In the attempt we are almost certain to be landed in absurdity, so complicated are the relations of life, especially in governmental and political science.

In this absurdity lay the fundamental principle of the French Revolution, so far as it was produced by the writings of philosophers.

But the deductions drawn from his philosophy lead to absurdity, and are an insult to the understanding of the world.

What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous crime to-day among a spirited and sensitive people like the Polesstill more so in a highly civilised national State such as Belgium or France.

It is an absurdity that only a theatrical monarch could conceive and a crime that only a military autocracy could attempt to enforce.

The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration was received as an absurdity and the robber subjected to all kinds of tortures, including the electric machine, for his impious blasphemy.

Ridiculousness N. ridiculousness &c adj.; comicality, oddity &c adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c 497; bombast &c (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c 857.

V. be ridiculous &c adj.; pass from the sublime to the ridiculous; make one laugh; play the fool, make a fool of oneself, commit an absurdity.

"if one should but repeat the fopperies of mortal men, in their sacrifices, feasts, worshipping their gods, their rites and ceremonies, what they think of them, of their diet, houses, orders, &c., what prayers and vows they make; if one should but observe their absurdity and madness, he would burst out a laughing, and pity their folly."

But Grattan's assertion that the man who, as his sister said of him, knew but two books, the "Æneid" and the "Faerie Queene," was superior in scholarship to one who, with the exception of his rival, Fox, had probably no equal for knowledge of the great authors of antiquity in either House of Parliament, is little short of a palpable absurdity.

m., absurdity, nonsense.

If it had not been for the absurdity of altering her plans on his account she would have postponed her visit to the steward until another day.

Under the strain of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing in her father's mind.

When it is considered that their best and most zealous officers sprung from the burghers, and that Prussia, when abandoned by her King and nobles, was saved from permanent subjection only by the unparalleled exertions of her burghers and peasantry, one is shocked at such ingratitude and absurdity.

To say nothing of the absurdity, not to say ignorance, of such a claim, it is enough that it is in the teeth of the treaty itself.

There can not be a more arrogant pretension or palpable absurdity.

Now when we consider that this northerly line must form nearly a right angle to pass along the north shore of the Bay de Chaleurs, that this is 100 miles farther north than Mars Hill, where instead of an angle there can be only an inclination of 14°, can there be a greater absurdity than the British claim founded on these facts?

It is the previous deduction formed in the mind, and the splenetic contempt felt for a practical sophism, that beats about the bush for, and at last finds the apt illustration; not the casual, glancing coincidence of two objects, that points out an absurdity to the understanding.

On the other hand, he maintains that "a complex idea is as great an absurdity as a complex star," and that words only are complex.

It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped!

Another absurdity of this "implied faith" dogma is, that where there was no power to exact an express pledge, there was none to demand an implied one, and where there was no power to give the one, there was none to give the other.

We shall go into no metaphysics to show the absurdity of this pretence.

The condition and treatment of servants make the doctrine that they were mere COMMODITIES, an absurdity.

The Bible defences thrown around slavery by professed ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and historical facts it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity, ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates in the compound; each strives so lustily for the mastery it may be set down a drawn battle.

Indeed the manifest absurdity of demanding it, seems to have quite forestalled the setting up of such a claim.