the 'Protestantism of the Protestant religion.' The father warned him grimly that he was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the Spectator on the Children in the Wood. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of Mr. Baxter under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I have ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... desires. Wherefore, by my story I purpose at one and the same time to shew you how great is the folly of all such, and how much greater is the folly of those who, deeming themselves mightier than nature, think by sophistical arguments to bring that to pass which is beyond their power, and strive might and main to conform others to their own pattern, however little the nature of the latter may brook such treatment. Know then that there was in Pisa a judge, better endowed with mental than with physical vigour, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between right and wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... overthrows. He therefore explains to him the nature of the process to which he is being subjected. The two strangers are not serious; there are jests at the mysteries which precede the enthronement, and he is being initiated into the mysteries of the sophistical ritual. This is all a sort of horse-play, which is now ended. The exhortation to virtue will follow, and Socrates himself (if the wise men will not laugh at him) is desirous of showing the way in which such an exhortation should be carried ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... for the greatest warriors but destroy the flower of their armies and the prestige of their name? Our maps, in placing the North at the top, and the South at the bottom of the sheet, impress us, by what may seem a sophistical analogy, with the imagination that Huns or Moguls, Kalmucks or Cossacks, have been a superincumbent mass, descending by a sort of gravitation upon the fair territories which lie below them. Yet this is substantially true;—though the attraction ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the felt wound; he remembered that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to hope the latter might be ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... infim species under each of the two main heads. We shall presently imitate this procedure for reasons of expediency. For the whole phraseology of the subject is derived from Aristotle's treatise on Sophistical Refutations, and we must either keep to his method or break away from tradition altogether. Sufficient confusion has already arisen from retaining Aristotle's language while ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... were engaged in business or pleasure and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigator," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and could not have told for my life whether ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... and thought end by doing the work of feeling, as in 'Fifine at the Fair'; and that the two should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity in such works of an intermediate period as 'Cleon', 'A Death in the Desert', the 'Epistle of Karshish', and 'James Lee's Wife'; the sophistical ingenuities of 'Bishop Blougram', and 'Sludge'; and the sad, appealing tenderness of 'Andrea del Sarto' and ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... reports the summing up of the judge was moderate in expression, but leaned against the prisoner on every point, and corrected the sophistical reasoning of his counsel very sensibly. Both reports said an expert was called for the prisoner, whose ingenuity made the court smile, but did not counterbalance the evidence. Helen sat cold as ice with the extracts in ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... example of the irony of circumstance that I am able to do so. But, after all, why should we be annoyed instead of being thankful, when bright flowers spring up on a dunghill? Certainly, my father would not have felt any indignity. He was the least superstitious and also the least sophistical of men. If a thing was worthy in itself he would never call it common or unclean on ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... it in an article with certain additions, which it is only fair to distinguish as his own, implying that the vigorous English of Grampus was not always as correct as a Frenchman could desire, while Merman's objections were more sophistical than solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able extrait of Grampus's article in the valuable Rapporteur scientifique et historique, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice of certain Frenchmen who ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... to demonstrate, by the force of example and contrast, the sophistical absurdity of absolute theories, that, however naturally and harmoniously their parts may be made to correspond in thesis and system as a whole, according to which the same consequences, upon a given principle, should inevitably flow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe of fifty thousand livres—obtained for him, after he had been defeated in every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being, according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... that do decry good works and rely only upon faith, take not away merit: for, depending upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more sophistical way do seem to challenge heaven. It was decreed by God that only those that lapped in the water like dogs, should have the honour to destroy the Midianites; yet could none of those justly challenge, or imagine he deserved, that ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... fit opportunity should present, exact of them satisfaction therefor. But it was knocking at a deaf man's door, as they did not regard these protests or even take any notice of them; on the contrary they have sought many subterfuges, circumstances, false pretences and sophistical arguments to give color to their doings, to throw a cloud upon our lawful title and valid rights, and to cheat us out of them. General Stuyvesant also has had many questions with them, growing out of this matter, but it ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... logic of truth, and is intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves as a protection against sophistical fallacy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... that other aristocratic reformer, who voted for the spoliation of the church property of France, on the ground, which that leveling sentimentalist Rousseau had advanced, that the church property belonged to the nation. But this plea, in both cases, was sophistical. It was, doubtless, a great evil that the property of the State had fallen into the hands of wealthy proprietors, as it was an evil that half the landed property of France was in possession of the clergy. But, in both cases, this property had been ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... another bale of French books from G. containing upwards of forty volumes. I have read about half. They are like the rest, clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral. The best of it is, they give one a thorough idea of France and Paris, and are the best substitute for French conversation ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that you allowed it; but I understand how you were led into that error. Your husband's infidelity had shaken his hold on your respect for him and your sympathy with him, and had so left you without your natural safeguard against Mrs. Presty's sophistical reasoning and bad example. But for that wrong-doing, there is a remedy left. Enlighten your child as you have enlightened me; and then—I have no personal motive for pleading Mr. Herbert Linley's cause, after what I have seen of him—and then, acknowledge ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... complained as proceeding from Stockdale arose from a letter of the poet's, in which (November 12, 1810) he asks his friend the publisher to send him a "Hebrew essay demonstrating the falsehood of the Christian religion," and which the Christian Observer, he says, calls "an unanswerable but sophistical argument." Have it he must, be it translated into "Greek, Latin or any of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... answers characteristically, (1) 'Quietness.' 'But Temperance is a fine and noble thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as quickness.' He tries again and says (2) that temperance is modesty. But this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt. This time he gives a ...
