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adjective
Inapplicable  adj.  Not applicable; incapable of being applied; not adapted; not suitable; as, the argument is inapplicable to the case.
Synonyms: Unsuitable; unsuited; unadapted; inappropriate; inapposite; irrelevant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Inapplicable" Quotes from Famous Books



... clutches, fangs, or claws of a pursuing enemy, he was obliged to fly and leap over thorny briars and bramble-bushes or hornets' nests, or plunge through swamps alive with blood-sucking insects and leeches—Ricord's definition would certainly have been inapplicable. In those days, but for the protecting double fold of the preputial envelope that protected it from the thorns and cutting grasses, the coarse bark of trees, or the stings and bites of insects, the glans penis of primitive man would have often looked like the head of the proverbially ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... this and other countries down to the very eve of the occurrence. In these Mr. Proctor took a leading part; and it was due to his urgent representations that provision was made for the employment of the method identified with the name of Halley,[766] which had been too hastily assumed inapplicable to the first of each transit-pair. It depends upon the difference in the length of time taken by the planet to cross the sun's disc, as seen from various points of the terrestrial surface, and requires, accordingly, the visibility of both entrance and exit at the same station. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... adverted to the recent measures in the province, and cautioned his hearers of weaker parts against calling in question the just severity which God-fearing magistrates had at length been compelled to exercise. He spoke of the danger of pity—in some cases a commendable and Christian virtue, but inapplicable to this pernicious sect. He observed that such was their devilish obstinacy in error that even the little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... example and teaching of Jesus be really adopted in modern life as the pattern and rule of conduct? Is there not something strangely impracticable in His Ethics; and, however admirably suited to meet the needs of His own time, utterly inapplicable to the complex conditions of society to-day? On the one hand, Tolstoy would have us follow the example of Jesus to the letter, and rigidly practise the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, even to the extent of refusing to resist wrong and possess property, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... centre; so I got along on my knees into the centre to experiment. Bitter failure; the canoe took to sidling down river broadside on, like Mr. Winkle's horse. Shouts of laughter from the bank. Both bow and stern education utterly inapplicable to centre; and so, seeing I was utterly thrown away there, I crept into the bows, and in a few more minutes I steered my canoe, perfectly, in among its fellows by the bank and secured it there. Mme. Forget ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... law courts were constructed specially with a view to the protection of the accused, and upon the assumption that it is better nine guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned. Clearly such rules will be inapplicable to the historical question which of two hypotheses is most likely to be true. The author forgets that the negative hypothesis is just as much a hypothesis as the positive, and needs to be defended in precisely the same manner. Either the Gospels were used, or they ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... from the first that the system called "The Wakefield" could never fairly represent the ideas of Mr. Wakefield himself, whose singular breadth of understanding and various knowledge of mankind belied the notion that fathered on him the clumsy execution of a theory wholly inapplicable to a social state like Australia. I am glad to see that he has vindicated himself from the discreditable paternity. But I grieve to find that he still clings to one cardinal error of the system, in the discouragement of small holdings, and that he evades, more ingeniously than ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... might have been a serious interference with their rights and with their prospects. But as I have already pointed out to you, Government regulations have to be suspended during the period of the war because they are inapplicable in a time of urgency. The same thing applies to many trade-union regulations and practices. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the explanation which suggested itself to my own mind when first I heard of the phenomena, but was dismissed as wholly inapplicable after the first day's inquiry; nor do I think that any one could maintain that different people, individually and collectively, for some weeks, thought they heard and saw a series of sounds and motions which ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett

... States and Germany, under which the nonworking provisions of the German patent law are made inapplicable to the patents of American citizens, was concluded on February 23, 1909, and is now in force. Negotiations for similar conventions looking to the placing of American inventors on the same footing as nationals have recently been initiated with other European governments whose laws ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... the views of Jean Jacques Rousseau!" exclaimed Thugut, contemptuously; "but these views are inapplicable to the world and to practical life; he who desires to derive advantages from men, first, of all things, must avail himself of their bad qualities and flatter them. To hold intercourse with perfectly virtuous men is tedious and unprofitable; fortunately, however, there are ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... American, in the way of titles. The proudest of them all signify absolutely nothing. They do not stand for ability, for public service, for social importance, for large possessions; but, on the contrary, are oftenest found in connection with personalities to which they are supremely inapplicable. We can hardly afford to quarrel with a national habit which, if lightly handled, may involve us in serious domestic difficulties. The "Right Worshipful" functionary whose equipage stops at my back gate, and whose services are indispensable to the health and comfort of my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... run upon. When the dip is flat, the trough, if hung from plugs in the hanging-wall, may be swung backward and forward. The use of this "bumping-trough" saves much shoveling. For handling filling or ore in flat runs it deserves wider adoption. It is, of course, inapplicable in passes as a "bumping-trough," but can be fixed to give smooth surface. In flat mines it permits a wider interval between levels and therefore saves development work. The life of this contrivance is short when ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age. Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is active on all ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... "sweet love" and "beloved." Ben Jonson called himself the "lover" of Camden, and dedicated his eulogistic lines to "my beloved Mr. William Shakespeare." There is therefore no reason for considering the language of the first series of Sonnets as necessarily inapplicable to a masculine friend. The second series, beginning with the 127th Sonnet, is as evidently addressed, as Mr. Brown says, "to his mistress, on her infidelity;" and the Sonnets end with two upon "Cupid's Brand," admitted by all to be separate poems, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... from the silence of certain of the Fathers is therefore invalid. The argument e silentio—always an insecure argument,—proves inapplicable in this particular case. When the antecedent facts have been once explained, all the subsequent phenomena become intelligible. But a more effectual and satisfactory reply to the difficulty occasioned by the general silence of the Fathers, remains ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... manifested upon the Earth, by reason of the exhaustion of all natural or unassisted human efforts for the amelioration of mankind;" (pp. 155-6;) whereas "our recently enlarged Ethnographical information shews such an argument to be altogether inapplicable to the case." "It would be more like the realities of things, as we can now behold them, to say that the Christian Revelation was given to the Western World, because it deserved it better and was more prepared for it than the East." (p. 156.)—The remedy for the first of ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... incorrect to state that the struggle for life is the sole sovereign law in Nature and society, just as it is false to contend that this law is wholly inapplicable to human society. The real truth is that even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which grows progressively milder in its methods and more elevated in its ideals. But operating concurrently with this we find a law, the influence ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... was that publicity which, according to the republican notion of the Greeks, was essential to all grave and important transactions. This was signified by the presence of the chorus, whose presence during many secret transactions has been judged of according to rules of propriety inapplicable to the country, and so ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... wall to wall tends to thrust out the walls, and hence a tie is applied to hold the opposite sides of the roof together at its base, where alone a tie can be fully efficient, and thus the roof is made to act upon the walls wholly in the direction of gravity; or where an efficient tie is inapplicable, as in the case of a hammer beam roof, buttresses or counterforts are added to the walls, to enable them to resist the pressure outwards. A beam laid horizontally from wall to wall, as a girder to carry a floor and its load, may sag or bend downwards, and tend thereby to force out the walls, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... year. Is anything less like a brilliant spring day than a gloomy winter's day? In his history of the Restoration, Lamartine has drawn a picture of the Empress Marie Louise which seems tolerably exact for the period after the calamities that befell the Empire, but inapplicable to the happy days of the mother of the King of Rome. "Marie Louise," he writes, "sought refuge in ceremony, in retreat and silence from the ill-will that pursued her at every step.... Napoleon loved her from a ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... a mathematician to commit these elementary blunders; he did not assume to account for rotation by inapplicable laws, but took for granted that the sun revolved upon its axis, and thence communicated a corresponding motion to the bodies thrown from its surface. But our author has sought to advance beyond his teacher, and in this way has shown his ignorance of physics by an egregious mistake. ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... State was Antichristian. The great thing, and the one thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformer's own interpretation of it. Whatever helped was good; whatever hindered was evil; and if this simple classification proved inapplicable over the whole field, it was no business of his to stop and reconcile incongruities. He had more pressing concerns on hand; he had to save souls; he had to be about his Father's business. This short-sighted view resulted in a doctrine that was actually Jesuitical in application. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "This is very sad. But I perceive I must explain to you the action of my paint. A broken bone is a mighty small affair at the worst of it; and it belongs to a class of accident to which my paint is quite inapplicable. Sin, my dear young friend, sin is the sole calamity that a wise man should apprehend; it is against sin that I have fitted you out; and when you come to be tempted you will give me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... Highlands of Scotland; and I, who am a proprietor in both countries, can hardly be expected to put much trust in the political physicians who, to cure a disease in Mayo or Galway, propound remedies the first principles of which they would deem inapplicable to the same disorder in Argyle ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... Teleology.—Purpose and Design distinguished—Man has no Monopoly of the Latter.—Inference of Design from Adaptation and Utility legitimate; also in Hume's Opinion irresistible—The Principle of Design, taken with Specific Creation, totally insufficient and largely inapplicable; but, taken with the Doctrine of the Evolution of Species in Nature, applicable, pertinent, and, moreover, necessary.—Illustrations from Abortive Organs, supposed Waste of Being, etc.—All Nature being of a Piece, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... the meaning of nature as to exclude human nature, and so to narrow the sphere of the natural sciences, as to leave no place for the Science of Language. It is also possible so to interpret the meaning of growth that it becomes inapplicable alike to the gradual formation of the earth's crust, and to the slow accumulation of the humus of language. Let the definition of these terms be plainly laid down, and the controversy, if it will not cease at once, will at all events become more fruitful. It will then ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... merely for the gratification of your desire to possess knowledge, or whether literary production be your aim, unless you may study undisturbed your labours will never bear their full fruit. Interrupted, your knowledge will be scanty, diverse, and generally inapplicable, your literary ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... regarded is, that artificial drying is usually inapplicable to fresh peat. The precautions needful in curing peat have already been detailed. Above all, slow drying is necessary, in order that the blocks shrink uniformly, without cracking and warping in such a way as to seriously injure their solidity and usefulness. In general, peat ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... test would be an admirable one, if, in the first place, it were always practicable to apply it, and if, in the second, it always yielded results susceptible of a definite interpretation. Unfortunately, in the great majority of cases, this touchstone for species is wholly inapplicable. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... character {.} (sang) rather than by "priests." Even in Christianity, beyond the priestly privilege which belongs to all believers, I object to the ministers of any denomination or church calling themselves or being called "priests;" and much more is the name inapplicable to the sramanas or bhikshus of Buddhism which acknowledges no God in the universe, no soul in man, and has no services of sacrifice or prayer in its worship. The only difficulty in the use of "monks" is caused by the members of the sect in Japan which, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien

... "The Cenci" as the best tragedy of modern times. Writing concerning it, Shelley said: 'I have been cautious to avoid the introducing faults of youthful composition; diffuseness, a profusion of inapplicable imagery, vagueness, generality, and, as Hamlet says, "words, words".' There is nothing that is not purely dramatic throughout; and the character of Beatrice, proceeding, from vehement struggle, to horror, to deadly resolution, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... inapplicable to the requirements of ordinary side-saddle riding; because, in order to use it properly, it should be applied, as nearly as practicable, at right angles to the side of the horse, so as to touch him only on one spot, ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... line, by 34 miles in another line; Rimsky is 54 by 20 miles across, and it has a strangely sinuous margin; Bow atoll is 30 miles long, and on an average only 6 in width; Menchicoff atoll consists of three atolls united or tied together. This theory, moreover, is totally inapplicable to the northern Maldiva atolls in the Indian Ocean (one of which is 88 miles in length, and between 10 and 20 in breadth), for they are not bounded like ordinary atolls by narrow reefs, but by a vast number of separate little atolls; ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... our native land. The fundamental principles of the republic, to which the humblest white man, whether born here or elsewhere, may appeal with confidence, in the hope of awakening a favorable response, are held to be inapplicable to us. The glorious doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... stone, especially for ecclesiastical decoration, and for the srails of staircases and halls Its softness enables it to be readily carved into elaborate forms, but its solubility in water renders it inapplicable to outdoor work. The purest alabaster is a snow-white material of fine tiniforni grain, but it is often associated with oxide of iron, which produces brown clouding and veining in the stone. The coarser varieties of alabaster are converted ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Origen. The faculty which, according to this theory, possesses immediate intuition into the things of God is not only irresponsible to reason, but stands in no relation to it. It ushers us into an entirely new world, where the familiar criteria of truth and falsehood are inapplicable. And what it reveals to us is not a truer and deeper view of the actual, but a wholly independent cosmic principle which invades the world of experience as a disturbing force, spasmodically subverting the laws of nature in order to show its power over them.[229] For as soon as the formless ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... had in view the new elections that were to recruit that "small remainder of those faithful worthies who at first freed us from tyranny and have continued ever since through all changes constant to their trust"; but he lets it stand now, as not inapplicable to the new condition of things brought in by the sudden mixture of the Secluded with the Rumpers. The "Ready and Easy Way," however, has still to be explained; and to that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... atomic character of our words, and the flat juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making a gem of every prose sentence, — the art which, carried, perhaps, to, a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of Tacitus a series of cameos, — that art is inapplicable to our looser medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level; the same effort will not, with this instrument, attain the same beauty. If equal beauty is ever ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... is proportional to cost of production, being consequently inapplicable, we must revert to a principle anterior to that of cost of production, and from which this last flows as a consequence,—namely, the principle of demand ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... "Thodice," and with Leibnitz in general, is derived in part from these phrases. We do not believe that any sincere student of Leibnitz has found him dark and impenetrable. Be it a merit or a fault, this predicate is inapplicable. Never was metaphysician more explicit and more intelligible. Had he been disposed to mysticize and to shroud himself in "impenetrable darkness," he would have found it difficult to indulge that propensity in French. Thanks to the strict rgime and happy limitations of that idiom, the French is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... substance is a good disinfectant as well as a deodorant, and if applied as a wash, in the proportion of four to six ounces of the powder to one gallon of water, it will destroy most forms of life. In many cases this agent is inapplicable ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell

... appear. The first is to make the scheme for taxing corporations quite different in principle and plan from that for taxing natural persons. The assumption in this is that the "general property tax" is an irremediable failure, and is particularly inapplicable to corporations. This plan goes along with the separation of state and local taxation.[12] An unfortunate result of this is to relieve the great mass of taxpayers of the state from, any apparent and measurable part of the tax burden ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... of punishing so powerful an animal is a question of difficulty to his attendants. Force being almost inapplicable, they try to work on his passions and feelings, by such expedients as altering the nature of his food or withholding it altogether for a time. Ou such occasions the demeanour of the creature will sometimes evince a sense of humiliation as well as of discontent. In some parts of India ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... in favor of Edward, and in 1554 he wrote to the council, whom he pressed to obtain a pardon from the queen, by a letter delivered to Dr. Weston, but which the latter opened, and on seeing its contents, basely returned. Treason was a charge quite inapplicable to Cranmer, who supported the queen's right; while others, who had favoured Lady Jane, upon paying a small fine were dismissed. A calumny was now spread against Cranmer, that he complied with some of the popish ceremonies to ingratiate himself with the queen, which he ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... without carefully calculated gesture, he can carry through a part in a modern comedy probably is misled by the thought that the English are more sober in gesture than the Latin races: and his contempt for the work of the mime is based on a belief that certain purely conventional gestures, inapplicable save in wordless scenes, constitute the whole materials of the mime's art. The mime certainly has a kind of dumb language with a limited vocabulary, understood, unfortunately, by few English people save those connected ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... to the mechanism of the body, which might gradually accustom itself to the accurate placing of the fingers. This could be applied only where we place a piece of music, frequently practised; but it is totally inapplicable to a new piece, which is played by the professor with equal facility, though he has never seen it before. In the latter case there must arise, necessarily, an ideal representation, or an act of judgment, previous to every ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... which weaken authority by distance will continue. If, then, the removal of the causes of this spirit of American liberty be for the greater part, or rather entirely, impracticable; if the ideas of criminal process be inapplicable—or, if applicable, are in the highest degree inexpedient—what way yet remains? No way is open but to comply with the American spirit as necessary; or, if you please, to submit to it as a ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... exultation was purely official and ceremonial, as due by loyalty from a cadet to the head of his house, no such compensation existed. The enemy was no enemy in my eyes; his affronts were but retaliations; and his insults were so inapplicable to my unworthy self, being of a calibre exclusively meant for the use of my brother, that from me they recoiled, one and all, as cannon shot from ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... no foreign fancies which are inapplicable to our state of society. It is very common for our young men to come home and appear quite ridiculous in attempting to introduce their foreign fashions. It should be always kept in mind that the state ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... attack from the representatives of experience and common sense. Of these, the chief was Aristotle, whose criticism has been preserved to us, and who, while admitting that Plato's scheme has a plausible appearance of philanthropy, maintains that it is inapplicable to the facts of human nature. To this conclusion, indeed, even Plato himself was driven in the end; for in his later work, the "Laws," although he still asserts that community of goods would be the ideal institution, he ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... amusing dialogue relating principally to English Postal Reform. Being inapplicable to any condition of things existing in the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... established facts, together with a probable result of facts of a fifth class; the hypothesis of natural selection totters on the extension of a conjectural condition explanatory of extinction to the origination of species, inapplicable in that extension to the majority of organisms, and not known or observed to apply to the origin of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... the wine and water, his face, as so often with rude folk in a great emotion, browned as it was with wind and sun, seemed lighted from within; he seemed etherealized, yet with his virility all alive in him. A phrase, wholly inapplicable in its first sense, came irresistibly to the younger priest's mind as he waited on him. "When the strong man, armed, keepeth his house, ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... in which a constricting bandage is inapplicable, for example, in cold abscesses, tuberculous glands or tendon sheaths, Klapp's suction bell is employed. The cup is applied for five minutes at a time and then taken off for three minutes, and this is repeated over a period of about three-quarters of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... work of this nature a style ornamental and luxuriant would have been evidently inapplicable, yet the author has not been wholly inattentive to this particular, but has endeavoured to temper the dry and formal manner of the mere journalist, with something of the historian's ease. Long sequestered, however, from literary ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... This inapplicable answer might have been too much for the comprehension of many; but it did not puzzle Mrs. Allen, for after only a moment's consideration, she said, in a whisper to Catherine, "I dare say she thought I was speaking ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... present manner of proficiency) in tactics; and as for his school, he could himself learn at night what he was to teach others on the following day! Nor was this mere "conceit"—though, in some other respects, that word, in its limited sense, was not inapplicable—neither was it altogether ignorant presumption; for one of these men was seldom known to fail in anything he undertook: or, if he did fail, he was never found to be cast down by defeat, and the resiliency of his nature justified ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... the trail all he thinks of is a conviction—that is all he wants, all the public will remember; to him will be the glory; and when the case is finally reversed he will probably be out of office. These "requests" cover pages, and touch upon every phase of law applicable or inapplicable to the case. Frequently they number as many as fifty, sometimes many more. It is "up to" the judge to decide "off the bat" which are right and which are wrong. If he guesses that the right one is wrong or the wrong one right the defendant gets ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... appreciate even her own phoenixity, much less that of another, she must perforce be content with a mere mortal. Who is the mortal to be? Not her cousin Lucian; for rising young politicians must have helpful wives, with feminine politics and powers of visiting and entertaining; a description inapplicable to the phoenix. Not, as you just now suggested, a man of letters. The phoenix has had her share of playing helpmeet to a man of letters, and does not care to repeat that experience. She is sick to death of the morbid ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... the Russian proposals, relating to the non-augmentation of land and sea forces, is so inapplicable to the United States at present that it is deemed advisable to leave the initiative, upon this subject, to the representatives of those powers to which it ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... The art or method of receiving telegraph messages by ear. It is now universally used by all expert Morse operators. It can only be applied to telegraph systems producing audible sounds; in some cases, as in needle telegraphy, it may be quite inapplicable. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and Feeling—emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind—that we shall attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge? Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters—of ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... made them applicable to the dead. We can limit and direct upon them, or any one of them, the intention of the Adorable Sacrifice. The Church, which has no jurisdiction over them, can yet make indulgences applicable or inapplicable to them by way of suffrage; and by means of liturgy, commemoration, incense, holy water, and the like, can reach efficaciously to them, and most of all by her device of privileged altars. .... All that I have said hitherto has been, indirectly, at least, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... introductions to distinguished people, and his mission attracted a great deal of attention. The proposals which he made came under Flamsteed's notice, who pointed out that the Frenchman's projects were quite inapplicable in the present state of astronomical science, inasmuch as the places of the stars were not known with the degree of accuracy which would be necessary if such methods were to be rendered available. Flamsteed then goes on to say:—"I heard no more of the ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... roads go. The Australian habit is here followed of using 'bush' for country, though no word could be more ludicrously inapplicable, for there is hardly anything on the way that can really be called ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... table of the House of Commons, often with a fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the ordinary political squabbles. But, of course, the theological questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret thoughts that visit the hearts of men when ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... action was fought under Fighting Instructions which contained an article about dividing the enemy's fleet. But even if this article had been in force at the time—and we now know that it was not—it would still have been inapplicable, for it was only designed in view of an attack from leeward, a most important point which modern writers appear ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had passed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my present position. I passed some time at Venice; and one summer evening, on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man, who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and who, after ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... reduction of the numbers of the army, and they declaimed against the whole principle of a standing army with patriotic passion, which sometimes appeared for the time quite genuine. They brought illustrations of all kinds, applicable and inapplicable, from Greek and Roman, from French and Spanish history, even from Eastern history, to show that a standing army was invariably the instrument of despotism and the forerunner of doom to the liberties of a people. The financial policy of the Government gave them frequent opportunities ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... in the House of Commons on the smallness of the recognition, the Prime Minister replied that Nelson's glory did not depend upon the rank to which he might be raised in the peerage; a truism too palpable and inapplicable for serious utterance, the question before the House being, not the measure of Nelson's glory, but that of the national acknowledgment. As Hood justly said, "All remunerations should be proportionate to the service done to the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... are the motives of Christianity so little necessary to the practice of it, its principles to its conclusions, that the one may be spared and yet the other remain in undiminished force? Still then, its Doctrines are no more than a barren and inapplicable or at least an unnecessary theory, the place of which, it may perhaps be added, would be well supplied by a more ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he takes the word 'meaning' in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to poetry. People say, for instance, 'steed' and 'horse' have the same meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley

... in every atom of matter, as it did on the morning of creation. Should material nature be "delivered" from the law of gravitation, chaos would come again. No portion of this fair and beautiful natural world needs to become "dead" to the laws of nature. Such phraseology as this is inapplicable to the relation that exists between the world of matter, and the system of material laws, because, in this material sphere, there has been no revolution, no rebellion, no great catastrophe analogous ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... with the agitation amongst the thoughtful. Naturally a stranger to politics properly so called, constantly engaged as he was in finance or administration, the minister's constitutional ideas were borrowed from England; he himself saw how inapplicable they were to the situation of France. "I was never called upon," he says in his Memoirs, "to examine closely into what I could make, at the time of my return to office, of my profound and particular esteem for the government of England, for, if at a very early period my ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the deeper student. Here, therefore, the system of secrecy, economy, and accommodation was rendered impossible by the competition of knowledge, in which the most thorough exposition of the truth was sure of the victory, and the system itself became inapplicable as the scientific spirit penetrated ecclesiastical ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... well-being; partly, also, because it is of supreme importance that the great experiment of democracy should not be unduly hampered by excessive inpourings of ill-assimilable foreign blood, and by dangerous contacts with obsolete or inapplicable European institutions. As an economist, steeped in the principles of Cobden and his British school of liberals, my predilections (prejudices if you will) have always been in favor of the freest possible movement, alike of trade ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson

... of patients which are unfortunately becoming more common every day, especially among women of the richer orders, to whom all these remarks are pre-eminently inapplicable. 1. Those who make health an excuse for doing nothing, and at the same time allege that the being able to do nothing is their only grief. 2. Those who have brought upon themselves ill-health by over pursuit of amusement, which they and their friends have most ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... Locke's appeal, and imploring her help. And yet the thought of his aunt in connection with the upbringing of a child brought a smile to his lips. She was about as unsuited, in her own way, as he. Caro Craven was a bachelor lady of fifty—spinster was a term wholly inapplicable to the strong-minded little woman who had been an art student in Paris in the days when insular hands were lifted in horror at the mere idea, and was a designation, moreover, deprecated strongly by herself as an insult ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... the other of these States is distinguished in these respects, and by these causes, from the States whose elections are different from both. In searching for the grounds of this doctrine, I can discover but one, and that is wholly inapplicable to our case. The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems ...
— The Federalist Papers

... sensible remark. "In order to judge," said he, "of the truth or falsehood of such predictions, one ought to collect fifty of them. It would be found that they are almost always made up of the same phrases, which are sometimes inapplicable, and sometimes hit the mark. But the first are rarely mentioned, while the ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... for complaints (p. 250) of discrimination, and took corrective action.[9-54] Yet, as Nelson pointed out, such corrections, often in the form of "clarifying directives," were usually directed to specific commanders and tied to specific incidents and were ignored by other commanders as inapplicable to their own racial experiences.[9-55] Despite the existence of the racially separate Steward's Branch, the Navy's policy seemed so unassailable to the Chief of Naval Personnel that when his views on a congressional measure ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... lasted two nights,[23] without being very interesting. Sir George Grey made a brisk, dashing speech quite at the beginning, which was very effective, but when read, disappoints, as there does not seem a great deal in it. Last night Macaulay failed. He delivered an essay, not without merit, but inapplicable, and not the sort of thing that is wanted in such a debate. He had said he should not be of use to them, and he appears to have judged correctly. The Tories affected to treat his speech with contempt, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... as wholly inapplicable to the question, or at least as evasive of it, the case of petitions refused on account of disrespectful language towards the persons or the body petitioned. Those constitute a standing exception, independent of the ...
— Speech of Mr. Cushing, of Massachusetts, on the Right of Petition, • Caleb Cushing

... that his brain is to be classed with notable cases of arrested development. He has strong forces in his nature, but in their outlet through his mind they are dissipated into a confusing clutter of unrelated thoughts and inapplicable phrases. He seems to possess neither the power nor the perception of coherent thinking and logical arrangement. He does not appear to be aware that prepossessions are not proofs, that assertions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... This system is inapplicable in the case of domestic servants (Gesinde) who are a part of the household, and who afford to their masters, besides their services, the advantage of having a person at their disposal always about them, and whose wages are ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... ground only a few feet high. The town itself is surrounded by precipitous rocks, which really make it a natural fortress impregnable against attack. All that I urge against conquest in general is inapplicable here, and I say let England guard such spots. As long as she does she is mistress of the sea. Her influence at such points is always for good. The thirty thousand natives of Aden, for instance, may now be considered subjects of Britain by their own ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... system which we could simply transplant from some other country. The system adopted in Great Britain, where each county or group of counties maintains an agricultural college and an experimental farm, and many more elaborate systems on the continent, were all found on examination to be inapplicable to our own rural conditions, unsuitable to the national character, and unrelated to the history of our agriculture. Many of these schemes might have turned out a few highly qualified authorities on the theory of agriculture, and ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... arrangement, and he sees no solution except this—that the monopoly value should pass back to the community which creates it. Accordingly, he favours the taxation of site value to its full amount. Another element of monopoly arises from industries in which competition is inapplicable—the supply of gas and water, for example, a tramway service, and in some conditions a railway service. Here competition may be wasteful if not altogether impossible; and here again, on the lines of a strictly consistent individualism, if the industry ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... Desdemona?" asked the chaplain, a little tartly, by no means pleased at having his natural history startled by sounds so inapplicable to the subject. "How often have I told you that the Lord views with displeasure anything so violent and ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... a delighted sense of discovering the country,—"why, you read about them in Dickens!" Who shall say but that this instinctive association was an involuntary severe, but not inapplicable, criticism? A nightingale suggests Keats; a ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... would have gone at it differently, gone at it hammer and tongs. Cassy's methods were merely finer. That was the common sense view. But was it psychology? The common sense view that is applicable to the average individual is inapplicable to a problematic nature and, consequently, not to Cassy, who must therefore have had another incentive for her visit, an incentive stronger than the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... well if I can remember a little inapplicable Latin to adorn my maiden speech in Parliament six or seven years hence. 'Cras ingens iterabimus aequor,' and a few shreds of that sort, will perhaps stick to me, and I shall arrange my opinions so as to introduce them. But I don't think a knowledge of the classics is a ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... Christ, or for the breaking of bread, which customs both the Jewish and Gentile converts might have adopted. The custom, however, at which these irregularities took place, is called by St. Paul, the Lord's Supper. And this title was not inapplicable to it in either of the cases supposed, because it must have been, in either of them, in commemoration of the last supper, which Jesus Christ, or the Lord and Master, ate with his disciples ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... with a sunbeam on the past of Israel were illustrated there with a certainty and directness which belonged to it alone; but we shall make a bad use of the history of Israel, if we say, 'It is all miraculous, and therefore inapplicable to modern national life.' It would be much nearer the mark to say, 'It is all miraculous, and therefore meant as an exhibition for blind eyes of the eternal principles which govern the history of all nations.' It is as true in Britain to-day ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... oxygen and becomes barium dioxide (BaO{2}), and that this dioxide at a higher temperature is reconverted into free oxygen and baryta, the latter being ready for use again. For many years it was assumed, however, by chemists that this ideally simple reaction was inapplicable on a commercial scale, owing to the gradual loss of power to absorb oxygen which was always found to take place in the baryta after a certain number of operations. About eight years ago Messrs. A. & L. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... redundancy of superfluous demonstration. Examined in detail, this and much of the show of testimony brought up to stare the daylight of conviction out of countenance, proves to be in a great measure unmeaning and inapplicable, as might be easily shown were it necessary. Nor do I feel the necessity of enforcing the conclusion which arises spontaneously from the facts which have been enumerated by formally citing the opinions of those grave authorities who have for the last half-century been sounding ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... time to time advise the reconsideration by Members of the League of treaties which have become inapplicable and the consideration of international conditions whose continuance might endanger ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... times on governments originally unlimited and despotic. Our American questions, therefore, must be discussed, reasoned on, decided, and settled, on the appropriate principles of our own constitutions, and not by inapplicable precedents and loose analogies drawn from ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... petulantly disdainful of others when he has nothing but paradoxes with which to oppose their truisms. He has a trick of adopting the manner and expressions of Carlyle, in speaking of incidents and characters to which they are ludicrously inapplicable, and becomes flurried and flippant on occasions where Carlyle would put into the same words his whole scowling and scornful strength. He frequently mistakes sympathy with suffering for insight into its causes, and an eloquent statement of what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... battle, has the same subdivisions,—two extremities and the center. A direction upon one of these three will always be suitable for the attainment of the desired end. A direction upon one of the two remaining will be less advantageous; while the third direction will be wholly inapplicable. In considering the object proposed in connection with the positions of the enemy and the geography of the country, it will appear that in every strategic movement or tactical maneuver the question for decision will ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini

... was renewed. Mr. Toombs offered an amendment that the Constitution of the United States, and such statutes thereof as may not be locally inapplicable, and the common law, as it existed in the British colonies of America until July 4, 1776, shall be the exclusive laws of said Territory upon the subject of African slavery, until altered by the proper authority. This was ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... but I could do nothing but flounder; beating fiercely with limbs that were so powerful and yet so utterly useless. I saw that my very metaphors symbolised my feebleness; I had no terms for my own mental condition; I was forced to resort to some inapplicable physical analogy. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... speculation and licensing oppression. The mediaeval legislator chose the former alternative. Church and State together enacted a number of laws to restrain the taking of interest, laws that, like the clothes of infancy, are not to be scorned as absurd restrictions, merely because they are inapplicable now, and would not fit the modern growth of nations. At this day the State has repealed those laws, and the Church has officially signified that she no longer insists on them. Still she maintains dogmatically that there is such a sin as usury, and what it is, as defined ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... remain unused; and of this, every friend of the young ought to be convinced. Our health, our food, and our general happiness depend, not on knowledge received, but on knowledge applied; and therefore, to teach knowledge that is inapplicable or useless, or to teach useful knowledge without teaching at the same time how it may be put to use by the pupil, is neither reasonable nor just. Hence the importance of our present investigation; and hence we have no hesitation in saying, that the enquiry, "How ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... Mr. John Morley in 1886. A word in it here or there is inapplicable to the details of the present Bill; but in principle every syllable cited by me from his Newcastle address forms part of the Unionist argument against summoning as much as a single Irish member ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... grounds: first, that by the law of nations the confiscation of private debts was justifiable; second, that, as the debt had by the law of Virginia been extinguished by its payment into the State treasury, and had thus ceased to be due, the stipulation of the treaty was inapplicable, since there could be no creditor without a debtor. It is not strange that this argument was unsuccessful. While it doubtless was the best that the cause admitted of, it may perhaps serve a useful purpose as an illustration of the right of the suitor to have ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... nature and the Light (the higher reason and spiritual life) of man. Nor (b) is it the same thing as to say that the desires of the animal nature are selfish. For selfishness is a moral term and, as we have seen, moral attributes are inapplicable except to a wrong ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... to 2, appeared to his eye to be identical with that of Jupiter's and Saturn's orbits. Hence he was led to compare the orbits of the other planets' circles described in pentagons and hexagons. As this hypothesis was as inapplicable to the heavens as its predecessors, Kepler asked himself in despair, "What have plane figures to do with solid orbits? Solid bodies ought to be used for solid orbits." On the strength of this conceit, he supposed that ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... this depression" (loc. cit., page 327).) believe that the main part of his great denudation was effected during a vast (almost gratuitously assumed) slow Tertiary subsidence and subsequent Tertiary oscillating slow elevation. So our high cliff argument is inapplicable. He seems to think his great subsidence only FAVOURABLE for great denudation. I believe from the general nature of the off-shore sea's bottoms that it is almost necessary; do look at two pages—page 25 of my S. American volume—on this subject. (482/3. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... originating in custom and moral justice, and records of judgments based upon "the precedents and commentaries", in the sort of cases common to agricultural communities of the time, many of the provisions being as inapplicable to modern life as modern laws would be to ancient life. A reader is impressed by the extraordinary number and variety of cases with their still more numerous details and circumstances accumulated in the course of long ages, the manner in which the laws are inextricably ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... in which I contemplated my duty required that I should renounce every pecuniary compensation. From this resolution I have in no instance departed, and being still under the impressions which produced it, I must decline as inapplicable to myself any share in the personal emoluments which may be indispensably included in a permanent provision for the executive department, and must accordingly pray that the pecuniary estimates for the station in which I am ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various

