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More "Improbability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less, urgent, and the importance of "ascertaining the views" of the different sections of the population, greater, not less. Or is it the diametrically opposite train of thought, namely, that an assumed improbability of disorder owing to the homogeneity of the population is a reason, not for giving Home Rule, but for withholding it? These contradictions and confusions are painfully familiar in anti-Home Rule dialectics all over the world. A quiet Ireland ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... purposes of fiction. Richardson is not content with this, and elaborately demonstrates that she might have known a number of minute details which it is perfectly plain that a real Miss Byron could never have known, and thus dashes into our faces an improbability which we should have been quite content ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... satisfactory consultation with his Excellency, and taking into consideration the improbability of the Sikh army crossing the Sutlej, I determined that no movement should be made towards the river by the forces from Umballah and Meerut, and I postponed for further consideration with his Excellency any change in the present distribution of the troops; eventually some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... together over this letter—the tenderest laughter and the happiest tears. It seemed by turns the wildest improbability that she should be well off, and the most natural thing in the world. Susie was out. Never had her absence been terrible before. Anna could hardly bear the waiting. She walked up and down the room, for sitting still ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... case actually before them, he had some unexpected disclosures to make about the prisoner's personal culpability. The first point which he desired to emphasise was that human intelligence should hesitate before no improbability, however improbable, provided that some explanation was humanly conceivable, and no definite material object rendered the improbability an impossibility. His whole statement would be based on the principle that the probable is ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Against all this improbability Mr. Darwin brings forward the supposed advantages which these variations give to their possessors. But here again a new element is introduced into the calculation. It is assumed, in the very statement of the question, that the process of ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... example of G. B. Niebuhr, Gutschmid admitted here, as Oppert did, 45 Assyrians; he based his view on Herodotus, in which it is said that the Assyrians held sway in Asia for 520 years, until its conquest by the Medes. Upon the improbability of this opinion, see ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... short history was delivered with a composure as great as that which had just been displayed by Pippo and the pilgrim; and it was impossible for any present to detect the slightest improbability or contradiction in the tale. The meeting with the other travellers in the storm Maso ascribed to the fact of their having passed him while he was stationary, and to his greater speed when in motion; two circumstances that were quite as likely to be true as all the rest of the account. He had left ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... ensuing session. Much of the sort of panic experienced by the country gentlemen alluded to, may be referred to a recent paragraph in the Globe newspaper, confidently announcing the intention of Ministers to propose a fixed duty on corn. The glaring improbability, that even were such a project contemplated by Ministers, they would (forgetting their characteristic caution and reserve) agitate the public mind on so critical a question, and derange vast transactions and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... seldom slain before the Audience, which has generally something ridiculous in it, their Bodies were often produced after their Death, which has always in it something melancholy or terrifying; so that the killing on the Stage does not seem to have been avoided only as an Indecency, but also as an Improbability. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... incontinence during her marriage with Agrippa, and openly profligate after her union with her next husband, Tiberius. This supposition, however, rests entirely upon conjecture, and is not only discredited by its own improbability, but by a yet more forcible argument. It is certain that Julia was at this time in banishment for her scandalous life. She was about the same age with Tiberius, who was now forty seven, and they had not cohabited for many years. We know not exactly the year in which Augustus sent her into exile, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Government. Lords Anglesey, Cavendish, and Clifford, the Duke of Somerset, Doctors Burnet, Tillotson, Cox, FitzWilliam, and many others testified to his mild and amiable character, his peaceable and virtuous life, and the improbability of his being guilty of the charges brought against him. His public services in defence of freedom and of the Protestant religion were the real causes of the resolution to get rid of him. Towards the close of the trial, one of his enemies, the notorious Jefferies, made a violent ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... giving an instance recorded of one of these creatures lifting with his trunk the axle of a field-piece as the wheel was about to pass over a fallen gunner, which he declares to be a physical impossibility. Certainly the story has many elements of improbability about it, and his comments on it are caustic and amusing: par exemple, when he asks: "How did the elephant know that a wheel going over the man would not be agreeable to him?" That is the weak point in the story—but, however ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... dreamy heaviness the discourse began. The inspirational claims seemed to lie in the manifest improbability of a man of Clifton's cultivation being so dull and diffuse in a natural condition. Yet, as the message wore on, it cannot be denied that a strange influence was at work. The words followed each other with greater fluency and in richer abundance. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... The utter improbability of error in this part of scriptural teaching, even if the existence of error elsewhere were for argument's sake conceded. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... in it, rose half reluctantly to her feet. Standing so, her deformity was even more visible than it was when she was seated; and it took all my nerve and power of will to take the measure of the mis-shapen shoulders without shrinking from the touch. And then I saw the improbability, I might say the impossibility, of finding in any ready-made-clothing store, a dress which would fit the twisted form. One must be made on purpose; one which would set at defiance all rules of symmetry; and how to have it completed to-morrow, even late in the ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It was a play, purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Historians tell us nothing of the grounds for such a belief. It was too probably produced by the misrepresentations of the unprincipled adventurers who infested the province. Ovando should have paused and reflected before he acted upon it. He should have considered the improbability of such an attempt by naked Indians against so large a force of steel-clad troops, armed with European weapons: and he should have reflected upon the general character and conduct of Anacaona. At any rate, the example set repeatedly by ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... measure was this knowledge responsible for his success in dealing with men. He had been certain that Jean and Hedin would eventually marry, and secretly he longed for the day. He had watched Hedin for years and now, despite the improbability of the story, he believed it implicitly. And it was with a heavy heart that he had watched the studied coldness of each toward the other. McNabb was a man of snap decisions. He would teach these young fools a lesson, and at the same ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... own method of Interpretation infinitely better. But, unfortunately for those persons, the question in hand is not a question of taste, but a dry matter of fact. We have to discover what is the Divine method of Interpretation, and no other thing. Its improbability and its inconvenience,—its difficulty, and its strangeness,—its seeming inconclusiveness, (apart from the authority on which it rests,) and its certain uniqueness, (notwithstanding the many injunctions we have ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... these demonstrations of pleasure. It was thought by many that Philip had been really disappointed in the conclusion of the armistice, that he was inspired with a spark of that martial ambition for which his panegyrists gave him credit, and that knowing full well the improbability of a long suspension of hostilities, he was even eager for the chance of conquest which their resumption would afford him. The secret treaty of the Pope was of course not so secret but that the hollow intention of the contracting ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... some whaler which might have stopped to fish; but Andrew strongly urged them at once to abandon all hopes of escaping that year, and at once, while they had health and strength, and the weather remained moderate, to make preparations for the winter. He showed the extreme improbability of our overtaking ships which must have been driven very far to the south by the gale, as also the danger of being swamped should the slightest sea get up; while, should we not succeed in our attempt, we should be worn out, and, incapable ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... in my forest cabin I have an assortment of the best wines and whiskies, notwithstanding the improbability of being able to offer a glass to my friends, but those bottles remain well corked, waiting for their legitimate owner to feel indisposed, when a draught of their contents will restore his lost strength without ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... of French prisoners on board a vessel in which the plague existed, the improbability of the circumstance alone, but especially the notorious facts of the case, repel this odious accusation. I observed the conduct of Sir Sidney Smith closely at the time, and I remarked in him a chivalric spirit, which sometimes hurried him into trifling ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who but Mrs. Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... navigation of the river, they formed the design, at the suggestion of the talented engineer above mentioned, of actually making their way across the river underground, and commenced this great work in spite of the general opinion of the improbability of success."[7] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... be no a priori impossibility in deviations from the beaten track, yet there is a certain a priori improbability which may seem to justify those who refuse to go into alleged instances of the supernormal. There is a story against Thomas Aquinas, that on being invited by a frisky brother-monk to come and see a cow flying, or some such marvel, he gravely came and saw not, but expressed himself ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... girl in the picture had stood on the rock beside the pool; Tavish, terror-driven by a spirit of the dead! He did not attempt to reason the matter, or bare the folly of his alarm. He did not ask himself about the improbability of it all, but accepted without equivocation that strong impression as it had come to him—the conviction that the girl on the rock and the woman in the coach were in some way identified with the flight of Tavish, the man he had never seen, from that ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... but it is of vast importance to the historical student; for it is to be borne in mind that it finds a place in the pages of those same Diarii upon the authority of which are accepted many defamatory stories without regard to their extreme improbability so long as they are within the bounds of ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... wonderful improbability according to natural circumstances. These trains never connected with each other, nor were intended to. There was no message sent ahead to stop. There was not the slightest business reason for waiting, yet the second conductor, on arrival of the first, asks this question, "What am ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... from this reproach is rather our good fortune than our merit. It is by favor of our stars, not by virtue of our own, that we turn not aside from the plain path of truth to the by-ways of supernaturalism and improbability. Yet we refrain with difficulty from a breath of self-praise; there is a proud and solid satisfaction in holding an unassailable position could we but catch the world's eye, we would meet ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... occasions, should have been the leader and supporter of a dissolute crew of unrestrained loose companions, the frequenter of those sinks of sin and profligacy which then disgraced the metropolis (as they do now), is an improbability so gross, that nothing but the excellence of Shakspeare's pen could have rendered an ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... for her."[35] Buchanan by his move thus played directly into Farragut's hands. From some difficulty in the ground it was found necessary to bring the head of the Tennessee round toward Morgan, and this, with the length of time occupied in the manoeuvre and the improbability of her attacking the whole fleet by daylight, caused the admiral to think that she had retired under the guns of the fort. He was soon undeceived. At ten minutes before nine, when the crew had hardly got seated ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... jury are satisfied that there is the highest improbability that these persons could have had any previous knowledge of Goodridge, or been concerned in any previous concert to rob him; if their conduct that evening and the next day was marked by no circumstance of suspicion; ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... from quoting M. Du Chaillu's work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent improbability in his assertions respecting the man-like Apes; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his veracity; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narrative remains in its present state of unexplained and apparently inexplicable confusion, ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... sanctioned by the constant acceptance of historians, to suppose that it was this occasion that prompted Andre to abandon a commercial life. The improbability of winning Honora's hand, and the freedom with which she received the addresses of other men, undoubtedly went far to convince him of the folly of sticking to trade with but one motive; and so soon as he attained his majority, he left the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... are hot and trembling, and her frame is painfully thin. Certainly she does not look fit to enter upon evening gaiety, and Lady Verner in addressing her son, "You will go with me, Lionel," proved that she never so much as cast a thought to the improbability that Sibylla would ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... taken his idea of writing fables from Dryden whose classical reading tempted him in two or three instances to indulge in such fancies. They were clever and in childhood appeared humorous to us, but we have long ceased to be amused by them, owing to their excessive improbability. Such ingenuity seems misplaced, we see more absurdity than talent in representing a sheep as talking to a wolf. To us fables now present, not what is strange and difficult of comprehension, but mentally fanciful folly. In some few instances in La Fontaine and Gay, the wisdom ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... for me to decide on the instant. If I had had time to think, I am perfectly certain that I should not have profited by the extraordinary warning that had just been addressed to me. The suspicious appearance and manners of the stranger; the outrageous improbability of the inference against the credit of the bank toward which his words pointed; the chance that some underhand attempt was being made, by some enemy of mine, to frighten me into embroiling myself with one ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... reflecting on the great improbability of this relation, and fearing to be the dupe of Sarah, he cried, "No, no; it is a dream! it is impossible, you deceive me; ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... was only when she went up to bed that she allowed her thoughts to go back to the beautiful moment when she had fancied Miss Davis might have been thinking of making her an artist; and then she cried sadly as she thought of how foolish she had been in imagining even for a second that such a wild improbability ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... physician who is as much at home in literature as he is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of the, physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... may suppose, several of my friends well know, that I have been anxious to trace some loose reports that I had heard, which your residence in Maryland, and the improbability of your saying such things, had ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... have softened the hard opinion that I had formed of some of his actions. But that I should marry Mr. Cashel Byron is simply the most improbable thing in the world. All questions of personal inclination apart, the mere improbability is enough in itself to appal ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... off enough of the tiling, lowered their friend, bed and all, right down in front of the young Rabbi. The house would be low, and the roof slight, and Jesus was probably seated in an open inner court or verandah, At any rate, the description gives a piece of local colour, and presents no improbability. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... regard to fertility given in the last two paragraphs, when we reflect on the inherent improbability of man having domesticated throughout the world one single species alone of so widely distributed, so easily tamed, and so useful a group as the Canidae; when we reflect on the extreme antiquity of the different breeds; and especially when we reflect on ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... tempting her to go away with him—though he pleads in the character of her betrothed husband. In spite of herself, she detects the weak places in the case which Nugent has made out against me—the absence of sufficient motive for the conduct of which he accuses me, and the utter improbability of my plotting and intriguing (without anything to gain by it) to make her marry the man who was not the man of her choice. She feels these hesitations and difficulties. But what they really signify it is morally impossible for ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... the untravelled English, and even the travelled English, except the few who live in France among the French, knew nothing of all this. Your press tells nothing. The nine millions of votes given to Louis Napoleon seemed to prove his popularity, and therefore the improbability of the tyranny of which he was accused by his enemies. I knew that those nine millions of votes were extorted, or stolen by violence or fraud. But the English people did not know it. They accepted his election as the will of the nation, and though they might wonder at your ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth—to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps—the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... of the wonderful and seemingly inexplicable nature of this scene, there was one idea that instantly obtruded itself, and that I could never after banish from my mind. It is Falkland! In vain I struggled against the seeming improbability of the supposition. In vain I said, "Mr. Falkland, wise as he is, and pregnant in resources, acts by human, not by supernatural means. He may overtake me by surprise, and in a manner of which I had no previous expectation; but he cannot produce a great ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... His colour was high, and his expression, indeed, a little idiotic; and he declared afterwards that he felt like a sandwich-man, with the news printed in red letters before and behind. Honora knew that the intense improbability of the truth would save them, and it did. Mrs. Holt remarked, slyly, that the game of golf must have hidden attractions, and regretted that she was too ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... troubled, like so many in our day, about the miracles. I could hardly bring my mind to believe them. One day, talking with a jovial fellow whom I casually met (not of very strong mind indeed, but who made up for it by very strong passions) over the improbability of such occurrences, he exclaimed, as he mixed his third glass of brandy and water, "I only wonder how any one can be such a fool as to believe in any stuff of that sort? Do you think that, if the miracles had been really ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... safe ground in assuming the improbability of such a wholly fortuitous set of events happening a second time and producing the same result elsewhere. Thus when we find in India the Naga rajas identified with the cobra, and credited with the ability to control the waters, we can confidently ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... improbability of the German contention is shown by the fact that after the first few days of the invasion every possible precaution had been taken by the Belgian authorities, by way of placards and handbills, to warn the civilian population not to intervene ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in which France was then plunged, the utmost uncertainty prevailed as to the course events might take, and rumors of all descriptions were current, the wildest scarcely exceeding in improbability the fantastic horrors that actually prevailed throughout the land during these opening days of the Reign of Terror. The expectation that found most favor in the fleet was that Provence would separate from the rest of France, and proclaim itself an independent ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... priest's voice and the sight of his wasted face faded from the painter's sense, he began to see everything in the old light again. Then what Don Ippolito had said took a character of ludicrous, of insolent improbability. ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... viii., p. 42.).—I am sorry MR. GATTY takes the phrase "mythic accompaniments" as an imputation on himself. I did not intend it for one, having no doubt that he repeated the story as he heard it. In it were two statements of the highest decree of improbability. One I showed (Vol. v., p. 434.) to be contrary to penal, the other to forensic practice. One MR. GATTY found to have been only a report, the other to have occurred at a different place and under different circumstances. Had these been stated in the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire to use, as a background for his action, a study of that ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... floated into my cone of luminosity, to disappear again behind, a new impression thrust itself upon me. I call it an impression, not an observation. It is very hard to say, what was reality, what fancy on a night like that. In spite of its air of unreality, of improbability even, it has stayed with me as one of my strongest visions. I nearly hesitate to put ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... arouse the critical spirit, for the phenomena did not seem much more extraordinary than centipedes or eclipses. Only those who understand that such stories upset all we know of anatomy and astronomy can realize their improbability and the weight of evidence necessary to make them credible. The most important distinction in miracles (I use the word as a popular description of extraordinary events which is readily understood though hard to define) ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the Vatican are merely an instance of Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... I afterwards heard that there was something about this stranger in a book called "The Story of an African Farm," which I once began, but never finished, not being able to understand most of it, and being vexed by the gross improbability of the girl not marrying the baby's father, he being ready and willing to make her an honest woman. However, I am no critic, but a plain man who tells a plain tale, and I believe persons of soul admire the book very much. Any way, it does not say who the Stranger was—an allegorical ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... sufficient to have plac'd her thus low and distressful, if he had not also suppos'd her a Servant: and that too in some elegant Family; for if she had always remain'd a Fellow-cottager with her Father, it must have carried an Air of Romantick Improbability to account for her ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... poem," he says, "there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are easily exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cowley tells of Hervey that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labours and the partner of his discoveries; but what image of tenderness can be ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... moreover, embryonic in their nature; and embryonic parts, as is well known, possess the highest classificatory value. From these considerations, and looking to the actual facts as exhibited in the following table, the improbability that the parasites of S. vulgare and S. Peronii, so utterly different in external structure and habits one from the other, and from the Cirripedes to which they are attached, should yet have absolutely similar prehensile antennae with these Cirripedes, appears to me, on the supposition ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... "explained away." It is the weight of a great mass of cumulative evidence which tells the tale. The most expert and exact description of the fall of a meteor would not have forced an acceptance from the scientific world; the relative improbability of the whole of the past experience of the human race would have been so much greater than the fact that the latter would have been discredited. Gradually it would have receded in the mind, and even the original witness might ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... of such importance that ill-disposed folk, eager to seize them, might have murdered him in order to gain possession of them. There were many possibilities, and there was always—to Allerdyke's mind—the improbability that James had died through ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... the news of our arrival. And, as we were travelling slowly all the time, you may take it as certain that Seketulo—if the fellow happens to be still alive—was informed of the fact some time before we actually reached this spot. And even if we admit, for a moment, such an improbability as that the news failed to reach him, these fellows who are now lurking all round us are, every one of them, painfully aware of the presence of the ship—as we can clearly see by the trouble that they are taking to ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... in his support with all the tenderness that is excited by pity, and all the zeal which is kindled by generosity, and, demanding an audience of the queen, laid before her the whole series of his mother's cruelty, exposed the improbability of an accusation by which he was charged with an intent to commit a murder that could produce no advantage, and soon convinced her how little his former conduct could deserve to be mentioned as a ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... caused the pulse of Mrs Forster to accelerate. They might be her husband and her son. It was the first time that the spare bed had been ordered. Reflection, however, convinced her that her hopes were strung upon too slight a thread; and, musing on the improbability of not having ascertained during a year the fact of her master having so near a relative—moreover, her son was not in existence—she sighed, and dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Before the gentlemen had finished their wine, Amber was in bed, and Mrs Forster invariably sat at ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of development, rejected belief in immortality—only to return to the belief, or at least to the HOPE, with fuller age and riper wisdom. That no great mind has seen any positive argument against the hope of immortality is certainly comforting to all of us. Intelligence can always refute improbability and falsehood. —— ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... the narrative of Mrs. Stowe untrue; it now devolves on me to show the improbability of some of her statements. An old negro man, whom she calls Uncle Tom, is the hero of her tale. Uncle Tom was the servant of a gentlemen, by name Shelby, who resided in Kentucky. She represents this old negro, Uncle Tom, as a very remarkable character. She tells us that Tom was ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... delighted to accuse Scott of having committed literary suicide. He had only stepped off the path to which he presently returned. He was unfitted to write the domestic novel, and even in "St. Ronan's" he introduces events of romantic improbability. These enable him to depict scenes of the most passionate tragedy, as in the meeting of Clara and Tyrrel. They who have loved so blindly and so kindly should never have met, or never parted. It is like a tragic rendering of the scene where ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Lives of SS. Ailbhe and Ciaran, he preceded St. Patrick in the Irish mission and was a co-temporary of the national apostle. Objection, exception or opposition to the theory of Declan's early period is based less on any inherent improbability in the theory itself than on contradictions and inconsistencies in the Life. Beyond any doubt the Life does actually contradict itself; it makes Declan a cotemporary of Patrick in the fifth century and a cotemporary likewise of St. David a century later. In any attempted solution of ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... Consider the improbability. He had been accustomed to call her his child, and his dear child, and to invite her confidence by dwelling upon the difference in their respective ages, and to speak of himself as one who was turning old. Yet she might not have thought him old. Something reminded him that he had ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... took a chair, knowing that if he was to perform a manly act and save his friend, he must be calm and firm. But in spite of himself, as he took his seat he gave a hasty glance round the room, thinking of its loneliness, and the extreme improbability of anyone hearing ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... show the unreasonableness of supposing that in point of fact matter ever has existed without being caused and controlled by Mind. The argument for Idealism may, I hope, have at all events exhibited incidentally the groundlessness and improbability of materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and left the way clear for the establishment of Theism by the arguments which rest upon the discovery that Causality implies volition; upon the appearances of intelligence in organic life; upon the existence ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Justice concluded this part of his opinion by quoting from Chief Judge Learned Hand's opinion for the Circuit Court of Appeals in the same case, as follows: "'In each case [courts] must ask whether the gravity of the evil, discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.'"[215] In short, if the evil legislated against is serious enough, advocacy of it in order to be punishable does not have to be attended by a clear and present ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the palms as the only really important one, and considering the impossibility or at least great improbability of its dissemination by natural means, the distribution by man himself, according to his wants, assumes the rank of an hypothesis fully adequate to the explanation of all the facts concerning the life-history of ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... Close to the falling water, seated on the edge, his back supported by the rock, and his legs hanging over the precipice, I now beheld the savage who left the cave before me. The noise of the cascade and the improbability of interruption, at least from this quarter, had made him inattentive ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... terms, one highly trained crew member had punched a wrong pattern of holes on the tape. Another equally skilled had failed to notice this when reading back. A childish error, highly improbable; twice repeated, thus squaring the improbability. ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily
... justice to say, that I do not believe that Messrs. Charles and Thomas Heath were in any way privy to this transaction. On the contrary, I am convinced, that they are totally incapable of such dirty conduct; there is no improbability in their being ignorant of the matter; Squire Quaker Williams having the sole management of the Banking concern, while the two elder brothers, Charles and Thomas, managed the Brewing and Wine Trade. The secret of this dirty conduct of Mister ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... were the majority of the crowds, holding life cheap, as all bad men strangely do—equally prepared to take or lose it upon the slightest provocation. Few tales of horror in Panama could be questioned on the ground of improbability. Not less partial were many of the natives of Cruces to the use of the knife; preferring, by the way, to administer sly stabs in the back, when no one was by to see the dastard blow dealt. Terribly bullied by the Americans were the boatmen and muleteers, who were reviled, shot, and stabbed by these ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... expected, the wind blow no longer "where it listeth," and wayward man no longer find his counterpart in nature. But we console ourselves by contemplating the difficulties of the problem, and the improbability, that, in our generation at least, we shall be deprived of these subjects of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... life, Helen would have preferred Paris; and so it has been, is, and will be eternally. And it cannot be otherwise, just as it cannot happen that, in a load of chick-peas, two peas marked with a special sign should fall side by side. Further, this is not only an improbability, but it is certain that a feeling of satiety will come to Helen or to Menelaus. The whole difference is that to one it comes sooner, to the other later. It is only in stupid novels that it is written that 'they loved each other all their lives.' And none but children can believe ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the matter at once to the officer of the watch, who was Holgate. Holgate came to the captain's cabin, as has been related. There was no discrepancy to be noted in the stories of the two men, nor was there any inherent improbability in their tale. So, as I have said, though no verdict was given, the verdict might be considered as open, and we had got no further. The captain, however, took one precaution, for the key of the ammunition chest was put in Barraclough's charge. What others did I know ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... revelation upon the young Virginian was as if an adder had suddenly fastened upon his bosom. It woke a suspicion, involving indeed an improbability such as his better reason revolted at, but full of pain and terror. But wild and incredible as it seemed, it received a kind of confirmation ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... valuable writer of light pieces for the stage. But farces do not live, and few of Hook's are now favourites with a public which is always athirst for something new. The incidents of most of the pieces—many of them borrowed from the French—excited laughter by their very improbability; but the wit which enlivened them was not of a high order, and Hook, though so much more recent than Sheridan, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... incident to the practice of witchcraft? No man with a glimmer of poetry in his soul will imagine it for a moment. The separation of characters is more credible than this; but if that theory can be shown to be unfounded, there is no improbability in supposing that Shakspere, finding that the question of witchcraft was, in consequence of events that had taken place not long before the time of the production of "Macbeth," absorbing the attention ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... duplicity, it may be said to be the demonstration that there is no criterion of truth in this world. Persuaded thus of the impossibility of philosophy, Carneades was led to recommend his theory of the probable. "That which has been most perfectly analyzed and examined, and found to be devoid of improbability, is the most probable idea." The degeneration of philosophy now became truly complete, the labours of so many great men being degraded to rhetorical and artistic purposes. It was seen by all that Plato had destroyed all trust in the indications of the senses, and substituted for it the Ideal ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... upon points of philosophy and history with the most learned of the Egyptian priests. He was a man of extraordinary force and penetration of mind, as his laws and his sayings, which have been preserved to us, testify. There is no improbability in the statement that he commenced in verse a history and description of Atlantis, which he left unfinished at his death; and it requires no great stretch of the imagination to believe that this manuscript reached the hands of his successor ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... "tails out" in the manner formerly described. The consequence is, that while in Kudrun it is, as was remarked, difficult to get any swing on the metre, in Titurel it is simply impossible; and it has been thought without any improbability that the fragmentary condition of the piece is due to the poet's reasonable discontent with the shackles he had imposed on himself. The substance is good enough, and would have made an interesting chapter in the vast working up ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... their power either to irritate or to soothe; and the first perception of her diminished influence produced in her an immediate depression of spirits, and a consequent sadness of demeanour, that rendered her very interesting to Mr Glowry; who, duly considering the improbability of accomplishing his wishes with respect to Miss Toobad (which improbability naturally increased in the diurnal ratio of that young lady's absence), began to reconcile himself by degrees to the idea ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... being moved by our mere importunity, or by the mechanical repetition of set phrases; but that the fulfilment of some wish of ours may be conditioned by our humility and confidence in expressing it, presents no improbability. In any case, what is necessary on our part is that we should have faith, not only in God's power to grant our petitions, but in His wisdom in granting or refusing them as may be most expedient for us. We ourselves can, within limits, fulfil most of our children's ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of the composition of the Iliad; and that if so, this poem could not have been committed to writing during the time of such its composition; that in a question of comparative probabilities like this, it is a much grosser improbability that even the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expungings, to upwards of 15,000 lines, should have been actually conceived and perfected in the brain of one man, with no other help but his own or others' memory, than that it should, in fact, be the result of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... the case for the Crown was neat, clear, cogent, straight-forward, and supported by evidence. The defense was chiefly argument of counsel to prove the improbability of a clergyman and a man of good character passing a forged note. One of the reports stated that Mr. Arthur Wardlaw, a son of the principal witness, had taken the accusation so much to heart that he was now dangerously ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... for interfering, he begged to be informed of the state of the case, whereupon the matter was laid before him in all its details. He was not slow in taking a fair view of it, and spoke well and eloquently in my behalf—insisting on the improbability that a person of my habits and position would be wilfully mixed up with a transaction like that of which it appeared I was suspected—adding, that as he was fully convinced of my innocence, he was ready to enter into any surety with respect to my appearance at any ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... in his solid suit will eliminate any chance of the No-trump being continued, and an adverse call of two No-trumps is just what the holder of the solid suit most desires, as he can double with comparative safety, being assured both of the success of the double and of the improbability that the Declarer will be able to ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... youth who wished to learn the doctrines of antiquity. These were all that the sage undertook to teach,—not new and original doctrines of morality or political economy, but only such as were established from a remote antiquity, going back two thousand years before he was born. There is no improbability in this alleged antiquity of the Chinese Empire, for Egypt at this time was a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the probability and improbability of its being the returning troop, until a loud knock at the door gave new alarm to the ladies. Instinctively laying his hand on a small saw, that had been his companion for the whole day, in the vain expectation of an amputation, the surgeon, coolly assuring ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... would be intolerable. But the public ear had become attuned to his accents, to which, whatever the sense of his language, men listened as to a messenger of heavenly tidings. Mr. Duffy strongly urged upon his fellow labourers the improbability of success, and advised a distinct change of policy. In this he was overborne by their united opinion, and the Nation continued to promulgate the same bold, unwavering course. By degrees the feeling of bitterness entertained by the anti-education section ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... notice. I also replied to the objections which had been made to some of his doctrines by reviewers of Dumont's book, and added a few supplementary remarks on some of the more abstract parts of the subject, such as the theory of improbability and impossibility. The controversial part of these editorial additions was written in a more assuming tone than became one so young and inexperienced as I was: but indeed I had never contemplated coming forward in my own person; and as an anonymous editor of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... street. In the midst of this headlong career, however, she was violently arrested. She heard the cry of "Stop thief!" behind her, and glancing back, saw two men, accompanied by some boys, in full pursuit. Too astonished and frightened to consider the improbability of their pursuing her, she ran harder than ever. She felt horrified, and dreaded their rudeness should they reach her. Down side-streets and across byways she dashed, the crowd in pursuit increasing each moment. At last she found that she had run full-tilt into the arms ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... martyrology, of ascetic writings, and of histories of saints and monks, which it was necessary to work through and sift for my strictly limited object, I came upon a narrative (in Cotelerius Ecclesiae Grecae Monumenta) which seemed to me peculiar and touching notwithstanding its improbability. Sinai and the oasis of Pharan which lies at its foot ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Theatre for the scene of the culmination of the domestic drama seemed to touch the extreme of improbability. The actors were not a poor travelling company of mummers, as in Pagliacci, with no decent private accommodation for this kind of thing. The protagonist of Carnival was lodged in a perfectly good Venetian palace, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... always returns for elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under this protection of an improbability, that I propose ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... was aware that it would not be just to hold any creed responsible for the manner in which a person like Stimson defended it. Still, he was struck with both of this man's facts. The last, he had often met in books; but the first was new to him. Of the two, this novel idea of the improbability of the apostles' inventing that which would seem to be opposed to all men's notions and prejudices, struck him more forcibly than the argument adduced from the acquiescence of the Redeemer in his own divinity. The last might be subject to verbal criticism, ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Hollander, according to the title-page, was being acted at the Cockpit, Drury Lane. His other pieces were produced rather later. I am inclined to think that The Lady Mother, in spite of the wild improbability of the plot and the poorness of much of the comic parts, is our author's best work. In such lines as the following (IV., 1) there is a ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... of high intelligence and tender sensibilities who loved his people and mingled freely with them would gain a knowledge of suffering and sorrow; but we are justified in passing all such fancies, not only on account of their intrinsic improbability, but because the great Asvaghosha, who wrote about the beginning of our era, knew ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... be the original outlay. It wasn't a million. He would soon repair the damage. Once they got the casks filled, they could return to Africa, and King Dingo was the man to find them a fresh cargo. Perhaps he would let them have it on credit, if they couldn't do better (at this improbability several laughed); but the skipper need not go a begging for credit. He was not so easily broken up as that came to. If he himself was short, he had friends in Brazil—ay, and in Portsmouth, too—who would soon find ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... that it discloses, though we think the candidate for public favour and support has hit upon (perhaps) an injudicious way of laying them before the world. Still there may be something in them; and even the outrageous improbability and extravagance of the statement on the very face of it stagger us, and leave a hankering to inquire farther into it, because we think the advertiser would hardly have the impudence to hazard such barefaced absurdities ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... impossibility, no improbability even, in the statement made by the newspaper correspondent; yet as Richard thought it over in the night, he could not but regard it as singular that Mr. Keene should be the man to make public such a piece of ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... "there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are easily exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cowley tells of Hervey that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labours and the partner of his discoveries; ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... affair, was probably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantastic suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also been made,—attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently honest. On the side of the defence, authorship is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper's work there ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... lips and glittering eyes. He well knew the improbability of hitting a vulnerable spot in a swimming alligator; his marksmanship was scarcely equal to the certainty of finding one of those wicked, armor-lidded eyes. It was with a hard gulp of fear in his throat that he pressed the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... to the example of Thucydides. Setting aside, from intrinsic improbability, both the traditions—the copyings, and the committal to memory verbatim,—we can easily see what Demosthenes could find in the work, and how he could make the most of it. The narrative or story could be indelibly fixed in his memory by a few perusals, and, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... places referred to were real localities. Thus there was a semblance of truth and reality in all these tales which added greatly to the interest of them; while there were no means of ascertaining the real truth, and thus spoiling the story by making the falsehood or improbability of ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... and few things would give me greater pleasure than to realise the plan which you had in view for me, of building a house there. But I am afraid, I am sorry to say, that the chances are very much against this, partly on account of the state of my own affairs, and still more from the improbability of Mr. Coleridge's continuing in the country. The writings are at present in my possession, and what I should wish is, that I might be considered at present as steward of the land, with liberty to lay out the rent in planting, or any other improvement which ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had flourished and decayed—a world greatly ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... pestilence, some modern writers have persuaded themselves that the Black Death is the one great turning-point in the social and economic history of England, and that nearly all which makes modern England what it is, is due to the effects of this pestilence. A wider survey suggests the extreme improbability of a single visitation having such far-reaching consequences. Moreover the Black Death was not an English but a European calamity, and it is strange to imagine that the effects of the plague in England should have been so much deeper than in ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... exploits performed by the youth, but there we move in an atmosphere of the marvelous. In Bodenstedt's poem, however, the supernatural has been almost completely banished, and we cannot help noticing the improbability ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... said to have reigned a full century, or but one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion. Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs, not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... of Caillie; but we find we have already occupied too much space in details necessary to make the geographical nature of the question well understood; and we shall content ourselves with remarking, that the discovery of the termination of the Quorra, or Niger, tends to throw a degree of improbability upon the narrative of that individual, which it will require much ingenuity to explain away. It is certain that the latitude given to Timbuctoo by the editor of those travels, and upon which sufficient ridicule has already been thrown in the Edinburgh ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... lowest of all farces. It is not the subject I condemn, though very vulgar, but the execution. The drift tends to no moral, no edification of any kind. The situations, however, are well imagined, and make one laugh, in spite of the grossness of the dialogue, the forced witticisms, and total improbability of the whole plan and conduct. But what disgusts me most is, that though the characters are very low, and aim at low humour, not one of them says a sentence that is natural or marks any character at all. It is set ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Government naturally regards such action as the primary and, indeed, the most essential element in the disposal of the Tallulah incident, I advise that, in accordance with precedent, and in view of the improbability of that particular case being reached by the bill now pending, Congress make gracious provision for indemnity to the Italian sufferers in the same form ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... what is an improbability?" answered her companion. "It is only a matter of the capacity of the age to receive what is new. A few years ago electricity was improbable, yet look at the telegraph and the telephone. Still further back, who would have believed that ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... efforts of his expiring son. After Sohrab's death, he burnt his tents and all his goods, and carried the corpse to Seistan, where it was interred; the army of Turan was, agreeably to the last request of Sohrab, permitted to cross the Oxus unmolested. To reconcile us to the improbability of this tale, we are informed that Rustum could have no idea his son was in existence. The mother of Sohrab had written to him her child was a daughter, fearing to lose her darling infant if she revealed the truth; and Rustum, as before stated, fought under a feigned ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to disappear again behind, a new impression thrust itself upon me. I call it an impression, not an observation. It is very hard to say, what was reality, what fancy on a night like that. In spite of its air of unreality, of improbability even, it has stayed with me as one of my strongest visions. I nearly hesitate to put it ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... denied.' His whole remarks on the subject, and especially those on the impression to be derived from the multitude of apparent coincidences, in a long series of prophecies, some vast, some minute; and the improbability of their all being accidental are worthy of his comprehensive genius. It is on the effect of the whole, not on single coincidences, that the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... rather from her timidity than from her indifference to the project, resolved to put it into execution. This story of the two girls weeping, and filling Madame's bedroom with the noisiest lamentations, was Malicorne's chef-d'oeuvre. As nothing is so probable as improbability, so natural as romance, this kind of Arabian Nights story succeeded perfectly with Madame. The first thing she did, was to send Montalais away, and then three days, or rather three nights, afterward, she had La Valliere removed. She gave to the latter one ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... seeming improbability of Lear's conduct it may be observed, that he is represented according to histories at that time vulgarly received as true. And perhaps if we turn our thoughts upon the barbarity and ignorance of the age to which this story is referred, it will appear not so unlikely ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... student of his subject. Lovborg may quite naturally wish to see how his new method, or his excursion into a new field, strikes the average scholar of the Tesman type. He is, in fact, "trying it on the dog"—neither an unreasonable nor an unusual proceeding. There is, no doubt, a certain improbability in the way in which Lovborg is represented as carrying his manuscript around, and especially in Mrs. Elvsted's production of his rough draft from her pocket; but these are mechanical trifles, on which only a niggling criticism would ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... name. His voice, muffled by the thickly falling flakes, had an odd, deadened ring in his own ears; and he doubted if he could be heard very far. When he considered the vast width of the prairie, and the extreme improbability of two figures, shaping opposite courses, meeting point-blank in the middle of it, he was ready to despair of finding the boy. It maddened him to think how close they might pass, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... to which we have just alluded, of the revelation of the name Jehovah, is also told in ch. iii., where it is connected with the incident of the burning bush. Apart from the improbability of the same document telling the same story twice, the very picturesque setting of ch. iii, is convincing proof that we have here a section from one of the prophetic documents, and we cannot long doubt which it is. For while one of ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Proving a negative is rather unusual, but about the only thing which will save you is an alibi. Now you must pardon the expression, but you've always evaded my questions as to your whereabouts prior to June of that year. You've never flatly denied Corkery's story, but if it weren't for the inherent improbability of it, I'd have given up the fight long ago, for you have not helped as a ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... was preposterous. In examining the late lord's private papers, he discovered the letter which I typed and signed. He said very coldly that the fact that I had waited until everyone who could corroborate or deny my story was dead, united with the improbability of the narrative itself, would very likely consign me to prison if I made public a ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... an uncommonly queer situation for a perfectly innocent man, week-ending at a country house. I should have been ashamed to face the critics if I had made so improbable a situation the crux of a play. But the improbability of life constantly outruns the mechanical inventions of the playwright and the novelist. Where life, with all its extravagances, fails, is in its refusal to provide the apt and timely coincidence that shall solve the problem of the hero. As I walked on slowly towards Jervaise Clump, I had little ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... ambiguity. Perhaps all that we are warranted in inferring from it is that the annual procession was, that year, of unusual splendour. Whether, as has been conjectured, it was the first time Lady Godiva had ever made her appearance, there seems more doubt. Apart from any evidence, there is no improbability in supposing that she may have formed part of earlier processions; though it may be that during the period of Puritan ascendency the show had been neglected and the lady in particular had been discountenanced. If this be so, however, it is difficult to account ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... knew. With you it was somewhat different. Your presence in the taxicab was only suspicious. There was always the possibility that you might be one of those ubiquitous 'innocent bystanders.' Your name, your position, the improbability that you could have anything in common with—shall we say, the matter that so deeply interests us?—was all in your favour. However, presumption and probability are the tools of fools. We do not depend upon them—we apply the test. And ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... have possessed any musical ear or much power of imagination. It is not going too far to say that of the highest possibilities of poetry he had no conception. He imagines he has disposed of Lycidas by exhibiting its "inherent improbability" in the eyes of a crude common sense: a triumph which is as easy and as futile as his refutation of Berkeley's metaphysics by striking his foot upon the ground. The truth is of course that in each case he is beating the air. The stamp upon the ground would have been a triumphant answer to ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... ask of me in Kensington. 'He is drowned.' 'How drowned?' 'He shot himself.' 'Why did he shoot himself?' 'Because I had married his ward.' 'But his partner is gone too.' 'He is murdered.' 'Why murdered?' 'Because he interceded for me.' 'Where is your witness?' 'He has disappeared.' I saw the wild improbability of this tale, and thought of past notorious quarrels with my father ended by my voluntary absence. There were but two points that seemed to stick in my nervous mind: 'It never would do to tell our marriage at that moment, and I must ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... those inventions. All the world knows the history of the celebrated saints Perpetua and Felicity, whose beatifications have no other foundation than the words perpetua felicitas, so very common on the monuments of that nation. The improbability of some of the fictions has been such, that in Spain itself, in the face of that respect there shown to the things pertaining to religion, there have not been wanting pious men who have dared to doubt the authenticity of some of those saints. In a certain city in Andalusia, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... character of Jesus will meet with the ridicule it deserves unless substantiated by documentary evidence. The mere improbability of events contrary to natural laws does not destroy the ethical value of the teachings of the Nazarene. Anything might have happened in the eerie days of old; the critic must do more than deny the historicity ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... asked these three questions of himself. Half a minute served to answer them all in the affirmative. There was neither impossibility nor improbability in any of the three propositions. It was clear that the thing could be ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... of Lammermuir, Ivanhoe, the Monastery, the Abbot, Kenilworth, and the Pirate.[167] The marks of broken health on all these are essentially twofold—prevailing melancholy, and fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the Abbot scarcely less so in its main event, and Ivanhoe deeply wounded through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... short preamble, in which he apologized to the bench for interfering, he begged to be informed of the state of the case, whereupon the matter was laid before him in all its details. He was not slow in taking a fair view of it, and spoke well and eloquently in my behalf—insisting on the improbability that a person of my habits and position would be wilfully mixed up with a transaction like that of which it appeared I was suspected—adding, that as he was fully convinced of my innocence, he was ready ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... says he, and thereby render our definition intelligible, Mr. Hume is perfectly persuaded "that all mankind will be found of one opinion with regard to it." If Mr. Hume had closely looked into the great productions of his own school, he would have seen the utter improbability, that necessitarians themselves would ever concur in such a ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... visitors, and of other minor events. On the other hand it seemed odd that Maria Consuelo should be at liberty to go whithersoever she pleased. She could not reasonably be supposed to have a guardian in every city of Europe. The more he thought of this improbability the less he ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... damsels. The Abbe's principal arguments are derived from the silence of contemporary authors, and especially of Wace, who was himself a canon of Bayeux;—from its being unnoticed in any charters or deeds of gift connected with the cathedral;—from the improbability that so large a roll of such perishable materials would have escaped destruction when the cathedral was burned in 1106;—from the unfinished state of the story;—from its containing some Saxon names unknown to the Normans;—and from representations taken ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... taken it appears that the civil population of Aerschot has in no wise participated in the hostilities, that no shot was fired by them; that all the witnesses agree in pointing out the improbability of the German version, according to which the Burgomaster's son, a youth of 151/2 years, and of extremely gentle disposition, is said to have fired upon a superior German officer during the night of Aug. 19. Still more improbable is the version of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... king shall see again the ring which he has given to his bride. To the Hindu, curse and modification are matters of frequent occurrence; and Kalidasa has so delicately managed the matter as not to shock even a modern and Western reader with a feeling of strong improbability. Even to us it seems a natural part of the divine cloud that envelops the drama, in no way obscuring human passion, but rather giving to human passion an unwonted ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... that, despite its seeming improbability, it might be important for him to see this queer creature who came to ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... suspect Leyden, who alone had the necessary knowledge of antiquities, we are still met by the improbability of old Mrs. Hogg being engaged in the hoax. Moreover, Leyden was probably too keen an antiquary to take part in one of the deceptions which Ritson wished to punish so severely. Mr. Child expresses his strong and natural suspicions of the authenticity of the ballad, and Hogg is, certainly, ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... them at once to abandon all hopes of escaping that year, and at once, while they had health and strength, and the weather remained moderate, to make preparations for the winter. He showed the extreme improbability of our overtaking ships which must have been driven very far to the south by the gale, as also the danger of being swamped should the slightest sea get up; while, should we not succeed in our attempt, we should be worn out, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... even, perhaps, purchase so priceless a treasure as a certain princess of the blood royal. He did not, however, dwell much on this possibility, but kept the delightful hope well neutralized with a constantly present sense of its improbability, in order to save the pain of a long ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... instant. If I had had time to think, I am perfectly certain that I should not have profited by the extraordinary warning that had just been addressed to me. The suspicious appearance and manners of the stranger; the outrageous improbability of the inference against the credit of the bank toward which his words pointed; the chance that some underhand attempt was being made, by some enemy of mine, to frighten me into embroiling myself with one of my best friends, through ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... this unexpected revelation upon the young Virginian was as if an adder had suddenly fastened upon his bosom. It woke a suspicion, involving indeed an improbability such as his better reason revolted at, but full of pain and terror. But wild and incredible as it seemed, it received a kind of confirmation from what ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... with. The Begum then sent for five of the children, who were wounded in the affray of last night, and, after endeavoring to soothe them, she sent again for Letafit and Hossmund Ali Khan, and in the presence of the children expressed her disapprobation of their conduct, and the improbability of Asoph ul Dowlah's suffering the ladies and children of Sujah Dowlah to be disgraced by being exposed to the view of the rabble. Upon which Letafit produced the letter from the Nabob, at the same time representing that he was amenable only to the orders of his Excellency, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I could not possibly have as strong an assurance of his honesty, clear-sightedness, and penetration, as of the great improbability of the fact, I ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... independence of America, through which I mean not to follow him. It is a circumstance sufficiently striking, without being commented on, that the former union of America with Britain, produced a power, which, in her hands, had was becoming dangerous to the world: and there is no improbability in supposing, that had the latter known as much of the strength of former, before she began the quarrel, as she has known since, that instead of attempting to reduce her to unconditional submission, would have proposed ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... in the dramatic contest of 468 by Sophocles; or the alternative story of the same authority that the cause of his chagrin was that Simonides' elegy on the heroes slain at Marathon was preferred to his own. Apart from the inherent improbability of such pettiness in such a man, neither story fits the facts; for in 467, the next year after Sophocles' success, we know that Aeschylus won the prize of tragedy with the Septem; and the Marathon elegy must have been written in 490, fourteen years before his first visit ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... known nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes. But the improbability of these announcements does not result from the celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The physicist, the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... and because of the improbability of the physiological discovery, and of the moral 'reform' which enforced it; and again, because the law is not of the sort which people acquainted with near degrees of kinship would make; and once more, because ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Quinola merely reproduces David Sechard, though he places him in the reign of Philip the Second of Spain. He went far out of his way to make Fontanares the first inventor of the steamboat; the improbability of such a supposition quite forfeits the interest of the spectators and, in attempting to effect a love denouement, he disgusts us by uniting the noble discoverer with the vile Faustine. Even the element of humor is wanting in ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... ineffective German, with every effect of improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and wished to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which we can decide such controversies. A wild boar, that falls into our snares, is deemed to be in our possession, if it be impossible for him to escape. But what do we mean by impossible? How do we separate this impossibility from an improbability? And how distinguish that exactly from a probability? Mark the precise limits of the one and the other, and shew the standard, by which we may decide all disputes that may arise, and, as we find by experience, frequently ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... parity of reasoning it would seem to make the question more, not less, urgent, and the importance of "ascertaining the views" of the different sections of the population, greater, not less. Or is it the diametrically opposite train of thought, namely, that an assumed improbability of disorder owing to the homogeneity of the population is a reason, not for giving Home Rule, but for withholding it? These contradictions and confusions are painfully familiar in anti-Home Rule dialectics all over the world. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... The alternative proposed, of entering into the Holy League, presented many points of view so favorable to Navarre, that Ferdinand, ignorant, as he then was, of the precise footing on which she stood with France, might have seen no improbability in her closing with it. Had either alternative been embraced, there would have been no pretext for the invasion. Even when hostilities had been precipitated by the impolitic conduct of Navarre, Ferdinand (to judge, not from his public manifestoes only, but from his private correspondence) ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... all its surroundings as if we had been born and bred there, introduces us to all the principal inhabitants in a thoroughly "neighborly" way, and contrives to impress us with a sense of the substantial reality of what she makes us mentally see, even when an occasional improbability in the story almost wakes us up to a perception that the whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with him at the improbability of such things befalling. I carried in my bosom too large a heart, and one that was the property of every wench I met—for just so long as I chanced to be ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... cigar and stood up. "Now," he said, "I generally talk straight, and you have held out a hand to me. Can you believe in the apparent improbability of such a man as I am in the opinion of the folks at Silverdale getting tired of a wasted life and trying to walk straight again? I want your answer, yes or no, before I head across the prairie for ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... form. It was said that two Narnian horseman had ridden from the east into the Roman camp of observation in Umbria, and had brought tidings of the utter slaughter of the foe. Such news seemed too good to be true, Men tortured their neighbours and themselves by demonstrating its improbability and by ingeniously criticising its evidence. Soon, however, a letter came from Lucius Manlius Acidinus, who commanded in Umbria, and who announced the arrival of the Narnian horsemen in his camp, and the intelligence which they brought thither. The letter was first laid before ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... evidence—dwelt on the strong circumstances that seemed to bespeak his guilt—spoke of the mournful increase of crime—of laws, and life, and property being at stake—and finally closed his address with a sentence expressive of the extreme improbability of the prisoner's defence; for he, on being asked if he had any thing further to say, replied in the negative, only asserting, in the most solemn manner, his ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... "The improbability is tripled by the complete overthrow of that order which rules all the heavenly bodies in which the revolving motion is definitely established. The greater the sphere is in such a case, so much longer is the time required ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... endeavour to get an equitable and comprehensive law passed for the preservation and increase of the breed of Salmon? It is a matter of even national importance, and if duly provided for and properly attended to, I see no improbability in the supposition that Salmon would again be as abundant as they were when the apprentices on the banks of the Ribble stipulated that they should not be compelled to eat Salmon oftener than three days in the week. The apathy of ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... communication of the speedy arrival of the troops, was not without effect. The criminals trembled at the idea; Don Silvio was mad with rage he pointed out to the men the necessity of immediate attack—the improbability of the troops arriving so soon, and the wealth which he expected was locked up by Don Rebiera in his mansion. This rallied them, and they advanced to the doors, which they attempted to force without success, losing several men by the occasional fire from those within the ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... dramatic arrangement, especially when the truth is so kind as to be in itself romantic. Social nature, particularly in Paris, allows of such freaks of chance, such complications of whimsical entanglements, that it constantly outdoes the most inventive imagination. The audacity of facts, by sheer improbability or indecorum, rises to heights of "situation" forbidden to art, unless they are softened, cleansed, and purified ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... hot and trembling, and her frame is painfully thin. Certainly she does not look fit to enter upon evening gaiety, and Lady Verner in addressing her son, "You will go with me, Lionel," proved that she never so much as cast a thought to the improbability that Sibylla ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... has seen. He is the most pathetic figure of the play. One touch of verisimilitude is lacking; none of the guests gives him a tip, yet he maintains his urbanity. As Mr. Shaw has not yet visited America he may be unaware of the improbability of ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... certain characteristic bars; that in every child in a six-fingered family there should be the capacity for the production of an additional digit; and so in other cases. Nevertheless there is no more inherent improbability in this being the case than in a useless and rudimentary organ, or even in only a tendency to the production of a rudimentary organ, being inherited during millions of generations, as is well known to occur with a multitude of organic beings. There is no more inherent improbability ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... H. V. explains away the improbability of the Magician forgetting his gift. "In this sore disquietude he bethought him not of the ring which, by the decree of Allah, was the means of Alaeddin's escape; and indeed not only he but oft times those who practice the Black Art are baulked ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... successful attempt."[214] The Chief Justice concluded this part of his opinion by quoting from Chief Judge Learned Hand's opinion for the Circuit Court of Appeals in the same case, as follows: "'In each case [courts] must ask whether the gravity of the evil, discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.'"