— Charmides • Plato
... that is, through voluntary and unassisted cooeperation. Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain. The Progressive watchword, "right makes might," sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success. More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of his struggle with the Progressives into compromising ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Confusion. Under this head, indeed, of Fallacies of Confusion, might strictly be brought almost any fallacy, though falling also under some other head: for, some of the links in an argument, especially if sophistical, are sure to be suppressed; and, it being left doubtful which is the proposition to be supplied, we can seldom tell with certainty under which class the fallacy absolutely comes. It is, however, convenient to reserve the name Fallacy of ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... will, for example, only require an appeal to every man's experience, to prove that we often act purely from a regard to the happiness of others, and are therefore social beings; and it is not necessary to be a consummate judge of the deceptions of language, to despise the sophistical trifler, who tells us, that, because we experience a gratification in our benevolent actions, we are therefore exclusively and uniformly selfish. A correct examination of facts will lead us to discover that quality which is common to all virtuous actions, and ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... limited degree, a demonstration of this fact. Mr. O'Connor had been competent but never particularly clever along strictly legitimate lines; it was always and only along ways just a little devious, a little tricky, a little sophistical, that his acumen mounted above the ordinary. His greatest successes with the Guardian had always been gained by methods which had been kept secret from his chief, for Mr. Wintermuth's keen sense of business honor would have prevented the fruition ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... utilitarian. Science had no charm to him, since it was directed to utilitarian ends and was uncertain. His sayings had such a lofty, hidden wisdom that very few people understood him: his utterances seemed either paradoxical, or unintelligible, or sophistical. "To the mentally proud and mentally feeble he was equally a bore." Most people probably thought him a nuisance, since he was always about with his questions, puzzling some, confuting others, and reproving all,—careless ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Francisco Roldan and his companions, on leaving Spain, had taken an oath to be faithful to the sovereigns, and to the admiral in their name, which oath they had violated. For these and similar reasons, some just, others rather sophistical, he urged the sovereigns not to consider themselves bound to ratify the compulsory terms ceded to these profligate men, but to inquire into their offences, and treat ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... continuation of the same simple chain of reasoning. We comprehend in this case a hundred other experiences and observations, concerning the usual figure and members of that species of animal, without which this method of argument must be considered as fallacious and sophistical. ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... multifarious and immoral nature, you can appeal—and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there—to wait and see his part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50} circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... teeth of this insidious argument, the Senate would not venture to inflict capital punishment on their friends, that they evinced their approbation by loud cheers; while many of the patrician party were shaken in their previous convictions; and many of those who perceived the fallacy of his sophistical reasoning, and detected his latent determination to screen the parricides of the state, felt the hazard and difficulty of proceeding as the exigencies of the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... men, and all the stratagems of goblins. I would not name to thee so salutary an advice as to dismiss thy innocent and unsuspicious prize, did not I know thee too obstinate and headstrong to listen to the voice of wisdom. Essay then thy base and low-minded temptations, thy corrupt and sophistical reasonings, to tarnish the unsullied purity of her mind, and it is well. If by such a wretch as thee she can be seduced from the obedience of virtue and the Gods, then let her fall. She were then a victim worthy of thee. But if thou essayest the means ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... history is also according to law,—parts, though minute parts, of a universal plan, and permitted for reasons worthy of the Creator. To both, or neither, is the same answer open. Your objection is, I think, a mere sophistical evasion of the difficulty. There is no difference whatever in the nature of the events, except that the variation from the 'established series of sequences' is infinitely greater in those portentous revolutions of the universe to ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... eminently religious men; but they did endless injury to the cause of religion by laying the foundations of a new theology, while equipping the defenders of it with the subtlest of all weapons of offence and defence, and with an inexhaustible store of sophistical arguments of the ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to hear what Professor Park has to say about it. There has been another review in "La Presse" equally favorable. All seem to see the truth about American slavery much plainer than people can who are in it. If American ministers and Christians could see through their sophistical spider-webs, with what wonder, pity, and contempt they would regard their own ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... flashes of whose thought, and the movements of whose impulses render her at moments more prudent than the Servite Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had; more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the whole wide ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac |
