"Uncritical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But he was the earliest ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Village Sorcerer), which was performed at Fontainebleau before the Court, and received with unexampled enthusiasm. His profession, so far as he had any, was that of a copyist of music, and his musical taste and facile talents had at last brought him an uncritical recognition. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... to me, pervade most of the estimates, critical or uncritical, of the Heptameron, the two first of old date, the third of recent origin. The first is that it is a comparatively feeble imitation of a great original, and that any one who knows Boccaccio need hardly trouble himself to know Margaret of Navarre. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... uncritical eye, the differences between ungulates and carnivores of to-day are many and obvious, but as we trace them back into the past we follow on converging lines, and in our search for the prototypes of the carnivora we are led to the Creodonta, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... when the Romans became undisputed masters of Gaul, we find Rouen the capital of the province, called the Secunda Lugdunensis; and from that tine forward, it continued to increase in importance. Etymologists have been amused and puzzled by "Rothomagus," its classical name. In an uncritical age, it was contended that the name afforded good proof of the city having been founded by Magus, son of Samothes, contemporary of Nimrod. Others, with equal diligence, sought the root of Rothomagus in the name of Roth, who is said to have been its tutelary god; and the ancient clergy ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... trenchant phrases. Soon, however, she lifts him with her to the ardent contemplation of the perfect life; it is in words of singular beauty that she describes the attitude of generous loving-kindness, uncritical, humble and glad, with which the true servant of God considers all sorts and conditions of men: "Such a man rejoices in every type that he sees, saying: Thanks be to Thee, Eternal Father, that Thou hast many mansions in Thy house.... He rejoices ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... uncritical censure, belongs to the past; but the play remains, a singular exercise of "poetic energy," a confession, ex animo, of "the burthen of the mystery, ... the heavy and the weary weight Of all ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... interview Charlotte saw with warring impulses that Somerset slowly diminished in Paula's estimate; slowly as the moon wanes, but as certainly. Charlotte's own love was of a clinging, uncritical sort, and though the shadowy intelligence of Somerset's doings weighed down her soul with regret, it seemed to make not the least difference in her ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of bad taste the writer of certain passages in Venus and Adonis could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown. To invent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a surviving fragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be an uncritical mode of evading the question at issue. It must be regarded as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in tragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its reappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yet dramatist enough ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was not uncritical of the administrative work of the airline as it touched upon the fatal flight and concerning this matter ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... now—as it had given him throughout all this time of trial—an uncontrollable emotion, but he would not let his mind speculate about the grief and attitude of his family, forcibly interposing a veil between himself and them. Tired out at length, he let his reverie merge into mere uncritical perception. He was conscious of afternoon sunshine, of a great stretch of sky, with a continent of white cloud containing big blue lakes; his eye took in the expanse of sea, glistening, streaked, patched, lined, and shaded, with the pier in his centre of vision, a mass of kiosks, pole-lamps, and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... that he propounded the problem of critical scholarship, but himself did nothing to solve it. By critical scholarship is meant the examination of the grounds on which learning rests. In youth we are uncritical, and accept as Caesar or Livy the books from which we read those authors; but with growing experience we learn that a copy is not always a true representation of its original; and with this, even though there is little perception of the changes and chances through which ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the gleaming whiteness of his teeth. She ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... is a denouncer,' says Lord Strangford in a note on this expression, 'of Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is an anti-Philocelt, a very different thing from an anti-Celt, and quite indispensable in scientific inquiry. As Philoceltism has hitherto,—hitherto, remember,—meant nothing but uncritical acceptance and irrational admiration of the beloved object's sayings and doings, without reference to truth one way or the other, it is surely in the interest of science to support him in the main. In tracing the workings of old ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... numberless observers piled up an immense mass of details which might advantageously be sorted into a kind of encyclopaedia. Such an encyclopaedia is the so-called Natural History of Pliny. It is a vast jumble of more or less uncritical statements regarding almost every field of contemporary knowledge. The descriptions of animals and plants predominate, but the work as a whole would have been immensely improved had the compiler shown a more critical spirit. As it is, he seems rather disposed to quote any interesting citation ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... she was so yielding, so selfless, so absolutely uncritical, that if any woman could marry late she was the woman. She could have lived with a monster of egotism without finding it out. Had she not devoted herself to two such monsters most of her life? And perhaps Mr. Kingston was ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... young girl would hardly have looked at a tradesman. But her ups and downs, capped by her indiscretions with Henchard had made her uncritical as to station. In her poverty she had met with repulse from the society to which she had belonged, and she had no great zest for renewing an attempt upon it now. Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care so ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... animism was crude and uncritical. In proportion as men learnt to reflect upon their experience, it was bound to be modified, and to submit to reactionary influences. Such was the case at the very beginning of philosophical and scientific enquiry—and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... and no capacity to rise in faith to a living God above nature, the result is a multitude of divinities of higher and lower rank. Myths respecting them are the spontaneous invention of unreflecting and uncritical, but imaginative, peoples. Thus they serve to indicate the range of ideas, and the moral spirit of those who originate and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... was being told to an uncritical and unchronological audience, or Dame Agnes might have received a gentle intimation that she was antedating the reign of King Arthur by the short period ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Usher's "The Greenback Movement of 1875-1884 and Wisconsin's Part in It" (1911) practically exhaust the list. Elizabeth N. Barr's "The Populist Uprising", in volume II of William E. Connelley's "Standard History of Kansas" (1918), is a vivid and sympathetic but uncritical narrative. Briefer articles have been written by Melvin J. White, "Populism in Louisiana during the Nineties", in the Mississippi "Valley Historical Review" (June, 1918), and by Ernest D. Stewart, "The Populist ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... only the Christian State, and not the "general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Poesy, composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), according to the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... by the modern world. Then and there he planned a conspiracy to rob the greatest character in literary history of his just fame; and, under the pseudonym of "Delia Bacon," advanced those theories of his own concealed authorship which have ever since deluded the uncritical and disgusted all lovers of ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... account of its uncritical methods Augustinianism has found but few defenders and deserves notice only in so far as it claims to base its ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... often of the flimsiest kind, which again are used to support further hypotheses, and so on, until the sober inquirer begins to feel his brain reeling and his footing giving way beneath him. I shall have occasion to notice one or two examples of this uncritical use of evidence later on, and will say no more of it now. No one can feel more grateful than I do to the many leading anthropologists who have touched in one way or another on Roman evidence; but for myself I try never to forget the words of Columella, with which a great ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... means the spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature and art that may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis the Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an uncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there are typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the terms as we may, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elements always recognisable; united in perfect art—in Sophocles, in Dante, in the highest work of Goethe, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... When Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the Oxford case. The ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... proof," which gives evidence for these "certain facts"? The whole discussion in general about prehistoric man, which Virchow has mixed up with his Munich address (pp. 30, 31), is the clearest evidence of the uncritical spirit in which he deals with these historical problems as "exact natural sciences." He assures us that "not one single ape's skull, nor skull of an anthropoid ape, has ever been found which could actually have belonged to a human owner!" ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... character. It is fresh, simple, fluent, vigorous, flexible, never dazzling away attention from what it represents by the intrusion of verbal felicities which are pleasing apart from the vivid conceptions they attempt to convey. The uncritical reader is unconscious of its excellence because it is so excellent,—that is, because it is so entirely subordinate to the matter which it is the instrument of expressing. At times, however, the singular interest of the things described must impress the dullest reader with the fact that the author ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from their use ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... such a composition as the Annales Cambriae were called (what it really is) a list of dates; since the word chronicle has a dangerous tendency to engender a very uncritical laxity of thought. It continually gets mistaken for a register; yet the two sorts of composition are wholly different. That the habit of making cotemporaneous entries of events as they happen, just as incumbents of parishes, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... they conceived of the superman as a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. You may see the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and common ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... room. The dancers and all the other guests filed out to enjoy the supper, the room rang with laughter and screamed witticisms. A popular feature of the entertainment was the mottoes, flat scalloped candies of pink and white sugar, whose printed messages caused endless merriment among these uncritical young persons. "Do You Love Me?"; "I Am A Flirt"; "Don't Kiss Me"; "Oh, You Smarty," said the mottoes insinuatingly, and the revellers read them aloud, exchanged them, secreted them, and even devoured them, in ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... great gusto, their noses plunged into the lush grass, their tails incessantly busy flicking off the flies. The raindrops and the sticks of the cowherd boys fall on their backs with the same unreasonable persistency, and they bear both with equally uncritical resignation, steadily going on with their munch, munch, munch. These cows have such mild, affectionate, mournful eyes; why, I wonder, should Providence have thought fit to impose all the burden of man's work on the submissive shoulders of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... that Othello killed his wife, probably within twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to mention more than a few. (a) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept away from her for ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... would have been more widely adopted, and the compactness and lucidity of its statements, and the enthusiasm-inspiring character of its style would have contributed to make it highly prized wherever it was known. Then would come speculation as to its authorship, and what wonder if in uncritical times an Athanasian authorship was first guessed, then confidently affirmed and believed?" (Father Sydney F. Smith, S.J., ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... against that table; I sat down because I chose to do so. His doctrine is not supposed to deny the truth contained in such statements; it is supposed only to give a fuller understanding of it. Hence, we cannot condemn either doctrine simply by an uncritical appeal to such statements and to the experiences they represent. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this worse than worthless translation—worthless as failing to represent, worse than worthless as misrepresenting—should have been favoured ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... cork out of a whiskey bottle long enough to remark, casually, "I allus reckoned Kansas was purty close to hell," and said no more about it. Harlan was the proprietor and bartender of the Oasis and catered to the excessive and uncritical thirsts of the ruck of range society, and he had objected vigorously to the placing of the second sign in his place of business; but at the close of an incisive if inelegant reply from the marshal, the sign went up, and stayed up. Edwards' language ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... so nice, he can't be very bad," said kind Lady Mildmay, using an argument of most uncritical charity. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... for the Trinity than they would wish to have. The quotation is, "The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they (?) are not three Gods, but one God." I am accused of following an "uncritical principle," in not reasoning in the same way. If it is "uncritical," I plead guilty, and beg that my sentence may be as mild as possible. But before the sentence is pronounced may it not be well to apply the reasoning to some other subject,—to Peter, James, and John, for instance? ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... prospective son-in-law a promise that in twelve months' time he would return. During that interval correspondence went on apace not only between the affianced lovers, but between M. Forestier and Ingres, the former taking affectionate and not uncritical interest in the other's projects. For Ingres was before all things a projector, anticipating by decades the achievements of his later years. The glow of enthusiasm, the fever of creativeness were at its height. Italy ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... exaggerating numbers. Yet where Valerius is his only authority or is not contradicted by others, he accepts his statements, figures and all, without uneasiness. This instance is typical of his method as a critical—or rather an uncritical —historian. When his authorities do not disagree, he accepts what they say without much question. When they do disagree, he has several courses open to him, and takes one or another according to his fancy at the moment. Sometimes he counts heads and follows ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... would be a feature of his educational scheme, and partly because it soothed him to be doing it. He could never read to Barbara. Once, when he tried it, the sound of his voice and the monotony of his cadences, so got on her nerves that she stopped him in the middle of a word. But this girl with her uncritical mind, and her gratitude for small bits of kindliness, gave him confidence in himself by ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Burns says, 'crooning to a body's sel' does weel eneugh;' but my crooning is not fit for company, except that of uncritical children." ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of actuality and the people ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous" values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere impressionist. But he insists that ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Jesus Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated—except by an artificial abstraction—from the inward way of mysticism, or from the implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response—or "assent," as Clement of Alexandria called it—the moral swing of our inmost self, as we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... closer to his heart,—the Church's atmosphere of holiness, the emblematic radiance of the candle's light, the ecstasy of worshippers who seemed "to breathe the air of Paradise." And Saint Gregory's is the religious, uncritical spirit of his day, whose interest was in ecclesiastical establishment rather than ecclesiastical architecture. Churches there were in numbers; but they were not architectural achievements. Their building was like the planting of the flag; they were new outposts, signs of an advance of the ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... of H. M. Tomlinson's "The Sea and the Jungle," we pause to offer the uncritical opinion that this chap gets as good seawater into his copy as Conrad, and that, in the item of English, he can write ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... see in my attitude one that is typical for our time. Every one of us, it seems to me, travels this road: After a period of early veneration, which is awakened in us by tradition and by the earliest literary impressions of youth, there comes, as a reaction against an uncritical overestimate, and under the influence of changed ideals of art, a defection from Schiller, which parades itself in a one-sided and unhistorical emphasis of his weak points. Then gradually this negative attitude corrects ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... time. The other, to state the position extremely, regards each day as the possible glorious dawn of a completely new world. The first attitude, when intemperately preached and practiced, becomes an uncritical veneration of the past; the second, an uncritical disparagement. We ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... duties, it unconsciously assumed another aspect in his eyes. But not for worlds would he have put into words the annoyance he could not help feeling, and Rachel was entirely unconscious of his attitude. The devoted, uncritical affection for her father which had grown up with her life was in her mind so absolutely taken for granted as one of the foundations of existence, that it did not even occur to her that Rendel might possibly not look at it in the same light. She took for granted that he ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... number of persons who have refused to be vaccinated! This would be laughable if it were not really serious; it is sad and serious that a man of Mr. Coleridge's education and social position should so consistently mislead the uncritical readers of the Contemporary Review to whose pages he has unfortunately very free access. If Mr. Coleridge really believes these things he is either very stupid or very ignorant; if he knows them to be otherwise, but wilfully deceives the public, he is immoral. He suffers from the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, "Let's go and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had so quick a flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... bears evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it valuable even now. Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of any distinctly literary quality. Much of what Shakespeare used was indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward Hall. Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made no attempt to separate the legendary from the truly historical material. So far as drama is concerned, however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, since legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of a career in an act or a saying which never had basis in fact. The ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... date. But if, in the eagerness of the chase after the literary facts of the origin of the Old Testament, we forget that it is a unity, that it is a divine unity, that it is a progressive revelation, and that 'the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy' then I venture to say that the most uncritical, old-fashioned reader of the Old Testament that found Jesus Christ in the Song of Solomon, and in the details of the Tabernacle, and in all the minutiae of worship and sacrifice, was nearer to the living ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... meeting of the British librarians at Cambridge in 1882 a bomb was thrown into the camp of the book producers in the form of the question: Who spoils our new English books? In the explosion which followed, everybody within range was hit, from "the uncritical consumer" to "the untrained manufacturer." This dangerous question was asked and answered by Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, as a London bookseller, had for nearly forty years handled the products of the press new and old, had numbered among ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... spirits. Perhaps I might obtain a post in a bank; I might become a shop-assistant, bag-man, even a pressman. These moody and unwholesome thoughts were clouding my mind as I surveyed myself in the wrinkled mirror which had seemed to suffice the uncritical Cousin Egbert for his toilet. It hung between the portrait of a champion middle-weight crouching in position and the calendar advertisement of a brewery which, as I could not fancy Cousin Egbert being in the least concerned ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... conceive the great plan upon which his later career was based. This was nothing less than to issue practically the whole body of classic literature, Greek as well as Latin, in editions distinguished from all that had preceded in two important respects. First, they were to be not reprints of received uncritical texts but new revisions made by competent scholars based upon a comparison of all the best available manuscripts. Secondly, they were to be printed not in ponderous and costly folios but in small octavos of convenient size, small but clear type, and low price. This ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... in Rome or Africa, Irenaeus in Gaul. They all flourished about A.D. 190. They all speak of the Gospels, not only as well known and received, but as being the only Gospels acknowledged and received by the Church. One of them uses very "uncritical" arguments to prove that the Gospels could only be four in number; but the very absurdity of his analogies is a witness to the universal tradition of his day. To what date before their time must this tradition reach, so that it must be relied upon ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... good theatrical performances. Very early I recall a thespian named Thoman, who was supported by a Julia Pelby. They vastly pleased an uncritical audience. I was doorkeeper, notwithstanding that Thoman doubted if I was "hefty" enough. "Little Lotta" Crabtree was charming. Her mother traveled with her. Between performances she played with her dolls. She danced gracefully ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... conviction that the belief of the Church in the assumption rests on nothing better or more stable than these Apocryphal stories; that the authors of these Apocrypha were inventing their stories out of nothing, and that in an uncritical age their legends came to be taken as history. Thus was a belief in the assumption foisted upon the Church, having no slightest ground in fact. The human tendency to fill in the silences of Scripture has resulted in many legends, that ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... influenced perhaps by his comparative weal, Dennis decided that he would purchase a ticket to the Olympus, and climbing the rear approach to that elevation, found himself seated shortly with the gallery gods, viewing with uncritical contrasts the relative merits of the clown, ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... diversion. Nash, addressing the room of course, was at one end of a little sofa with his nose in the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease and with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o'clock in the day, but Mrs. Rooth was not dressed; there was, however, no want of finish in her elegant attitude—the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... women, have a natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gospel was truth and life to him, not a mere subject for strife and debate. It was far otherwise with the Arians. On one side their doctrine was a mass of presumptuous theorizing, supported by alternate scraps of obsolete traditionalism and uncritical text-mongering; on the other it was a lifeless system of spiritual pride and hard unlovingness. Therefore Arianism perished. So too every system, whether of science or theology, must likewise perish which presumes like Arianism to discover in the feeble ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... brought to an end by a maid sent to find Rosalind. After she had gone Maurice saw a book on the grass where she had been lying, and reaching through the hedge with his crutch, he drew it toward him. When he removed the outside cover, even his uncritical eye saw it was a handsome hook. "Shakespeare's 'As You Like It.' Edited by Louis A. Sargent," he read. "Why, it is one of Shakespeare's plays," he said, in surprise. So this was the story Rosalind was ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... sure that only in this way can we realise that they were real living people—not mere names. Their modes of thought were far different from ours; they may have wasted their time in verbal subtleties, and uncritical tales; but the more we study what they did, the more we shall realise how laborious, how artistic, how conscientious they were; and amid all the developments of the nineteenth century, we shall gratefully confess that the Middle Ages ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... observations, but we must not mistake a caricature for the reality. After all, Les Precieuses Ridicules contrasted very favourably with the ordinary type of womanhood of their day, not merely in France, but also in England; and an uncritical love of sonnets is preferable, on the whole, to coarseness, vulgarity ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... that the boarders are interested in it is to speak feebly: they blaze with interest, they explode with it, they scorch and sizzle. And they are so pugnacious! Not to each other, for contrary to the attitude at Kloster's they are knit together by the toughest band of uncritical and obedient admiration for everything German, but they are pugnacious to the Swede girl and myself. Especially to myself. There is a holy calm about the Swede girl that nothing can disturb. She has an enviable gift for getting on with her meals and saying nothing. I ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... advanced tentatively by former scholars and merely as working hypotheses, have now, by repetition and the dogmatic dicta of biographical compilers, come to be accepted by the uncritical ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... uncontroverted and uncontrovertible fact. "The evolutionist doctrine," he says, "is itself one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It existed, and most naturally, in the oldest philosophy and poetry, in connection with the crudest and most uncritical attempts of the human mind to grasp the system of nature; but that in our day a system destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech, and by the arbitrary and artificial coherence ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... and most ardent longings are overruled; he knows that until he can discount or conciliate that which commands his fortunes his condition is precarious and miserable. And through his eagerness to save himself he leaps to conclusions that are uncritical and premature. Irreligion, on the other hand, flourishes among those who are more snugly intrenched {215} within the cities of man. It is a product of civilization. Comfortably housed as he is, and enjoying an artificial illumination behind ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Ireland by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to publicly establishing or endowing religious worship, is not by lending a hand straight away to the operation, and Hebraising,—that is, in this case, taking an uncritical interpretation of certain Bible words as our absolute rule of conduct,—with the Nonconformists. If may be very well for born [211] Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraise is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... when he was to read a familiar lecture to an uncritical audience. He had been invited by the members of the Young Ladies' Saturday Morning Club to read one of his essays in their parlor. This he kindly consented to do, as well as to pass the previous night with his friends in Charles Street, and read to them ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... certainly few amongst many, and those who selected the canonical books, unless they themselves were also inspired, must be regarded in the light of mere critics, and, from the evidence they have left of their intellectual habits, very uncritical critics. When one thinks that such delicate questions as those involved fell into the hands of men like Papias (who believed in the famous millenarian grape story); of Irenaeus with his "reasons" for the existence of only four ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly. "I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down, with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner and sillier and more pointless than if ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... he won even more than his share of applause; but Beatrix, her nerves still tense from The Erl-King, felt a difference in the quality of the welcome to the two musicians. The critical few were impartial, and in the case of Arlt they led a wavering fugue of the uncritical many. Arlt was young, small and insignificant. His tailor was not an artist, and Arlt was too palpably conscious that his coat tails demanded respectful care. Society applauded Arlt with punctilious courtesy; ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshiped by these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of Pagan authors were valued ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... formularies for saints' festivals, and depends on the days of the secular month. Most of the material here is hagiological biography, occasionally revised as by Leo XIII. in view of archaeological and other discoveries, but still largely uncritical. Covering a great stretch of time and space, they do for the worshipper in the field of church history what the Scripture readings do in that of biblical history. As something like 90% of the days in the year have, during the course of centuries, been allotted to some saint or other, it is easy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... was over, and discuss with Daddy and her the ups and downs, the fresh chances and prospects of his infant business, was pleasant enough. Daddy and he met on the common ground of wishing to make the world uncomfortable for Purcell; while Dora supplied the admiring uncritical wonder, in which, like a warm environment, an eager temperament expands, and feels itself under the stimulus more inventive ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remained. Her dimples were in full play, but he found it according to his humor to continue uncritical, inexpressively tender, toward this big, bonny child who never curbed the expression of ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... one who will