... discrepancy. It will be recollected that the essence of the process consists of the comparison of the small ellipse made by the distant star with the larger ellipse made by the nearer star. If the two stars were at the same distance, the process would be wholly inapplicable. In such a case, no matter how near the stars were to the earth, no parallax could be detected. For the method to be completely successful, the comparison star should be at least eight times as far as the principal star. Bearing this in ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... drawn from the courts of law, applying the principles of law to new cases as they emerge, is altogether frivolous, inapplicable, and arises from a total ignorance of the bounds between civil and criminal jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims that govern these two provinces of law, that are eternally separate. Undoubtedly the courts of law, where a new case comes before them, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... endurance. The reader might probably suppose that she was what is commonly known as a strong-minded woman. The epithet would suit her if seriously applied, for she had undoubtedly a clear, strong intellect, a cool judgment, and a resolute purpose; but it would be thoroughly inapplicable in the satirical sense in which it is commonly used. There was nothing masculine about her. On the contrary, she was so reserved and so unassuming that it required an intimate knowledge of her to fathom the depths of her acquirements and experience. "In her whole appearance and manner," ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous

... that Article 14 could not apply to anything more warlike than "merchandise" being transported from Pungwe Bay, where Beira is situated, to the British sphere of influence. It is admitted by Mr. Baty that Article 12 is inapplicable to any routes other than the water-ways specified and the land routes and portages auxiliary to them. It is also admitted that the only other stipulation that might apply, Article II, "obviously applies to the territory far to the north, and concerns the question ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... until they have unsettled everybody's faith in that history. No one now pretends, seriously, to believe anything that is told of the Romans farther back than the time of Pyrrhus. Clouds and darkness rest over the earlier centuries, and defy penetration. What Sir Thomas Browne says of Egypt is not inapplicable to early Rome. History mumbleth something to the inquirer, "but what it is he heareth not." Not even the story of Curtius now finds believers. He must have been a contractor, who made an enormous fortune at the time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... supposed the appellation inapplicable to a gentleman!" answered Sercombe, with entire coolness. "But by all means take me before ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... delegates to support the General as a candidate for the nomination and endeavored to forestall opposition to a third term. It declared that the objection to a third presidential term applied only to a third consecutive term and hence was inapplicable to the re-election of Grant. Grant, meanwhile, presented a spectacle that was at once humorous and pathetic. He had not expected, on leaving the presidency, to return to power again, had dropped consideration of the political future and had given ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... the advocate remarked, with a thrust at the public prosecutor, that "the brilliant observations of that gentleman on heredity, while explaining scientific facts concerning heredity, were inapplicable in this case, as Botchkova was of unknown parentage." The public prosecutor put something down on paper with an angry look, and shrugged his shoulders in ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... which grew steadily more boisterous, Lord would have called an orgy under other circumstances. The word did occur to him, but it seemed fantastically inapplicable. Normally the behavior of his men would have demanded the severest kind of disciplinary action. But here the old code of rules simply didn't apply and he didn't interfere ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox

... scandalous knave. A man of my standing in the world, to be robbing little children of their clothes! Ridiculous!" But while he spoke, Memory had searched her fatal volume, and found a page, which, with her sad, calm voice, she poured into his ear. It was not altogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith had been grievously tempted, by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan children, joint heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quite decided, his claims had turned ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to denote all involuntary emissions of semen, whether nocturnal or diurnal; and, secondly, to denote involuntary sexual orgasm in the female as well as in the male. In the case of the female, the term "seminal emission" is inapplicable; but the term "pollution" may be applied in English (as it is in German) to such phenomena in either sex. By American writers the term "pollution" is now generally used (e.g., Allen, "Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs," Twentieth Century Practice, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... Government unhesitatingly applied the doctrine of "continuous voyage," seizing and condemning neutral ships even when bound from England to Bermuda or the Bahamas, if their cargo was ultimately destined for Southern ports. The doctrine was declared inapplicable when the last leg of the journey was by land,[1] doubtless because there was little danger of heavy traffic across the Mexican frontier. Blockade runners continued to pour goods into the South until the fall of Fort Fisher ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... warning for others; but eternal punishment precludes the idea of amendment, and its infliction, after the day of judgment, when all not so punished shall be divinely secured from the possibility of falling, renders the notion of warning to others inapplicable. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too much on the stretch, and his manner has little variety. We cannot rest upon, any of his works, though they contain observations which occasionally discover a considerable insight into human nature. But his doctrines, on the whole, are so inapplicable to real life and manners, that we never dream of drawing from them any rule for laws or conduct, or for fortifying or illustrating anything by a reference to his opinions. They have with us ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... under the constitution and laws of Louisiana, except so much of the said constitution and laws as recognize, regulate, or relate to slavery; which, being inconsistent with the present condition of public affairs, and plainly inapplicable to any class of persons now existing within its limits, must be suspended, and they are therefore and hereby declared to be inoperative ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... regard to the definition of the word right. "The chancellor, in his reply," says the bishop in his memoirs, "boldly asserted that he perfectly well remembered the passage I had quoted from Grotius, and that it solely respected natural, but was inapplicable to civil, rights. Lord Loughborough, the first time I saw him after the debate, assured me that before he went to sleep that night he had looked into Grotius, and was astonished to find that the chancellor, in contradicting me, had presumed on the ignorance of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... and entangles all his relations to rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were always unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always intrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of "the survival of the fittest," meaning only the survival of the survivors; or wherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country," as ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... have no rotatory or orbital motion of its own; because, so long as it has a rotatory motion on its axis, or an orbital motion of its own through space, so long will even the first part of Newton's First Law of Motion be inapplicable to ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... attention. But as a rule, the absence of a social environment in connection with which learning is a need and a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of the school; and this isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to life and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... Spiders kept for silk must, therefore, be each in separate dens or cells; and the apparatus contrived by Mr. Rolt for this purpose, although very ingenious and well adapted to carry on a course of experiments with a hundred or two, would manifestly be wholly inapplicable to any purpose of commercial utility. Mr Rolt has, however, made some interesting additions to the history of the garden spider, and has obtained the silk in its natural state, exhibiting all its peculiar lustre; his method, likewise, of winding the silk directly from the animal is, to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various

... common view of Time is a false one, being really a hybrid conception, a spurious concept due to the illicit introduction of the idea of space, and to our application of the notion of space, which is applicable to physical objects, to states of consciousness, to which it is really inapplicable. Objects occupying space are marked out as external to one another, but this cannot be said of conscious states. Yet, in our ordinary speech and conventional view of things, we think of conscious states as separated from one ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... proportion of cases they are no doubt the progeny of persons belonging to the higher grade of distinctly degenerate stock—persons who have not themselves necessarily shown any marked traits of instability or degeneracy, and to whom therefore sterilization or segregation would be inapplicable. ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews

... applied after exposure to infection. This is called "early treatment." This term is inapplicable, as a disease cannot be treated before it exists. It is also likely to be confused with "abortive treatment," which implies treatment immediately on the ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health

... according to the words of an early author, not merely knight or burgess of the county or borough which elected him, but knight or burgess of England.[18] If these two principles are not entirely inapplicable to our political system, then the seat of Andrew Johnson was not in any respect affected by the subsequent madness of his State, nor can the legality of his seat be any argument for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... place, the considerations which would naturally guide an author of established reputation in the selection of early compositions for subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to the preparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works. Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' have long survived the age when character is influenced by the literature of sentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... which he gives in his Almagestum Novum. Sir G. B. Airy, having had his attention called to the matter, examined roughly all the eclipses which occurred during a period of 40 years, covering the supposed date implied by Xenophon. Having selected two, he computed them accurately but found them inapplicable. He then tried another (May 19, 557 B.C.) which he had previously passed over because he doubted its totality, and he had the great satisfaction of finding that the eclipse, though giving a small shadow, had been total, and that it had passed so near to Nimrud ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... (that is, he drops all particulari- ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... Christian's heart; for it is essential to a Christian to allow of prayer. He cannot be a Christian if he should condemn prayer; and prayer cannot hope to produce its object without a miracle. And to such miracles Hume's argument, the argument of incommunicability, is inapplicable. They do not seek to transplant themselves; every man's personal experience in this respect ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... affair is Society. At its outposts are flaming swords for women, though invisible to other eyes; men can venture without the lines, if they only return at roll-call. Let a woman receive or visit one of the demi-monde, (the technical use of the word is happily inapplicable here,) and she might as well earn her living by her own labor, or do any other disreputable thing; but her brother may pay court to the most doubtful, and mothers will only shake their heads and say, "He must sow his wild oats; he'll ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... Dicey of the Commentaries, "is the hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone's habit—common to all the lawyers of his time—of applying old and inapplicable terms to new institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon which the whole vicious theory ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... in practice extremely complex. For this reason, within the last twenty-five years there have, we believe, been as many patents taken out to simplify and hasten the operation. Without exception, these have been proved to be altogether inapplicable. Let us see how ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various

... evidently inapplicable to the first of these cases, which appears to have belonged more properly to the genus Convulsio, of Cullen, or to ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson

... of these essays has been to prove that even now, in the greatest armed conflict of the world, the term 'Christendom' is not inapplicable to Europe. There is a real unity in Western civilization—a unity due in large measure to the influence of religious faith and organization. The mediaeval Church gave the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe, and the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire, their first momentous introduction into ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... suggest. They have, however, the recommendation of experience, to which, in general, more regard is properly enough shewn, than can be expected towards arguments drawn from merely abstract opinions, too often so remote from the common track of life as to be quite inapplicable to the diversities and complicated relations of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... think there is a peculiar seat proper to many different styles of riding. The extremes of these are the manege and the Eastern styles, both admirable in their way, and perfectly practical, but each wholly inapplicable to the performances of ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... voice-training, voice-development, etc., have been avoided in treating the subject of children's voices, because of possible misapprehension of their intended meaning. The terms are not, of course, inapplicable to children's voices, but they must convey quite a different significance than they do when applied to the adult voice. In each case, the end of voice-culture is the formation of correct vocal habits; but it would seem, that while it is possible to develop the adult ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard

... federalists to power was, in my opinion, one of the most fortunate incidents which accompanied the formation of the great American Union: they resisted the inevitable propensities of their age and of their country. But whether their theories were good or bad, they had the defect of being inapplicable, as a system, to the society which they professed to govern; and that which occurred under the auspices of Jefferson must therefore have taken place sooner or later. But their government gave the new republic time to acquire a certain stability, and afterward to support the rapid growth of ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al



Words linked to "Inapplicable" :   inapplicability, irrelevant, unsuitable



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