What is "conceiving"

Usage examples of "conceiving".

If there were a body, just one single ball, with no surrounding space, there would be no way of conceiving or feeling it as a ball or any other shape.

For example, it used to be thought that childbirth should be painful, as a punishment for Original Sin or for having had so much fun conceiving the baby.

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow "outside" or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect Being.

The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility--on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere "creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world.

Incapable of conceiving the motives which sometimes transported the fortitude of believers beyond the bounds of prudence or reason, they treated such an eagerness to die as the strange result of obstinate despair, of stupid insensibility, or of superstitious frenzy.

But on this occasion his narrative is, for the most part, consistent and probable nor is there much difficulty in conceiving that an emperor might have access to some secret archives, which had escaped the diligence of meaner historians.

The aversion and contempt which mankind had so uniformly entertained for that imperfect species, appears to have degraded their character, and to have rendered them almost as incapable as they were supposed to be, of conceiving any generous sentiment, or of performing any worthy action.

When he had elevated his mind to the sublime contemplation of the first self-existent, necessary cause of the universe, the Athenian sage was incapable of conceiving how the simple unity of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world.

My friend, who in the meanwhile had been observing him with curiosity, conceiving him to be a foreigner, inquired in the course of the evening who he was, remarking that he had never seen a man with such a Cain-like mark on the forehead before, alluding to that singular scowl which struck me so forcibly when I first saw him, and which appears to have made a stronger impression upon me than it did upon many others.

We are justified in conceiving any collection of ideas soever as a homologous series, for we have the right to choose the function which will serve to arrange them as our design requires.

You see that you cannot conceive these divers 'Gods without conceiving also a Whole, in which the entire equation cancels out to Naught.

As a confirmation of this, we may observe, that the assent of the vulgar is, in this case, merely verbal, and that they are incapable of conceiving those sublime qualities, which they seemingly attribute to the Deity.

The feeble apprehensions of men cannot be satisfied with conceiving their deity as a pure spirit and perfect intelligence.

Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest?

Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain, Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved With all his legions to dislodge, and leave Unworshipt, unobeyed, the throne supreme, Contemptuous.