understand. For I too am friendless, in the sense of one standing alone, shut out from the sweet, intimate communion of feeling and opinion that may be held with the heart's friends. Shall you have read this as a friend, I wonder—a candid, uncritical, understanding friend? Let me hope it, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... there is so much bad music in the world is that composers are in too much of a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, what do they do? Instead of taking it out for a long, cool walk, they sit down at once to work it up, but let it work them up instead into an absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which every splutter of the goose-quill looks to them like part of ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... government is representative of national traditions and is organized in the interest of valid national purposes. National traditions and purposes always contain a large infusion of dubious ingredients; but loyalty to them does not necessarily mean the uncritical and unprotesting acceptance of the national limitations and abuses. Nationality is a political and social ideal as well as the great contemporary political fact. Loyalty to the national interest implies devotion to a progressive principle. It demands, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... contortions of his spirit, it is impossible not to perceive a strain of naivete in Mr. Gladstone. He adhered to some of his principles that of the value of representative institutions, for instance with a faith which was singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... fraud—a view which otherwise was rather unfamiliar to the ancients, but played an important part later. Incidentally there is a violent attack on idolatry. The work is not without acuteness of thought and a certain coarse wit of the true Cynical kind; but it is entirely uncritical (oracles are used which are evidently inventions of later times) and of no great significance. It is even difficult to avoid the impression that the author's aim is in some degree to create a sensation. Cynics of that day were not strangers to that kind of thing. But ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching, scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden ladies had lived there, who used to walk ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... composition, and the touching pleas of individuals of both sexes, in reduced circumstances, were so many evidences of success, which I hugged to my bosom. Reducing the matter to statistics, I have since ascertained that about one in ten of these letters is dictated either by honest sympathy, the warm, uncritical recognition of youth (which I don't suppose any author would diminish, if he could), or the craving for encouragement, under unpropitious circumstances of growth. But how was I, in the beginning, to guess at the motives of the writers? They offered sugar-plums, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... other form of mental healing, has such a variety of forms that it is practically impossible to describe a typical one. Faith in some power, or, what amounts to the same thing, the uncritical reception of suggestions concerning the cure, is the common ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... the full swing of the pendulum from dogmatism, or the uncritical conviction of truth. A modified form of scepticism has been developed in these later days under the influence of natural science, and is called agnosticism or positivism. It accepts the Protagorean doctrine only in the sense of attributing to human knowledge as a whole an incapacity ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... to a phrase of that quality for the undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. You see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. He still insisted it was a necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary—for the mass of people, a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could imagine the possibility—of 'understandings.' ... Mr. Brumley was very ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... not interesting to a critical reader. He sticks to the novel, or, more frequently, goes to France, to Russia, or to England for his fiction, as the sales- list of any progressive publisher will show. And I do not believe that they are deeply interesting to an uncritical reader. He reads them to pass the time; and, to judge from the magazines themselves, gives his more serious attention to the "write-ups" of politics, current events, new discoveries, and men in the public eye,—to reality, in other words, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition to the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... and led us to one of a number of very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed upon the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle with a metal ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... were seated at table; and, lucidly, it had been the general's choice. He was enchanted by her approbation of his taste, confessed it to be neat and simple, thought it right to encourage the manufacture of his country; and for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden or Save. But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago. The manufacture was much improved since that time; he had seen some beautiful ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... aggregating several thousand dollars and a complicated timber business disorganized by his sudden death. Hollister was young, sanguine, clever in the accepted sense of cleverness. He had married for love,—urged thereto by a headlong, unquestioning, uncritical passion. But there were no obstacles. His passion was returned. There was nothing to make him ponder upon what a devastating, tyrannical force this emotion which he knew as love might become, this blind fever of the blood under cover of which nature works ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... supposed documents in the muniment room of Redcliffe Church: "Of the Auntiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, bills, letters, inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge: many of which this singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of Bristol," published some twenty years later. He also imparted to Barrett two Rowleian poems, "The Parliament of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" (in two quite different versions). In September, 1768, a new bridge was opened at Bristol over the Avon; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... There quickly followed more substantial volumes of collective biography, which mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... this connection is significant of a very definite attitude toward books,—an attitude not uncritical, since it is love of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than instruction or entertainment,—both valuable, wholesome, and necessary, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... as a poet. It is true that his style remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses, but spirited ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the woods because he didn't want to work." Some such stuff is a common conception, though not as common as it used to be. If this teacher had had more brains, it would have been a lie. The word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism, or rather of this uncritical remark. To ask this kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems from celebrated composers" literally, always literally, and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong notes, right notes, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Japan, began with the first sight of land, to be engrossed with the task of identifying each newly discovered country with some island or district of the Far East, named on his maps. He was an ignorant man, though he knew Ptolemy and Marco Polo by heart, credulous, uncritical, not consciously dishonest, but unready to correct false impressions caused by his ignorance and gullibility. His notes, as may be seen from a reproduction of a page of his manuscripts (facing p. 38), were in an execrable hand. The forger of the Journal of the First Voyage ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... have purposely brought out what I believe to be the most significant parts of Roosevelt's character and public life, I have not wished to be uncritical. I have suppressed nothing. Fortunately for his friends, the two libel suits which he went through in his later years, subjected him to a microscopic scrutiny, both as to his personal and his political life. All the efforts of very able lawyers, and of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... a casual eye on the widows and the fatherless, Uncle William had a full winter. He was not a model housekeeper at best, and ten o'clock of winter mornings often found him with breakfast dishes unwashed and the floor unswept. Andy, coming in for his daily visit, would cast an uncritical eye at the frying-pan, and seat himself comfortably by the stove. It did not occur to either of them, as Uncle William pottered about, finishing the dishes, that Andy should take a hand. Andy had women ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... appearance of a circular flame which suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancient philosophies, and many Eastern languages. And with this flood of erudition came the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... witnessed in medicine the trend, manifest then in so many fields of thought, away from an uncritical acceptance of the authority of the past. It also saw a defiant denial of ancient authority among those more radically inclined, such as the disciples of the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician, Paracelsus. Although some of his ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... Hamlyn, was the chatelaine of the famous Clovelly, in Devonshire, and was Con's sister. She had the spirit of eternal youth and was full of breathless admiration. I hardly ever met any one who derived so much pleasure and surprise out of ordinary life. She was as uncritical and tolerant of those she loved as she was narrow and vehement over those who had unaccountably offended her. She had an ebullient and voracious sense of humour and was baffled and eblouie by titled people, however vulgar ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... strenuously that it is not anterior to the fifteenth. De Bourgueville certainly calls it 'une antiquite de grand remarque;' but we all know that any object which is above an hundred years old, becomes a piece of antiquity in the eye of an uncritical observer; and such ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... illustration of the uncritical association of names than the popular coupling of Robert Frost with Edgar Lee Masters? They are similar in one respect; they are both poets. But in the glorious army of poets, it would be difficult to find two contemporaries more wholly unlike both in the spirit and in the form of their ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for the writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Abraham," "Children of Israel," by adoption, to which I have no doubt Paul refers in the "adoption" of Romans viii. 15-23; ix. 4; Gal. iv. 5; Eph. i. 5. In the lapse of ages this distinction between Bene Israel and Bene Jacob was forgotten, and therefore the very uncritical Masorites in their edition of the Old Testament "confounded the confusion" in this matter. With the disappearance of the 400 years and of the supposed two or three centuries covered by the book of Judges, the genealogies stand as facts. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... find that other instruments and other methods than those to which they have been accustomed are required. At any rate, they and the large public which hangs upon their words show a growing inclination to be respectful to the philosopher and an anxiety (sometimes an uncritical anxiety) to hear what he ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in The Daily Chronicle of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not without laughter—indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... decidedly how harmful it was that this "ferment" was introduced into lay circles at an unseasonable time by the apostles of materialism. For while it was very well adapted to bring about in educated circles a fermentation which produced beneficial results, in uncritical lay-circles this ferment produced nothing but a corruption ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... und zur Goethe-Litteratur."