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Inapplicable   Listen
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



... Mill has pointed out, in his Representative Government, several social conditions when representative government is inapplicable ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga

... each line of 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 ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini

... 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 ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... 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 ran down to meet me and assured me she had not laughed so much since she ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... of providing for a distinct service, either of charity, of worship, or of instruction. Let the administrators be changed, if necessary, also the apportionment of the legacy bequeathed, but do not divert any of it to services of an alien character; it is inapplicable to any but that purpose or to others strictly analogous. The four milliards of investment in real property, the two hundred millions of ecclesiastical income, form for it an express and special endowment. This is not a pile of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... the restoration of king Charles the Second, and the name not being inapplicable to our present situation (for we were restored to fresh life and strength), I named this Restoration Island; for I thought it probable that captain Cook might not have taken notice of it. The other names I have presumed ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh

... little book is become rather scarce, and is replete with so much good sense and genuine humour, which, though in part adapted to the times when it first appeared, seems, on the whole, by no means inapplicable to any aera of mankind, the editor conceives that there needs little apology for the republication. A farther inducement is, his having, from very good authority, lately discovered[AO] that these Characters (hitherto known only under the title of Blount's[AP]), were actually ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle

... 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 placed may during ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by simply signing his name to a cheque, ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot

... methods are inapplicable because we cannot try experiments in social matters. I remember being long ago struck by a remark of Dr. Arnold, which has some bearing upon this assertion. He observed upon the great advantage possessed ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... classes 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 unhappily ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... appears very extraordinary that nothing but the actual proof of a general abuse could affect a practice the very principle of which tends to make the coercion as general as the trade. Mr. Hurst's reflection concerning the abuse of authority is just, but in this case it is altogether inapplicable; because the complaint was not of the abuse, but of the use of authority in matters of trade, which ought to have been free. He throws out a variety of invidious reflections against the Council, as if they wanted zeal for the Company's service; his justification ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... his right hand), I 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 ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... 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 ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... embodies this belief so far as our common activities go, give a general framework and direction how a man or woman should live. (I do throughout all this book mean man or woman equally when I write of "man," unless it is manifestly inapplicable.) ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... overlaps the widest range of doubt, and doubles upon itself in the 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 unwelcome ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... books and words and discussion of normal instances, instead of by collection and observation of the unusual and irregular, and by experimental production of variety. If we think of a subject still in this infantile and almost pre-scientific stage, Bacon's words and formulae are far from inapplicable; they are, within their limitations, quite necessary and wholesome. A subject in this stage, strange to say, exists,—psychology; now hesitatingly beginning to assume its experimental weapons amid a stifling atmosphere of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... the latest rule of law. Consequently the historical materials contained in them, though always of great importance for discovering the latest law, have not binding force. IV. Those precepts of the Roman law which relate to Roman manners and institutions unknown in Germany are inapplicable here, though glossed. V. The Roman law has but slight application to such objects and transactions as were unknown to the Romans and are of purely Germanic origin. VI. With the limitations above enumerated the Roman law has been adopted ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... Shaking Palsy is 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

... 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 warrant ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... sectional contest 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 rejected by the House. On September 6 the Texas and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... made Jerusalem's acquaintance in Leipzig. Jerusalem called Goethe a Geck, a coxcomb, a description which, as we have seen, was not inapplicable to him in his Leipzig days. Jerusalem was a friend of Lessing, who highly esteemed him, and after ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... he maintained. "They get out of date. And there are, besides, exceptional characters that do not come under the common law of humanity; exceptional temperaments, and exceptional circumstances to which common principles are inapplicable, or for which they ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... received from my colleague, San Giuliano, the following telegram: 'Austria has communicated to us and to Germany her intention to act against Serbia, and defines such action as defensive, hoping to apply the casus foederis of the Triple Alliance, which I consider inapplicable. I intend to join forces with Germany to prevent any such action by Austria, but it will be necessary to say clearly that we do not consider such eventual action as defensive, and therefore do not believe that the casus foederis exists. ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson

... Liebig infers that they are INDIVISIBLE (p. 58). What logic! Weight is only force, that is, a thing hidden from the senses, whose phenomena alone are perceptible,—a thing, consequently, to which the idea of division and indivision is inapplicable; and from the presence of this force, from the hypothesis of an indeterminate and immaterial entity, is inferred an ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... 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 get ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... specific directions for making soups of fragments, as the remnants to be utilized will vary so much in character as to make such inapplicable, but the recipes given for combination soups will perhaps serve as an aid in this direction. Where a sufficient amount of one kind of food is left over to form the basis of a soup or to serve as a seasoning, it can be used in every way the same ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... one of really general interest, since the hypothesis of fraud is entirely inapplicable to it, and in the opinion of the most sceptical critics who have made an adequate study of the case, no explanation more commonplace than that of telepathy will bear examination. Other critics—and these are they who have gone into the matter most thoroughly—find the hypothesis of telepathy ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... of 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... 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 for state purposes and thus to separate responsibility ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... "gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York criterion inapplicable to them. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... phrase, by which the Borderers jocularly intimated the burning a house. When the Maxwells, in 1685, burned the castle of Lochwood, they said they did so to give the Lady Johnstone "light to set her hood." Nor was the phrase inapplicable; for, in a letter, to which I have mislaid the reference, the Earl of Northumberland writes to the King and Council, that he dressed himself at midnight, at Warkworth, by the blaze of the neighbouring villages burned by ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... till I am done with Jourdan." Reasonings like these are strictly general in their bearing, liable to refutation by the special circumstances controlling a particular action; and it may perfectly well be that considerations of urgency, amounting even to impossibility, make them inapplicable to the case before us. Nevertheless, it can scarcely fail that, till such special considerations are known, and their validity admitted, it is to this point that military scrutiny and inquiry will be ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan

... finer kinds of alabaster are largely employed as an ornamental 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 by calcination into plaster of Paris, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... developing magnetism in soft iron were imperfectly understood. The electro-magnet made by Sturgeon, and copied by Dana, of New York, was an imperfect quantity magnet, the feeble power of which was developed by a single battery. It was entirely inapplicable to a long circuit with an intensity battery, and no person possessing the requisite scientific knowledge, would have attempted to use it in that ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... 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 ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... longitudes, then a question of much importance. He brought with him 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 Frenchman after this; but was told that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... system of national banks. It will show that the feature of the earlier banks which evoked such serious opposition and ultimately destroyed them is not to be found in the present system and could not be incorporated in it. It was from the first inapplicable and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... supplied, a point is soon reached at which it is impossible to continue to find purchasers. The dry earth system is applicable to separate houses, or to institutions where much attention can be given to it, but it is inapplicable to large towns from the practical difficulties connected with procuring, carting, and storing the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... discovered uses for cavalry, or rather mounted infantry, to which that arm was never applied before. While other cavalry officers were adhering to the traditions of former wars, and the systems of the schools, however inapplicable to the demands of their day and the nature of the struggle, he originated and perfected, not only a system of tactics, a method of fighting and handling men in the presence of the enemy, but also a strategy as effective as it ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... misprints have been corrected for this electronic edition: Patient carrier of towel and comb,[2] —as printed, cited footnote 1, which is inapplicable ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various

... how the argument stands. The laws of phenomena belong exclusively to the phenomenal world. Their application and their validity are restricted to the world of phenomena. When we leave this region we are in a sphere to which they are quite inapplicable. What, then, can be meant by speaking of God as a "First Cause"? Cause is a phenomenal term, it expresses the relations between phenomena, and it has no meaning when applied to this assumed and unknown reality. We are in the position of one who is trying to use a colour scale in a world where ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... undertaken, an immense and fruitless expenditure has been incurred by sending out machinery, which could be of no earthly use—by despising the native processes, and substituting others that have been found wholly inapplicable—and by introducing British labourers, who when abroad reverse all the good qualities for which they are valuable at home. A reform in this system we believe to have been generally adopted, and we are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various

... credit the statement in the Newsletter because he believed the 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 ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... the score of coarse or vulgar expressions; and his better judgment would have recoiled from the use of so offensive a word as "bug." 2ndly. Because, as already stated, the terms "sipp'd" and "industrious" are inapplicable to a bug. Of the bug it may be said, that it "sucks" and "plunders;" but it cannot, with any propriety, be predicated of it, as of the bee, that it "sips" and is "industrious." My impression is, that when Pope found he was doing too much honour to Tibbald by comparing him to a bee, he substituted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various

... 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 appearance ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health

... upon 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 ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... 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, and lastly to the elevated dignity of calm suffering, joined ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... 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 ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... night is a phenomenon of considerable interest, and one which had been observed even by the ancients. In crowded cities or in their vicinity, the effect was generally ascribed to the rest of animated beings, while in localities where such an explanation was inapplicable, it was supposed to arise from a favourable direction of the prevailing wind. Baron Humboldt was particularly struck with this phenomenon when he first heard the rushing of the great cataracts of the Orinoco in the plain which surrounds the mission of the Apures. These ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various

... indeed, some learned casuists, who maintain that love has no language, and that all the misunderstandings and dissensions of lovers arise from the fatal habit of employing words on a subject to which words are inapplicable; that love, beginning with looks, that is to say, with the physiognomical expression of congenial mental dispositions, tends through a regular gradation of signs and symbols of affection, to that consummation which is most devoutly to be wished; and that it neither is necessary that ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock

... unrelated; arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c. 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not to the, purpose; impertinent, inapposite, beside the mark, a propos de bottes[Fr]; aside from the purpose,, away from the purpose,, foreign to the purpose, beside the purpose, beside the question, beside the transaction, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... an old story—none the worse for being true—regarding a fine young Irish gentleman, who being asked if he could play the fiddle, replied he had no doubt he could, but he couldn't exactly say, for certain, because he had never tried. This is not inapplicable to my uncle and his fencing. He had never had a sword in his hand before, except once when he played Richard the Third at a private theatre, upon which occasion it was arranged with Richmond that he was to be run through, from behind, without showing fight at all. But here he was, cutting ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... to health and against liability for tort are made as in the case of cattle, leaving out whatever is inapplicable to dogs. Some make a price on dogs at so much per head, others stipulate that the puppies shall go with the mother, others that two puppies shall count as one dog—as two lambs usually count as a sheep. Usually it is provided that all the dogs which ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... rush to escape the 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... The spur is 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, in which case the knee would ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... 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 ingenuously, the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... 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 of checks and balances ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... intelligence of the animal itself—determining its own variation, is so evidently a very partial theory, inapplicable to the whole vegetable kingdom, and almost so to all the lower forms of animals, amongst which, nevertheless, there is the very same adaptation and co-ordination of parts and functions as among the highest, that it ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... the experimental branches of what had previously been called natural history and the observational branches—those in which experiment was (or appeared to be) of doubtful use, and where, at that time, mathematical methods were inapplicable. Under these circumstances the old name of "Natural History" stuck by the residuum, by those phenomena which were not, at that time, susceptible of mathematical or experimental treatment; that is to say, those phenomena of nature which come now under the general heads of ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley

... 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 ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... 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

... 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 ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox

... 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

... And, secondly, though the Greeks may not have enunciated the principle, that poetry is not the art suited for picturing nature, still they probably had an instinctive feeling of its truth. Poetry, as Lessing pointed out in his Laocoon, has the element of time in it, and is therefore inapplicable in the description of those things which, while composed of various parts, must be comprehended at one glance before the right impression is produced. Look how our modern poet goes to work! He has a fair scene before his fancy. He paints ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... and opening a door to the most radical disbelief. The attack scarcely deserved Tillotson's somewhat lengthy defence. He had but re-stated what many before him had observed as to the exceptional character of demonstrative evidence, and the folly of expecting it where it is plainly inapplicable. A religious mind, itself thoroughly convinced, may chafe against possibility of doubt, but may as well complain against the conditions of human nature. Yet the controversy on this point between Tillotson and his opponents ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... interesting conclusions with regard to them; one conclusion long since fixed in Mr. Tymperley's mind was that the 'suffering' of those classes is very much exaggerated by outsiders using a criterion quite inapplicable. He saw around him a world of coarse jollity, of contented labour, and of brutal apathy. It seemed to him more than probable that the only person in this street conscious of poverty, and suffering under ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... circumstances, time and experience, would teach him something new, and apprize him that of those things with which he thought himself the best acquainted, he knew nothing; and that those ideas, which in theory appeared the most advantageous, were found, when brought into practice, to be altogether inapplicable. —TERENCE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... relevant, pertinent, apposite, germane, appropriate, befitting. Antonyms: inapplicable, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... college, Balliol; and my dear guardian expected me to come out in honors, and be a Fellow of my college and a clergyman. That was her plan; and a very good scheme of life it was, but it had one defect, that of being entirely inapplicable to the human being for whom it was intended. I looked forward to Oxford with anything but pleasure, and, indeed, considered that there was an insuperable obstacle to my going there. In those days most of the good things in life were kept as much as possible for ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... They float on the stream of society mere automatons in the great hand of the world. They do not direct their own Education as though they had any object in life. They seem to lay helpless in the hands of the world, the pets or playthings of the day. These remarks are not very inapplicable to young men also. There is a great body of young men who float on the stream of life with no self-direction. Ask one of them what he lives for, and he will tell you, "to chew tobacco, swear, be a man;" and his idea of being a man is to be able to do these ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... very much resemble a bull terrier. The adults are called bulls and cows, while, curiously enough, in the sealers' phrase, the offspring are referred to as pups. The places where large numbers of them gather together during the breeding season are known as rookeries! "Rookery" appears to me to be inapplicable to a herd of sea elephants, though "pup" supplies a more apt description of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... bearing the very inapplicable name of Virtue was brought up at Lambeth-street last week, on the charge of having stolen a telescope from the Ordnance-office in the Tower on the morning of the fire. The prisoner pleaded that, being short-sighted, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... difficulty with most systems for distributing the books in a library appears to lie in the attempt to apply scientific minuteness in a region where it is largely inapplicable. One can divide and sub-divide the literature of any science indefinitely, in a list of subjects, but such exhaustive sub-divisions can never be made among the books on the shelves. Here, for example, is a "Treatise on diseases ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... process of faith beginning with the crude transference of the elements of the present into the future, continuing with refined modifications of that transference, ending with an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent. Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientific data within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which we know, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head and silent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... still hangs on his tongue 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," ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... 145, "If any thing needs be added, the following observation is important, viz. that there is one passage so clearly inapplicable to the Jewish nation, and so totally incongruous with the rest of the interpretation, that Mr. English passes it over without even the attempt of an explanation. It is this: in a part of the prophecy which he ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... complaint on the part of Constantinople beginning with the occupation of Lilybaeum and ending with the murder of Amalasuentha. I fear that the nattering portrait drawn of 'the Amal' can apply to no one but Theodahad, the terms used being hopelessly inapplicable to a boy like Athalaric. Who then are 'our lords' ('nostri Domini'), in whose name peace is besought. The best that we can hope, for the sake of the reputation of Cassiodorus, is that they are Amalasuentha and Theodahad, the letter being written between October 2, 534 ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... generally these: first that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... blue, has also a very general sense, and may mean merely pale or fresh, yet as we find decided colours attributed to mead elsewhere in the poem, such as "melyn," (yellow) and "gwyn" (white) we have thought proper to retain the literal acceptation in this place, as a poetical variety, however inapplicable to the beverage ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... explaining the cause of his signing the will 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 ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... origin. The rules of evidence current in our 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, ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... 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 ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... I said, intellectualism's edge is broken; it can only approximate to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our inner life, which spurns its vetoes and mocks at its impossibilities. Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... we hinted, a third plan, ardently favored by Belleisle, whose war-talent Friedrich much respected at this time: plan built on Belleisle's reminiscences of the old Tabor-Budweis businesses, and totally inapplicable now. Belleisle said, "Go southeast, not southwest; right towards the Austrian Frontier itself; that will frighten Austria into a fine tremor. Shut up the roads from Austria: Budweis, Neuhaus; seize those two Highroad Towns, and keep them, if you would hold Bohemia; the want of them ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... judges"—and there the divine judgment is to be executed upon them. [Footnote 1: Some regard the locusts as an allegorical designation for an invading army. But without reason: in ii. 7 they are compared to warriors, and the effect of their devastations is described in terms inapplicable to an army.] [Footnote 2: The sequel, in which the nations are the objects of divine wrath, shows that the "all flesh," ii. 28, ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... 1907. No great change in policy was effected by this law which, for the most part, only revised the wording of the old laws and modified the methods of regulation. The head tax of two dollars, hitherto levied on each alien, was doubled but was made inapplicable to immigrants from our insular possessions or to aliens who had resided for a year either in the British possessions in North America, or in Cuba or Mexico. All aliens suffering from tuberculosis or loathsome diseases or those who were "mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... 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 it is ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... along the west side, the side nearly always travelled, as it is more sheltered from the prevailing southerly winds. The term "Mud Lake" is, however, not applicable to this lake, as only a comparatively small part of it is shallow or muddy; and it is nearly as inapplicable to Marsh Lake, as the latter is not markedly muddy along the west side, and from the appearance of the east shore one would not judge it to be so, as the banks appear to ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue

... intended to imply that there is no other way in which the change to the male line may have been brought about among other peoples. The explanation just given applies very well to the Aryan and Semitic peoples, but it is inapplicable to the state of things which seems to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Discovery.[69] The subject is a difficult one, and sometimes confronts us with questions much easier to ask than to answer. The change has been observed among tribes in ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... term, which have the same matter, must exhaust the universe between them, e.g. 'white' and 'not-white,' since, according to the law of excluded middle, everything must be either one or the other. To say, however, that a thing is 'not-white' is merely to say that the term 'white' is inapplicable to it. 'Not-white' may be predicated of things which do not possess extension as well as of those which do. Such a pair of terms as 'white' and 'not-white,' in their relation to ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... me just as teleologic and divinatory as those I have previously named. It assumes Evolution as a law of the universe, whereas in natural science it is only a limited generalization, inapplicable to most series of natural events, and therefore of uncertain continuance in any series. The optimism which it inculcates is insecure and belongs to deductive, not inductive, reasoning. The mechanical theory on which it is ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton

... become a great World Power we must become a corresponding War Power. We are assured by high authority that, were Washington now alive, it cannot be questioned he would in all these respects modify materially the views expressed in the Farewell Address, as being obviously inapplicable to existing conditions. Under these circumstances, and in view of the obligations we have assumed, the President, and Secretaries of War and the Navy, recommend an establishment the annual cost of which ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams

... 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

... for the Hall. Hence the scene! El Libertado steps out of the Gothic Chamber "forth" into the "gallery," and lo! "a monk in cowl and beads." But, Quien sabe? The Psalmist's caution with regard to princes is not inapplicable to poets.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... passage from Grotius, with 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... contending Parliamentarians across the 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

... 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 to the fall of Adam. The law here was ordained to life, and the ordinance ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... obvious 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 ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... written this when the Rump was sitting, and when he 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

... have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a Gott trunkner Mann—a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... of issues. They supported motions for the 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 for using the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of A Camel-driver; her driver, if ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... whenever limited at all, by reason of restraints imposed at different 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 ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... 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, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... to him, and he murmured them to himself. It was to Dolores that he applied them, and naturally too; for how ridiculously inapplicable to Katie would they be! All else was now forgotten except Dolores. He felt a longing after her that was like homesickness. The past all came back. He recalled her as she had been when he first met her at Valencia. A thousand ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... series of inductively 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

... described round it; and the ratio of these circles, which was that of 1 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 distances of the planets were regulated by the sizes of ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... government of the State, 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 ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... prefer to translate the 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, since the middle of the fifteenth century, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien

... 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, ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... poetic 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 I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... Trant, don't use such a word—Georgiana!—Why will you be so warm, so very unguarded, where that darling brother is concerned? You really—Oh! my dear Lady Trant, this must not go farther—and positively the word jilt must never be used again; for I'm confident it is quite inapplicable." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... 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

... interval Mr. Telford was consulted as to the construction of a bridge over Runcorn Gap on the Mersey, above Liverpool. As the river was there about 1200 feet wide, and much used for purposes of navigation, a bridge of the ordinary construction was found inapplicable. But as he was required to furnish a plan of the most suitable structure, he proceeded to consider how the difficulties of the case were to be met. The only practicable plan, he thought, was a bridge constructed on the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... expensively clad. I say less expensively clad, though the expression is scarcely just, for I had never seen her in attire that could properly be called expensive at all; and, yet, the term mean would be equally inapplicable to her present appearance. It might be better to say that, relieved by a faultless, even a fastidious neatness and grace, there was an air of severe, perhaps of pinched economy in her present attire. This it was that ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... understand the same "elect servant" all along. He is many times called Israel, and is often addressed in a tone quite inapplicable to Messiah, viz. as one needing salvation himself; so in ch. xliii. Yet in ch. xlix. this elect Israel is distinguished from Jacob and Israel at large: thus there is an entanglement. Who can be called on to risk his eternal hopes on his skilful unknotting of it? It appeared however to me most ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... 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 ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... I could have expected to reach by a dry systematic treatment. In the second place, I wished, by means of the concrete form thus given to a part of my abstractions, to refute by anticipation the criticism that those abstractions, though correct in thesi, were nevertheless inapplicable in praxi. Whether I have succeeded in these two objects remains ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... altogether of goodness, a profane religion, in spite of its poetic fervours? There were "flowers of evil," among the rest. It came in part, avowedly, as a kind of consecration of evil, and seemed to give it the beauty of holiness. Rather, good and evil were distinctions inapplicable in proportion as these new interests made themselves felt. For a moment, amid casuistical questions as to one's indefeasible right to liberty of heart, he saw himself, somewhat [72] wearily, very far gone from the choice, the consecration, of his boyhood. If he could but be ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... laws of the United States which are locally inapplicable, shall have the same force and effect within the said Territory of Kansas as elsewhere within the United States, except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March sixth, eighteen hundred ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... to General D. S. Stanley upon his being sent to Pulaski, and his subsequent orders to me, dated November 19, to fight the enemy at Pulaski if he advanced against that place, were, as shown in the following despatch from me, quite inapplicable ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... matter of national defence as is the protection of New York Harbor. Take this as the political meaning of the phrase "a navy for defence only," and naval men, I think, must admit that it is no longer inapplicable as a military phrase, but expresses adequately the naval needs of the nation. But no military student can consider efficient a force so limited, in quantity or in quality, that it must await attack before it ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan

... on capitally! Just been writing to all the papers to say that it is stupid to call you "Old Dot-and-go-one," because it is inapplicable to either your age or your mode ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various

... in 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,—human and divine. We plead ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... young woman 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 primitive ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... 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 of the secession of the plebs, and ruined himself by the operation. So ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... decidedly of their utility. Has then this ingenious contrivance been considered with reference to the protection of the Great Exhibition and its valuable, or rather invaluable, contents? or why is it deemed inapplicable to the purpose? ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various

... loving rebuke has its end and does its work, but I fear that wit, while rousing the admiration of the spiteful or the like witty, comes in only to destroy its dignity. At the same time, I am not sure whether there might not be such a judicious combination of the elements as to render my remarks inapplicable. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... 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 ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... ignorant, the notice of the intelligent, and the speculation of the learned. Things are presented to our view, in a variety of forms, which must have been the result of great labour and cost, and which appear utterly useless and inapplicable to any ostensibly known purpose. Respecting many of these mysterious records of a past age, page after page has been written to prove, and even disprove, the supposed intent of their constructors; and ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... then be asked, 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 simple ...
— 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

... 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, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... successions of causes. The consequence was very obvious. The system of the theorist, disencumbered from all regard to the real nature of things, easily assumed an air of speciousness. It required little dexterity to make his argument appear conclusive. But all men agreed that it was utterly inapplicable to human affairs. The theorist railed at the folly of the world, instead of confessing his own; and the men of practice unjustly blamed philosophy, instead of condemning the sophist. The causes which the politician has ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh

... therefore have cost him much to renounce the flattering hope of seeing his grandson make practical application of the lofty instructions in which his personal royalty reflected itself with so much splendour; but such a prince as he knew but too well that a political idea is valueless when it remains inapplicable. Impressed with the sorrowful conviction, he was compelled to recognise that Philip's ailing temperament rendered all equilibrium between intelligence and will impossible, so far so that that unhappy Prince could not elude his fate save by escaping from himself. In the approaching ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... forth over the whole heavens and said that God is one, [88] that that which is one is God." The favourite antitheses of his time, the definite and the indefinite, movable and immovable, change-producing and by change produced—these and such as these, he maintained, were inapplicable to the eternally and [86] essentially existent. In this there was no partition of organs or faculties, no variation or shadow of turning; the Eternal Being was like a sphere, everywhere equal; ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... him, not with the scorn or loathing a man of position would have felt, even when taking advantage of it, but with a terrible, gnawing jealousy. Probably, he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he was in love, for, somehow, the phrase seemed hopelessly inapplicable. It belonged to the Grierson part of his nature, and was supposed to signify a preliminary to marriage, an altogether decorous kind of affection for a decorously-behaved girl, who had never been homeless or hungry or cold. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... forth his great work, on which he was known to have been long engaged, and which if it had been his only production, would have carried his name down to posterity as one of the first bards of his time. "Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," would not be an inapplicable motto for this oriental romance, which unites the purest and softest tenderness with the loftiest dignity, and glows in every page with all the fervour of poetry. For the copyright of this poem he is said to have received the sum of 3,000 guineas, and it must have proved a source of immense ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various

... received in this Church, so far as it declares the Books of Homilies to be an explication of Christian doctrine, and instructive in piety and morals. But all references to the constitution and laws of England are considered as inapplicable to the circumstances of this Church, which also suspends the order for the reading of said Homilies in Churches, until a revision of them may be conveniently made, for the clearing of them, as well from obsolete words and phrases, as ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... passed 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 ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... been applied to voluntary action. Accordingly, he treats the whole question from the inductive side, distinguishing the cases where people are praised or blamed for their conduct, from those where praise and blame are inapplicable as being powerless. It would have been well if the method had never been departed from; a sound Psychology would have improved the induction, but would never have introduced any question except as to the relative strength ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... the United 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 require ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... found and in turn recalls the appropriate major premise. Finding the minor premise is a matter of observation, and if you fail to observe the significant fact about the problem, the really useful major premise may lie dormant, known and retained but not recalled, while false clues suggest inapplicable major premises and give birth to plenty of reasoning but all to no purpose. Some persons with abundant knowledge are ineffective reasoners from lack of a sense for probability. The efficient reasoner must be a ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... (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. Brin, who had studied ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... not now my purpose to discuss the doctrine of Biblical Inspiration. It has gone the way of many other theological dogmas. It has not been settled by a yea or nay, but by indifference, and because yea or nay are both inapplicable. The manner in which the trial was conducted was certainly singular, and is worth a word or two. The Holy Office was never more scandalously indifferent to any pretence of justice or legality in its proceedings. We were not told what was the charge ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... then, is exposed to every objection to which a theory can be obnoxious. It is gratuitous; it is inapplicable to the facts; it supposes more causes than are necessary; it fails to explain the phenomena, leaving the difficulties exactly where it found them. Nevertheless, such is the theory, how easily soever refuted when openly avowed ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham

... political domain all the resources of national 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

... spiritualized by Jesus 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 ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... 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 placed, may, during my continuance in it, be limited to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall

... citation; and Mr. Smilie said he considered it the very marrow of the bill. Mr. Lloyd of Maryland thought the death penalty would be out of proportion to the crime, and considered the extract from Exodus inapplicable since few of the negroes imported had been stolen in Africa. But Mr. Olin of Vermont announced that the man-stealing argument had persuaded him in favor of the extreme penalty. Early now became furious, and in his fury, frank. In a preceding ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... observed in cases where an European congress holds the peace of the world and the fate of nations in its hands. And we have thought that the British American Conference might perhaps consider the precedent not inapplicable to the present case. Such a course would have the further advantage of preventing ill-founded and mischievous rumours regarding the proceedings from ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun



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



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