[215] In short, if the evil legislated against is serious enough, advocacy of it in order to be punishable does not have to be attended by a clear and present ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Discourses were made, concerning the opening of the Eyes of the Dead Man, and viewing Isabella; but she was a Woman of so admirable a Life and Conversation, of so undoubted a Piety and Sanctity of Living, that not the least Conjecture could be made, of her having a hand in it, besides the improbability of it; yet the whole thing was a Mystery, which, they thought, they ought to look into: But a few Days after, the Body of Villenoys being interr'd in a most magnificent manner, and, by Will all ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception. But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... either of being executed on the island, or set ashore on the mainland, or being sent to England to be tried before the council; of which, after a day's consideration, he chose the first, alleging the improbability of persuading any to leave the expedition, for the sake of transporting a criminal to England, and the danger of his future state among savages and infidels. His choice, I believe, few will approve: to be set ashore on the mainland, was, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Fruit-bearing without Christ is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with Christ ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Presbyterian creed, to the Methodist creed, to, one might say, a hundred creeds, even including the slender one of Unitarians. How certain words of Newman came home to me in the midst of such reflections! "There is an overpowering antecedent improbability in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed something, and then revealing nothing; there is no antecedent improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an inspired volume." I do not mean to say ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... were by this time drenched to the skin, and looked with no very agreeable feelings to the prospect of passing the night in wet clothes. At length the night began to close in, and the guides talked of the improbability of reaching the English station before night. It was still raining hard; but we dismounted, and took our dinner as cheerfully as possible, and hoping for clearer weather the next day. On remounting, we soon discovered that the road was no longer so steep as it had been heretofore, and the ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... in the purely passive processes of association some ground for that degree of natural coherence and rational order which our more mature dreams commonly possess. These processes go far to explain, too, that odd mixture of rationality with improbability, of natural order and incongruity, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Errors.—Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in actual life. The Comedy of Errors is a play in which this situation is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this in the roaring fun which results. Nowadays we should call a play of this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from situations which are improbable, and since the play depends on these for success rather ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... And Mary Bolitho was a proud girl, and was not accustomed to being dictated to. All the same, she felt much interested in what he had said, and she found herself thinking of him again and again. There was something romantic, too, in his story which, in spite of its improbability, she could not help believing, and although she felt very angry with him, she sympathised with the feelings he had expressed. Months before she had been annoyed at the thought that her father should have been opposed by one who was little removed from the working classes. She ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... order not to leave the world with a lie behind me. I confirmed my assertions with an oath that I had spoken the truth, and that I was not guilty of anything, except that the glitter of the gold had dazzled me, and that I had not perceived the improbability of the story of the stranger. "Did you not know Bianca?" he asked me. I assured him that I had never seen her. Valetti now related to me that a profound mystery rested on the affair, that the Governor had very much accelerated ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... party, he had even still less made up his mind as to the practicability or expediency of the measure. Looking upon it as a question, the agitation of which was useful to Liberty, and at the same time counting upon the improbability of its objects being ever accomplished, he adopted at once, as we have seen, the most speculative of all the plans that had been proposed, and flattered himself that he thus secured the benefit of the general principle, without ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... frequently remarked the unpleasant air and countenance of this man. She now hesitated, whether to speak with him, doubting even, that this request was only a pretext to draw her into some danger; but a little reflection shewed her the improbability of this, and she blushed at her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and as he told it, it seemed to him, in its improbability, more like a fairy-tale than the sober happenings of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... men is least like Commissioner Falconer in circumlocutory address, at once blurted out, 'Is Count Altenberg going to be married?' Lord Oldborough turned and looked upon him with surprise—whether surprise at his curiosity, or at the improbability of the Count's making his lordship the confidant of his love-affairs, Temple declares he was in too much confusion to be able to decide. Lord Oldborough made no reply, but took up an answer to a memorial, which he had ordered Temple to draw, pointed ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... commenting on the improbability of a generous artist thus cruelly taunting his sensitive rival, I shall simply say that Liszt had not the slightest recollection of ever having imitated Chopin's playing in a darkened room. There may be some minute grains of truth mixed up with all ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... reflecting that two and a half cents for one way would have an air of improbability about it, answered promptly, "Yes, if ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... many minds of hope and fear as to the meeting him or speaking to him, under the consciousness of the possible defection from his Church, and the doubt and dread whether to confide her secret and consult him. However, the extreme improbability of her being able to do so made the yearning for the sight of a Winchester face predominate, and her vigil of the night past made the nursery authorities concede that she had fairly earned her turn to go to church ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... embowered, damsel filled prison-house, and not as any prince of high intelligence and tender sensibilities who loved his people and mingled freely with them would gain a knowledge of suffering and sorrow; but we are justified in passing all such fancies, not only on account of their intrinsic improbability, but because the great Asvaghosha, who wrote about the beginning of our era, knew nothing ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connection with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... bequeaths and commends to the special acceptance of you and me,—I propose that, in the very briefest manner, we now review the contents of that chapter; in order that we may discover what is the special absurdity, or impossibility, or improbability, or by whatever other name the thing is to be called,—which makes it quite out of the question that you or I should undertake the act of ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... similarity of the states of minds. In a rather elaborate controversy on the subject between Mr. Lang and myself, carried through the transactions of the Folk-Lore Congress of 1891, the introduction to Miss Roalfe Cox's "Cinderella," and in various numbers of "Folk-Lore," I urged the improbability of this explanation as applied to the plots of fairy tales. Similar states of mind might account for similar incidents arising in different areas independently, but not for whole series of incidents artistically woven together to form a definite plot which ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... with a movement of rotation, the atmosphere surrounding it must participate in that movement. Ptolemy did not know this, and consequently he came to the conclusion that the earth did not rotate, and that, therefore, notwithstanding the tremendous improbability of so mighty an object as the celestial sphere spinning round once in every twenty-four hours, there was no course open except to believe that this very improbable thing did really happen. Thus it came to pass that Ptolemy adopted as the cardinal doctrine of his system a stationary earth ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... hearing this accusation, without giving himself time for a moment's reflection, which would have shown him the improbability of the story, burst into so ungovernable a fury that he became almost frantic, and it was with the utmost difficulty his knights prevented his instantly putting his son to death. The states of Foix ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... of Congress at the same time authorised the President to take possession of the remaining Floridas, if England showed a disposition to seize the land as an aggressive act. Since Spain had come under the control of France, this action was not an improbability. But aside from temporarily occupying Pensacola, the British made no attempt to take the Floridas during the War of 1812, although rumours of that kind were frequent. Simultaneous with the end of the war came the restoration of Spanish authority in ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... p. 90) keep to their former standpoint. The latter do not trust the Jaina tradition and believe it probable that the statements in the same are falsified. There are certainly great difficulties in the way of accepting such a position especially the improbability that the Buddhists should have forgotten the fact of the defection of their hated enemy. Meanwhile, this is not absolutely impossible as the oldest preserved Jaina canon had its first authentic edition only in the fifth or sixth century of our era, and as yet the proof is wanting that the Jainas, ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... statement for the first two days, in spite of its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon came forward ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... slaughtered; some gave themselves up to undergo slavery: some retreated beyond the sea: and some, remaining in their own land, lived a miserable life in the mountains and forests." In all this, he is merely transcribing Gildas, but he saw no improbability in the words. At a later date, AEthelfrith, of Northumbria, he tells us, "rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral part of the English territory, whether by subjugating or expatriating[1] the natives," than any previous king. Eadwine, before his conversion, "subdued ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... occasion. Thus, for some hours did she beguile her Cares, but Love, who takes delight sometimes to torment his Votarys wou'd not long permit her to enjoy this satisfaction.... Reason, with stern remonstrances checked the Romantick turn of her late thoughts, and showed her the improbability of the hope she had entertained: Were he, cryed she, with an agony proportioned to her former transports, of any degree which you'd encourage his pretensions to my Love, he cou'd not for so long a Time have endured the servile Offices to which he ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... occasion to punish the Tuscarora, in the course of his services; and as the parties understood each other perfectly well, the former saw the improbability of the latter's daring to trifle ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... have plac'd her thus low and distressful, if he had not also suppos'd her a Servant: and that too in some elegant Family; for if she had always remain'd a Fellow-cottager with her Father, it must have carried an Air of Romantick Improbability to account for her ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... so far as that went, but insisted on an inherent improbability. A millionaire, a member of one of the oldest families in the city—a social swell, the brother of that Mrs. Martin Whitney whose pictures the papers were always publishing on the slightest excuse—wasn't likely to be found riding ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... OLIPHANT's The Railway Man and his Children, which is a good story, with just such a dash of the improbable—but there, who can bring improbability as a charge against the plot constructed by any novelist after this great Jewel Case so recently tried? Mrs. OLIPHANT's types are well drawn; but the story is drawn out by just one volume too much. "For a one-volume novel commend me," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... tomb? What was it but destiny that whispered to me what I had seen was the face of a woman? I had not traced a feature, nor could I distinctly state that it was a human countenance I had beheld; but mine was ever an imagination into which the wildest improbability was scarce admitted that it did not grow into conviction in ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... is very likely," said the Man of Wrath; but whether he meant it prettily, or whether he was merely thinking of the improbability of his ever eating too much of the local savouries, I cannot tell. I object, however, to discussing cooks in the garden on a starlight night, so I got off his knee and proposed that we should stroll round ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... we were travelling slowly all the time, you may take it as certain that Seketulo—if the fellow happens to be still alive—was informed of the fact some time before we actually reached this spot. And even if we admit, for a moment, such an improbability as that the news failed to reach him, these fellows who are now lurking all round us are, every one of them, painfully aware of the presence of the ship—as we can clearly see by the trouble that they are taking to keep ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Odyssey; that, if so, these poems could not have been committed to writing during the time of such their composition; that, in a question of comparative probabilities like this, it is a much grosser improbability that even the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expungings, to upwards of 15,000 hexameter lines, should have been actually conceived and perfected in the brain of one man, with no other help but his own or others' memory, than that ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Hysminias and Hysmine" of Eustathius or Eumathius, and the "Dosicles and Rhodanthe" of Theodorus Prodromus, the latter of whom was a monk of the twelfth century. In these productions of the lower empire, the extravagance of the language, the improbability of the plot, and the wearisome dullness of the details, are worthy of each other; and are only varied occasionally by a little gross indelicacy, from which, indeed, none but Heliodorus is wholly exempt. Yet, "as in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... was indeed the "flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." There is less improbability in the suggestion made by several writers that, when the pestilence wasted Jerusalem, and David offered up the sacrifice of intercession in the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, the king may have seen, in the scimitar-like tail of a comet such as Donati's, God's "minister,"—"a ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... we object to the extreme and monstrous improbability of almost all the incidents which go to the composition of this fable. We know very well that poetry does not describe what is ordinary; but the marvellous, in which it is privileged to indulge, is the marvellous of performance, and not of accident. One extraordinary ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase of modern life," the manicurist's ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... appealed to; but the facts were too overpowering, and it was too late to aid his comrades or himself. Then turning to the Court, he skilfully availed himself of the point which had so much impressed the community, the intrinsic improbability that a man in his position of freedom and prosperity should sacrifice everything to free other people. If they thought it so incredible, why not give him the benefit of the incredibility? The act being, as they stated, one of infatuation, why convict him of it on the bare word of men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... more flushed than usual, perhaps, he sat in his place until the whole school was down with it, and had to be closed in consequence. Then and not till then did he feel that he had saved the situation." I care nothing for the outrageous improbability of any youthful son of a shipowner being able to talk in the brilliant fashion in which Mr. Jacobs makes Vyner talk. Success excuses it. "Salthaven" is ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... overlooked entirely "the Devonshire tradition, which represents Sir William Hankford to be the judge {343} who committed Prince Henry," may be seen in The Judges of England, vol. iv. p. 324., wherein I show the total improbability of the tale. And my disbelief in the story of Hankford's death, and its more probable application to Sir Robert Danby, is already noticed in "N. & Q.," Vol. v., ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... our terrestrial faculties are sufficiently limited, but this reason and these faculties suffice none the less to make us feel the improbability, the absurdity, of this hypothesis, and we reject it as incompatible with the sublime grandeur of the spectacle of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Monsieur Legouve treated neither better nor worse than any other has done, as by the details of roads, bridges, marsh-draining, canals, railways, coal, coke, and the like, which were dead-weights on Thalia's light robe; and the improbability of the plot was not so much the marriage of a noble girl to the son of an apple-dealer as was the perfection given to the young engineer: every virtue and every grace were showered on him. The piece was unanimously pronounced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... I remember when Lady Morgan's O'Donnell was being read out in the year 1815, at the scene of M'Rory's appearance in the billiard room, when Mr. Edgeworth said, "This is quite improbable;" Maria exclaimed, "Never mind the improbability, let us ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... sanction of abundant authority. "Weak and gratuitous conjectures."—Porson. "A gratuitous assumption."—Godwin. "The gratuitous theory."—Southey. "A gratuitous invention."—De Quincey. "But it is needless to dwell on the improbability of a hypothesis which has been shown to be altogether ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... checked his tears, but immediately saw the improbability of this. "Oh, no, no! They're all gone! they're all gone!" he repeated again and again. "No one but us two and the dead ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth—to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps—the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... world," in a body which one sees visibly soiling under one's eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged. There never was a simpler or more attaching charm, because there never was a sweeter or more honest ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... flighty romance she shrinks from encountering actual poverty, but it might be this man's admiration is sufficiently strong to lead him beyond the debatable land. She hesitates just a little, then solaces herself with the improbability. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the embarking of French prisoners on board a vessel in which the plague existed, the improbability of the circumstance alone, but especially the notorious facts of the case, repel this odious accusation. I observed the conduct of Sir Sidney Smith closely at the time, and I remarked in him a chivalric ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... from the others, run a risk of being cut off? If this was the case, it would be easy for the Grand Duke to defend Irkutsk, and any time gained against an invasion was a step towards repulsing it. Michael sometimes let his thoughts run on these hopes, but he soon saw their improbability, and felt that the preservation of the Grand ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... the opinion that the situation in regard to the Canal no longer gave cause for anxiety. The strength of the forces available for its defence, the backward condition of the enemy preparations, the route of the Senussi's army, and the approach of summer, all pointed to the improbability of active operations for at least some months to come. At this time also Sir Archibald Murray, in an official document, referred to the A.I.F. as the "Imperial Strategical Reserve." Those persons who grasped the meaning of this phrase expected early developments, and the various foreign theatres ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... chapter "Of unprofytable Stody," above mentioned, which contains proof how well he at least had profited by study, he cites certain continental seats of university learning at each of which, there is indeed no improbability in supposing he may have remained for some time, as was ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... clear about that, Watson; for it is evident that they must either kill her or else secure her in such a way that she could not give immediate notice of their escape. But at any rate I have shown, have I not, that there is a certain element of improbability about the lady's story? And now on the top of this comes the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... France, and that it was her business to go back to Germany and eat humble pie. Whatever the audience may have felt about these reflections on the conduct of England, they must at least have been irritated by the fantastic improbability of the girl's motive. Very fortunately at this juncture the voice of the paper-boy is heard in the street conveying the thrilling news of our tardy entry into the quarrel; and a glad Margaret, having recovered her respect ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... majority of the crowds, holding life cheap, as all bad men strangely do—equally prepared to take or lose it upon the slightest provocation. Few tales of horror in Panama could be questioned on the ground of improbability. Not less partial were many of the natives of Cruces to the use of the knife; preferring, by the way, to administer sly stabs in the back, when no one was by to see the dastard blow dealt. Terribly bullied by the Americans were the boatmen and muleteers, who were ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... separated upon the assurance that she should see the two designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her. Dick, indeed, would not again deny her request; but had he not reckoned on the improbability of her renewing it? All night she lay confronted by that question. The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision. She knew now why Dick had suddenly reminded her of his father: had she not once before seen ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... fell. As the sound of the priest's voice and the sight of his wasted face faded from the painter's sense, he began to see everything in the old light again. Then what Don Ippolito had said took a character of ludicrous, of insolent improbability. ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... better taste, than the spirit of conciliation and moderation that prevailed between men so widely separated by opinion. This was not long before Gen. Lamarque was attacked by his final disease, and as there appeared to me to be improbability in the rumour of the affair of the Boulevards, I quite rightly set it down as one of the exaggerations that daily besiege our ears. It being near six, I consequently returned home to dinner, supposing that the day would end as ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... doubtful. Claudius, during all his reign, is represented as emperor on the medals of Alexandria, which are very numerous. If Zenobia possessed any power in Egypt, it could only have been at the beginning of the reign of Aurelian. The same circumstance throws great improbability on her conquests in Galatia. Perhaps Zenobia administered Egypt in the name of Claudius, and emboldened by the death of that prince, subjected it ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the Scots who have followed their example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality: they have alleged—as they had a fair right to do—the probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies have been enlisted—and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... assistants very extensive commissions, and direct very complex operations? Nothing ought to be admitted that is contrary to the established laws of nature, unless it is something with which these laws are absolutely incompatible. Would you rather give credit to a miracle than admit an improbability? Would you solve a difficulty rather by overturning the powers of nature than by believing an artful and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... seems to be peculiar to American life, so much so that, when a young man meets a friend whom he has not seen for some time, the commonest question to ask is, "What are you doing now?" showing the improbability or uncertainty that he is doing to-day what he was doing when they ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... unique, full of wit, a veiled sarcasm that is rich in the extreme, it will all be found in this charming little book. The air of perfect sincerity with which they are told, the diction, reminding one of 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' and the ludicrous improbability of the tales, give them a power rarely met with in 'short stories.' There is many a lesson to be learned from the ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
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