[67] Springer cites at some length the liberal opinions of Molire, La Bruyre, Wieland, Heine and others concerning the literary appropriation of another's thought. He then proceeds to quote Goethe's equally generous views on the subject, and adds the uncritical fling that if Goethe robbed Sterne, it was an honor to Sterne, again to his literary fame. Near the end of his paper, Springer arrives at the question in hand and states positively that these maxims, with their miscellaneous companions, were never published by Goethe, but were found ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... true, mutatis mutandis, of the men by whom they have been most conspicuously displayed. Some wits have been humourists also; nearly all humourists have been also wits; yet the two fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... paradox at the touch of an index finger, that almost faulty abstention from assuming the European tone which has made Hawthorne the traveller appear to certain readers a little crude,—that very air of being the uncritical and slightly puzzled American is precisely the source of his most delightful accuracies ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... to deprive Protestantism of its only firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries earlier, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... Baker read on, grunting reverently at the turn of every page. The words, missing the unsteady hearts of men, rolled out to wander without a home upon the heartless sea; and James Wait, silenced for ever, lay uncritical and passive under the hoarse murmur of despair ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the Church solely and wholly for this decay of humanistic learning in Italy would be uncritical and unjust. We must remember that after a period of feverish energy there comes a time of languor in all epochs of great intellectual excitement. Nor was it to be expected that the enthusiasm of the fifteenth century for classical studies ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... To the uncritical observer the possible achievements of invention and discovery seem boundless. Half a century ago no idea could have appeared more visionary than that of holding communication in a few seconds of time with our fellows ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... manifests the, defects even of his virtues. His positiveness, fascinating and effective as it is for an uncritical reader, carries with it extreme self-confidence and dogmatism, which render him violently intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events except those that he has formed, and formed sometimes hastily ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... be pointed out that the belief in God owes its existence, not to the trained and educated observation of civilized times, but to the uncritical reflection of the primitive mind. It has its origin there, and it would indeed be remarkable, if, while in almost every other direction the primitive mind showed itself to be hopelessly wrong, in its interpretation of the world in this ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... descent, that the past has an interest for it apparently gratuitous, but fiercely strong. I wish to trace my ancestors a thousand years, if I trace them by gallowses. It is not love, not pride, not admiration; it is an expansion of the identity, intimately pleasing, and wholly uncritical; I can expend myself in the person of an inglorious ancestor with perfect comfort; or a disgraced, if I could find one. I suppose, perhaps, it is more to me who am childless, and refrain with a certain shock from looking forwards. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... see all her movements. Yet he watched her steadily, with unchanging, lit-up eyes. She was a strange creature to him. But she had no power over him. She flushed, and was irritated. Yet she glanced again and again at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she despised him. She despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had nothing for her. Yet it angered her as if she were jealous. He watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. But he himself was not implicated. He was different in kind. She was ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the fact; in the despotic monarchies of the East were the elements of the arts and sciences; it was to republics they were transferred, and republics perfected them. Hume, indeed, is often the most incautious and uncritical of all writers. What can we think of an author who asserts that a refined taste succeeds best in monarchies, and then refers to the indecencies of Horace and Ovid as an example of the reverse in a republic—as if Ovid and Horace had not lived under ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... purists and the exacting have said their worst against the statue, it will yet be found—from the spirit of its execution, its cleverness, and 'go,' to resort to a vulgarism—charming a very large class of uncritical examiners. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... up his tune afresh to give the bird a start; but all to no avail. Methuselah was evidently in no humor for talking just then. He listened with a callous, uncritical air, bringing his white eyelids down slowly and sleepily over his bleared gray eyes. Then he nodded his head slowly. "No use," the Frenchman murmured, pursing his lips up gravely. "The bird won't talk. It's going off to sleep now. Methuselah gets visibly ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... the same mistake, or were too polite to take notice of it, we cannot tell, for they drank it without comment, and with evident satisfaction, like men of simple tastes and uncritical minds. ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... their nature be tentative and experimental. The radical mind is to-day one of the most dangerous elements in society, just because all the world over men are very ready to be influenced and are eager for change and are uncritical. Cleveland in an essay entitled Can Democracy be Efficient? exhibits a type of thinking about political questions that ought to appeal to all practical thinkers. It is his method rather than, in this connection, his conclusions that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... pointed out more than once that though neglect of such books as these may be perfectly natural and probable in the average reader, such neglect—and still more any contempt of them—is, though it may not be unnatural, utterly unscholarly and uncritical from the point of view of history. Their authors themselves learnt something from their own mistaken experiments, and their successors learnt a good deal more. They found that "sculduddery" was not a necessary attraction. Ducray does not avail himself of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... matters is not felt. The Brahmans always recognized that the most holy and most jealously preserved scriptures could exist in various recensions and the Mahabharata shows how generations of respectful and uncritical hearers may allow adventitious matter of all sorts to be incorporated in a work. Something of the same kind happened with the Pitakas. We know that the Pali recension which we possess was not the only one, for fragments of a Sanskrit ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot |
