What is "credulity"

Usage examples of "credulity".

Although Delaura had sought the support of distinguished members of his own order and even of other communities, none had dared challenge the acta of the convent or contradict popular credulity.

From the beginning of history in most nations, the details of another existence and its conditions have been furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless fancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, and the cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarian leaders.

Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment.

She becomes in-co-ordinated and unsettled upon the physical plane, credulity growing with what it feeds upon, until the bounds of rational living are overpast and mental unbalance becomes apparent.

If any credit could be allowed to confessions extorted by fear or pain, and to vague reports, the offspring of malice and credulity, the heresy of the Priscillianists would be found to include the various abominations of magic, of impiety, and of lewdness.

Grampa Zamp I thought about androids and Melt-O-Mobiles and credulity gas.

The bits made patterns of androids and melting cars and credulity gas.

As far as we can determine, if there is a credulity gas neither androids nor Melt-O-Mobiles have anything to do with it.

As I had foreseen, that interdiction left me to enjoy as I pleased all the time that I would have been called upon to devote to their devout credulity, and besides, I was naturally afraid lest De la Haye, such as I truly believed him to be, would never lend himself to that trifling nonsense, and would, for the sake of deserving greater favour at their hands, endeavour to undeceive them and to take my place in their confidence.

It was a joke of mine, and the lady amused herself at the expense of your credulity.

Aplysia may be a special case because it is easy to study, but it would be straining credulity to believe that it organized its learning behaviour along fundamentally different principles from those of other invertebrates, or indeed vertebrates with reasonably sized nervous systems.

It is hard to conceive anything more infuriating to a statesman or a military commander, or to a court favorite, than to be overruled at every turn, or to be robbed of the ear of the reigning sovereign, by an impudent young upstart practising on the credulity of the populace and the vanity and silliness of an immature prince by exploiting a few of those lucky coincidences which pass as miracles with uncritical people.

Christian Scientists, psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and the Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom, and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment.

The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.

In many respects this is an antithesis to his earlier films, in which an innocent man is made the victim of credulity, ignorance and hate which grows into a lynching.