Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Uninstructed   Listen
Uninstructed

adjective
1.
Lacking information or instruction.  Synonyms: naive, unenlightened.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Uninstructed" Quotes from Famous Books



... Blessing to be born in those Parts of the World where Wisdom and Knowledge flourish; tho it must be confest, there are, even in these Parts, several poor uninstructed Persons, who are but little above the Inhabitants of those Nations of which I have been here speaking; as those who have had the Advantages of a more liberal Education, rise above one another by several different Degrees of Perfection. For to return to our Statue in the Block ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... Whiggery in general, I can only say, that as no man can be said to be utterly overset until his rump has been higher than his head, so I cannot read in history of any free state which has been brought to slavery until the rascal and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical government, which naturally {p.222} leads to the stern repose of military despotism. Property, morals, education, are the proper qualifications for those ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... about paintings;' in the next breath, his overweening egotism would make him loudly proclaim: 'There never was but one painter in this world, and his name is Hockskins; he lives in my town, and he knows more than any of your 'old masters'! I ought to know!' Or, 'I am an uneducated man,' meaning uninstructed; immediately following it with the assertion: 'All teachers, scholars, and colleges are useless folly, and all education is worthless, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... seizing his native weapon, stops ironically to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone. They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... a mind to make an epigram," Mr. Waverton announced. "The arrogance of the vulgar, the—the uninstructed—perhaps I lack the mot juste, but quand meme—the mansuetude of the loftier mind. A fine antithesis that, I think." He stood up, walked to the window, and looked out. Away down the hill the fields lay in a mellow mist, the kindly autumn sun made the copses glow golden; it was a benign scene, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... this man, I should welcome it with gratitude. I shrink from ending my career with the shattering of so fine an image, in the public eye. What lies back of this crime—what past memories or present miseries have led to an act which would be called dastardly in the most uninstructed and basest of our sex, I lack the imagination to conceive. Would to God I had never tried to find out! But no man standing where Roberts does to-day among the leaders of a great party can fall into such a pit of shame without weakening the faith of the young ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... has imagination enough to conceive what our fighting men are doing for us and how supreme is our duty to do everything to relieve them from any other burden except those which the war compels them to face. There is also the fact that many members of our uninstructed industrial population believe that the richer classes are growing richer owing to the war, and battening on the proceeds of the loans. I do not think that this is true; on the contrary, I believe that the war has brought a considerable shifting of buying power ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... cannot argue with him; I cannot reprove the man to whom I owe so much. All ranks of men and of mind should be equal to you, the pastor, the divine. You ministers of the gospel address yourselves unabashed to the poor, the humble, the uninstructed. Did Heaven give you power and commandment over these alone? Go, Preacher! go! Speak with the same authority to the great, to the haughty, to the wise!" The old man's look ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hour That fool intrudes, raw in this great affair, And uninstructed how to stem the tide.— [Aside. [Coming up the Mufti,—aside.] The emperor must not marry, nor enjoy:— Keep to that point: Stand firm, for ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... you—might I venture to say with us—on every point but one. He favors immersion! He has been so vile a sinner that he foolishly fears the more simple rite of your church will not make him wet enough. Would you believe it? his uninstructed scruples on the point are so gross and materialistic that he actually suggested soaping himself as a preparatory ceremony! I believe, however, if instead of sprinkling my friend, you would pour a generous basinful ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... he replied; for I suppose that you mean to exclude mere uninstructed courage, such as that of a wild beast or of a slave—this, in your opinion, is not the courage which the law ordains, and ought to ...
— The Republic • Plato

... qualities all cold bodies. Similarly, we are to make a list of all constitutions which have produced good or bad government, and to investigate their points of agreement and difference. This sounds plausible to the uninstructed, but is a mere rhetorical flourish. Bacon's method is admittedly inadequate for reasons which I leave to men of science to explain, and Macaulay's method is equally hopeless in politics. It is hopeless for the simple reason that the complexity of the phenomena makes it impracticable. We cannot find ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... shorten the road of the traveller, and render the labor and genius of past ages tributary to our own. These teach most emphatically, that the secret of successful war is not to be found in mere legs and arms, but in the head that shall direct them. If this be either ungifted by nature, or uninstructed by study and reflection, the best plans of manoeuvre and campaign avail nothing. The two last centuries have presented many revolutions in military character, all of which have turned on this principle. It would be useless to enumerate these. ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... proposed to give him a reward upon our arrival at a post. His principles however, unsupported by a belief in the divine truths of Christianity, were unable to withstand the pressure of severe distress. His countrymen, the Iroquois, are generally Christians, but he was totally uninstructed and ignorant of the duties inculcated by Christianity, and from his long residence in the Indian country seems to have imbibed or retained the rules of conduct which the southern Indians ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... and uninstructed, or, did he fail after ample instruction? That is the difficult point raised by the very curious case of Mr. Robert Oliphant, which has never been mentioned, I think, by the many minute ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang

... mankind, and many causes are in operation to give a right direction to their thoughts, though the thinkers themselves are ignorant of what thought-power is. To give a right direction to the thoughts of ignorant thinkers is the purpose of much religious teaching, which these uninstructed ones must accept by faith in bare authority because they are unable to realise its true import. But notwithstanding the aids thus afforded to mankind, the general stream of unregulated thought cannot but have an adverse tendency, and hence the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... be safe for you,"—he answered—"The remedy is a sovereign one if used very rarely, and with extreme caution, but in uninstructed hands it is dangerous. Its work is to stimulate certain cells—at the same time (like all things taken in excess) it can destroy them. Moreover, it would not agree ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... many of the children of God, who are uninstructed, or in a carnal state, would feel themselves justified to continue their alliance with the world in the work of God, and to go on as heretofore, in their unscriptural proceedings respecting similar institutions, so far as the ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller

... magnificent architecture. Except that of Chester (the grim and simple nave of which stands yet unrivalled in my memory), and one or two small ones in North Wales, hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was the first that I had seen. To my uninstructed vision, it seemed the object best worth gazing at in the whole world; and now, after beholding a great many more, I remember it with less prodigal admiration only because others are as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my memory represent it as airy rather than massive. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... threshing machine, at work, the fabric and mechanism of which, as well as all that passes within, is hidden from his sight by the outside case; or if seen, would be too complicated for his uninformed, uninstructed understanding to comprehend. And what is that situation? This spectator, ignorant as he is, sees at one end a material enter the machine, as unground grain the mill, raw cotton the carding machine, sheaves of unthreshed ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... only the fortunes of men which are equal in America; even their requirements partake in some degree of the same uniformity. I do not believe that there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed and at the same time so few learned individuals. Primary instruction is within the reach of everybody; superior instruction is scarcely to be obtained by any. This is not surprising; it is in fact the necessary consequence ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... expect to hear that it could be, in an assembly convened for the propagation of Christian knowledge, a question whether any nation uninstructed in religion should receive instruction; or whether that instruction should be imparted to them by a translation of the holy books into their own language. If obedience to the will of God be necessary to happiness, and knowledge of his will be necessary to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... instruments of thought, but of the division of thought. But it is manifest, that if they effect this, they are not the only instruments by means of which the same thing may be done. The deaf and dumb, though uninstructed and utterly ignorant of language, can think; and can, by rude signs of their own inventing, manifest a similar division, corresponding to the individuality of things. And what else can be meant by "the division of thought," than our notion ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... facts necessary to the practice of these virtues and live accordingly? And yet with apparent inconsistency one of the prime virtues is neglected; one of the most vital needs of every human being—the understanding of his sex-nature—is too often left entirely to chance. Not only is the youth uninstructed, but no proper way of learning the truth is within his reach. It is as though he were set blindfold in the midst of dangerous pitfalls, with the admonition not to fall into any of them. Those who ought to tell the facts will not, consequently the facts must be gathered from chance ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley

... modern times—it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can. I will not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys. But there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... manifestation of the facetious spirit that had found literary expression in the topsy-turvy obituary notice from the pen of Hurdy-Gurdy's great humorist. Perhaps it had some occult personal signification impenetrable to understandings uninstructed in local traditions. A more charitable hypothesis is that it was owing to a misadventure on the part of Mr. Barney Bree, who, making the interment unassisted (either by choice for the conservation of his golden secret, or through ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... was pulled down from the car with a gentle yet relentless force, was conscious that he was being removed and must submit. There were sounds now, the quick syllables of the southern races, half articulate to the uninstructed ear but full of idiom and passion, and through his own silent struggle he was aware that the interpreter was soothing, directing, and inexorably guiding the assault. They took him, a resistless posse of them, beyond the gap, and the automobile followed slowly and passed him just outside. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... sentiments), may claim in confirmation of his doctrines sundry mournful instances elsewhere, and, in particular, the events that followed among the Romans upon the death of Nero, in which plain proofs were given that nothing is more terrible than a military force moving about in an empire upon uninstructed and unreasoning impulses. Demades, after the death of Alexander, compared the Macedonian army to the Cyclops after his eye was out, seeing their many disorderly and unsteady motions. But the calamities of the Roman government might be likened ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed hands had destroyed a ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... to give the longitude where one is sailing, on whatever parallel to the equinoctial. Likewise it shows the position of the stars, even when all their latitudes [i.e., altitudes?] and declinations are unknown, so easily that even the most uninstructed can in a short time learn it. It is of use in other curious, useful, and important ways, for the perfection of this art, which can by its aid be verified. As it is an article so curious and useful, the said Luis Perez de las Marinas persuaded me to give an account of it to your Majesty, with ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair

... only the fortunes of men which are equal in America; even their acquirements partake in some degree of the same uniformity. I do not believe there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed, and at the same time so few learned individuals. Primary instruction is within the reach of everybody; superior instruction is scarcely to be obtained by any. This is not surprising; it is in fact the necessary consequence of what we have advanced above. Almost all the Americans are ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... modes of preparing the potato for the table are by roasting or boiling. These processes are so simple that it is commonly supposed every cook understands them without special directions; and yet there is scarcely an uninstructed cook who can boil or roast ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... to the officers would have kept them quiet; but there are two years now due to them. I dare not draw for it without instructions, because in the instances in which I have hitherto ventured to act uninstructed, I have never been able to know whether they have been approved in the private sentiments of the members of Congress, much less by any vote. I have pressed on them the expediency of transferring the French debts to Holland, in order to remove everything which may excite irritations ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... she had drawn the knot that secured her to the rock so tight that she could not liberate herself until I came to her assistance and set her free. I then talked with her, and found that she had remarkable capacity, tenderness, and sweetness of nature, but was altogether uninstructed. I said to myself, it is impossible that a creature could be found so beautiful and intelligent unless Providence had intended her for something better than ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... aspirant will wait patiently, either the whole autocratic set of ladies will disband—for such sets disentangle easily—or else they in their turn will come knocking at the door and ask to be received. L'art de tenir salon is not acquired in an hour. It takes many years for a new and an uninstructed set to surmount all the little awkwardnesses, the dubious points of etiquette, that come up in every new shuffle of the social cards; but a modest and serene courtesy, a civility which is not servile, will be a good introduction ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... minister, "I trust this poor woman had remaining sense to feel and join in the import of my prayers. But let us humbly hope we are judged of by our opportunities of religious and moral instruction. In some degree she might be considered as an uninstructed heathen, even in the bosom of a Christian country; and let us remember, that the errors and vices of an ignorant life were balanced by instances of disinterested attachment, amounting almost to heroism. To Him, who can alone weigh our crimes and errors against our efforts towards virtue, we ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... impression of power, of resource, of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer, whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of "The Scarlet Letter" might afford entertaining and even profitable reading to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... gentleness, the bewitching softness of his civility, or the force and fitness of his satire; for as he was both the delight, the love, and the dotage of the women, so was he a continued curb to impertinence, and the public censure of folly; never did man stay in his company unentertained, or leave it uninstructed; never was his understanding biassed, or his pleasantness forced; never did he laugh in the wrong place, or prostitute his sense to serve his luxury; never did he stab into the wounds of fallen virtue, with a base and a cowardly insult, or smooth the face of prosperous ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... musical instruments a very principal part of learning; whence it is related of Epaminondas, who, in my judgment, was the first of all the Greeks, that he played very well upon the flute. And, some time before, Themistocles, upon refusing the harp at an entertainment, passed for an uninstructed and ill-bred person. Hence, Greece became celebrated for skillful musicians; and as all persons there learned music, those who attained to no proficiency in it were ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... 'upon the high and giddy mast', is as much their property as that which other men acquire in schools and colleges; and we had no more right to seize and employ these seamen in our battles upon the wages of common, uninstructed labour, than we should have had to seize and employ as many clergymen, barristers, and physicians. When I have stood on the quarter-deck of a ship in a storm, and seen the seamen covering the yards in taking in sail, with ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... View in Lee Wood, near, Bristol—is now in the possession of Lord Northwick. Nasmyth was a constant exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, &c., and his performances delighted the uninstructed spectator as well as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various

... circle of deeply impressed faces, felt that his prestige was restored, and even began to enjoy a foretaste of the triumph, which had been one part of his dream through the long laborious years. But he was puzzled how to bring the full grandeur of his design clearly before this uninstructed audience, and after reflecting for a while in quest of concise yet adequate definitions, he launched out into an eloquent description of the ceremonial observed in conferring degrees at Dublin University. It may be surmised that many of the details were due to his own fondly brooding fancy. ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... that which was lacking in themselves; but they could not bring themselves to believe that culture and holiness were incompatible or that nearness to God was possible only to those who were ignorant and uninstructed. We should have expected learning among the Dominicans, but very soon the English Franciscans became the most learned body in Europe, and that character they never lost till the suppression of the monasteries swept them out of the land. Before Edward ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... more premeditated piety he withdrew, and was able to treat the affair with something like religious awe. He was obliged, in fact, to steady Alice's own faith in it, and to keep her from falling under dangerous self-condemnation in that and other excesses of uninstructed self-devotion. This brought no fatigue to his robust affection, whatever it might have done to a heart more tried in such exercises. Love acquaints youth with many things in character and temperament which are none the less interesting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... would never satisfy me," I retorted, "so long as you remained uninstructed, for in your single person you would so swell the sum of human ignorance on that subject that my teaching would be ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... had found useful in internal hemorrhages. The knowledge of the properties of this plant he thought would be useful in cases of emergency, because it could be obtained in any field and by the most uninstructed persons." ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... of the idiot needs training and development as well as his physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has the latent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and left to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of decency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs of these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity, undoubtedly exist in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... certain benevolent schemes as doing sixpennyworth of good and a shilling's worth of harm. I grieve to say that, in my opinion, the definition exactly fits his own project. Few social evils are of greater magnitude than uninstructed and unchastened religious fanaticism; no personal habit more surely degrades the conscience and the intellect than [244] blind and unhesitating obedience to unlimited authority. Undoubtedly, harlotry and intemperance are sore evils, and starvation is hard to bear, or even to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... stump oratory was because he believed it to be a great school of insincerity. Its end was not truth, but plausibility. It was the effort of interested men to throw opinions into such forms as might most captivate uninstructed men; to keep back every unpopular side; to magnify everything in them that was seductive. He once said to me that two great curses seemed to him eating away the heart and worth of the English people. One was drink. The other was stump oratory, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... been unknown for nearly fifty years, and among whom the spirit of war, always so rife at the South, was opposed and neutralized by a thousand industrial and peaceful propensities, was suddenly called into the field. Uninstructed at first in the real nature of the conflict, regarding it as an unreasonable disaffection, and therefore necessarily limited in extent, not aroused even yet to a full consciousness of the momentous consequences involved ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... itself in the air, be employed to move huge engines, which will be directed to the infinite variety of production which engages the attention of the industrious artisans; and thus in course of time there can be little doubt that these lagoons, which were fled from as objects of danger and terror by uninstructed man, will gather round them a large, intelligent population, and become sources of prosperity to innumerable individuals through ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... efforts! my humble wishes! my craving wants! What signs of luxury, what tokens of dissipation, what innumerable marks of extravagant waste did I every where see around me, at the moment that poverty was thus pinching me to the very bone! Here a vain mortal, as insolent as uninstructed, drawn by six ponies; with a postillion before and three idle fellows behind, pampered in vice, that he might thus openly insult common sense, and thus publicly proclaim the folly of his head to be as egregious as the insensibility ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... product of centuries of growth, the sheet anchor of Society in a time of change. Where could we look for solidity, or permanence, if judicial decisions could be recalled at the caprice of the mob—the hysterical, the uninstructed, the fickle mob? The opinion of one trained and honest judge outweighs the whims of ten thousand of the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... Practice, industry, study of literature, cultivation of taste, and the rest, will of course lend their aid, will probably be necessary before high excellence is attained. But the instances are not to seek,—are at the fingers of us all,—in which the first uninstructed effort has succeeded. A boy, almost, or perhaps an old woman, has sat down and the book has come, and the world has read it, and the booksellers have been civil and have written their cheques. When all trades, all professions, all ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... which are often wonderfully beautiful,—so beautiful, in fact, that the uninstructed person is sometimes skeptical as to their production by the children,—may also be preserved in permanent form by parquetry. It is furnished in various colors for this gift, as for the seventh and eighth, and is greatly enjoyed by ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... were very grave,—Mr. Fessenden intimated his willingness to vote for it if it were demonstrated to be a necessity. On the constitutional question involved he did not touch. He preferred, he said, "to have his own mind uninstructed" upon that aspect ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... things were going, and perhaps expressing his suspicions too freely, his mother-in-law soon prevailed to have him turned out, and absolutely forbidden his father's house, the ready way to force a naked uninstructed youth on the most sinful courses. Whether Robin at that time did anything dishonest is not certain, but being grievously pinched with cold one night, and troubled also with dismal apprehensions of what might ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... different temperaments a child may have, and the different combinations of them? Are you competent to the direction and culture of the intellectual and moral nature? Have you skill to touch the hidden springs of action? Have you, thus uninstructed, the power, the knowledge, the wisdom, requisite for guiding that ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... his own mind, the notion of addressing an ode to her in the character of the young Madonna—the uninstructed Madonna—without that look of pensive suffering ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... nothing that men do well. He is there, vigilant and implacable, to pounce swiftly and mercilessly on derelictions of duty. No one knows so well as he what is possible to a Minister and his Department and what not. They themselves, the Minister and his Department, are totally uninstructed in the matter. Truly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various

... agreed that there was reason in what Tom said, because an ignorant lump of bread, uninstructed by an incantation, could not be expected to act very intelligently when set upon an errand ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... as coolie laborers on the plantations. They readily intermarry with the native women, and these unions are usually fruitful of healthy and bright children. It is said that the Chinese insist upon taking better care of their children than the native women, uninstructed, usually give them, and that therefore the Chinese half-caste families are more thrifty than those of the pure blood Hawaiians. Moreover, the Chinaman takes care of his wife. He endeavors to form her habits upon the pattern of his own; and requires of her ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... such a matter, had he sat alone as a judge; but he was one who would be almost sure to differ from others who sat as equal assessors with him. Mr Oriel was a gentleman at all points; but he was very shy, very reticent, and altogether uninstructed in the ordinary daily intercourse of man with man. Any one knowing him might have predicted of him that he would be sure on such an occasion as this to be found floundering in a sea of doubts. Mr Quiverful was the father of a large family, whose life ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather than ordinary poverty—a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his surface ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... but the knowledge that he must stay on his reservation, and do all that is there prescribed for him; that he will not be permitted to throw off his connection with his people, and stray away to meet his own fate, unprovided, uninstructed, and unrestrained,—will, under any adequate system of moral and industrial correction and education, prevent a general breaking-up of Indian communities, and the formation of Indian gypsy-camps all over ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker

... watching for her promis'd day, She sees her Saviour from a virgin sprung, His advent by attending angels song! And wisdom usher'd by the guiding Star, Hails Him, with gifts of homage, from afar. The voice of Heaven proclaims his promis'd birth, And conscious nature feels her friend on earth. His uninstructed youth divinely sage, Transcends the knowledge of experienc'd age: The weak receive the strength, his will can give, The dead obedient to his mandate live, In power as mighty, as in mercy kind, He dies, the ransom of ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley

... however—as uncharitable as it may seem to say it—of very little service to the scientific investigation of childhood. Even to-day, when a greater body of valuable results are being secured, the main danger to the proper study of the child's mind comes from the over-enthusiasm and uninstructed assurance of some of its friends. Especially is this the case in America, where "child study" has become a fad to be pursued by parents and teachers who know little about the principles of scientific method, and where ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have told the shadow of a lie to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so uninstructed in the things that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions would have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the prayers, for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... the ordinary intuitions of their mind, under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense; to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me," and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... garden, gay with scentless flowers such as tulips and late daffodils, and yet odorous—for early April has a few days during which the uncurling leaf has all the fragrance of blossom: and this was such a day, lustrous from a bath of rain. To our uninstructed seaman the scent seemed to exhale from the tulips; it recalled his attention from the gannets, and he drew in deep breaths of it, pondering the parterres of Kaiserskroon and Duchesse de Parme—bold scarlet splashed with yellow—of golden Chrysoloras, of rosy white Cottage Maids. Unknowing ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... and far who are suspected of sorcery, and a portion of the village youth have clambered up trees and are on the look-out for the ghost. If they do not see his body they certainly see his eye twinkling in the gloom, though the uninstructed European might easily mistake it for a glow-worm. No sooner do they catch sight of it than they bawl out, "Come hither, fetch the fire, and burn him who burnt thee." If the tinder blazes up at the name of a sorcerer, it is flung towards the village where the man ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... restoring the young minister to health. But, it must now be said, another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... expressed regret because, as he said, "Nothing had of late been revolutionised so much as the nursery." But harking back on the period of his own childhood, he was able to say, with a feeling of satisfaction, that the young mind was then "cradled amidst the simplicities of the uninstructed intellect; and she was held to be the best nurse who had the most copious supply of song, and tale, and drollery, at all times ready to soothe and amuse her young charges. There were, it is true, some disadvantages in the system; for ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... not we all frequently affirmed that we knew no more about certain inscrutable matters than the man in the moon? Now we would never have committed ourselves to such a comparison had we not been sure that the said man was a veritable and creditable, though somewhat uninstructed person. But our feelings ought not to be wrought upon in this way. We "had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, than such a Roman" as is not at least distantly acquainted with that brilliant character in high life who careers so conspicuously ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... rivalling in splendour the milky way, and tracts of space remarkable for their extreme blackness, give a particular physiognomy to the southern sky. This sight fills with admiration even those, who, uninstructed in the branches of accurate science, feel the same emotions of delight in the contemplation of the heavenly vault, as in the view of a beautiful landscape, or a majestic river. A traveller has no need of being a botanist ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... Bishop Churton's book as an authoritative exposition of the modern High Church view of Missions, It is good for us all to understand it, thereby we shall be saved alike from uninstructed admiration and indiscriminate denunciation.'—Church ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... Oh kindly answer, Sir, to question that To charitable courtesy less wise Might call for pardon rather! I shall now Gladly, what, uninstructed, loyally I should ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... American to which he is justly entitled and which is the essential requisite to respect from the South American. We are different in many ways as to character and methods. In dealing with all foreign people, it is important to avoid the narrow and uninstructed prejudice which assumes that difference from ourselves denotes inferiority. There is nothing that we resent so quickly as an assumption of superiority or evidence of condescension in foreigners; there is nothing that the South Americans resent so quickly. The South Americans are ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... inquisitive, energetic understanding, which could not be content without knowledge far beyond that of the most advanced beaver. Hungering for such knowledge, he bought some books: but in those days there were few books of an elementary kind adapted to the needs of a lonely, uninstructed boy. His books puzzled more than they enlightened him; and so, when his work was done, he looked about the little bustling city to see if there was not some kind of evening school in which he could get the kind of help he needed. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... obstinate. It appeared that the policeman claimed to arrest the donkey and convey him to the pound. The dry and hungry beast had been tethered by his master in the early morning where a hedge and margin of sward bordered the domain of Admiral Parkins. Uninstructed in modern law, he broke loose and strayed along the green, cropping here and there a succulent shoot of thorn or thistle, until, when approaching repletion, he was surprised by the policeman, reprimanded, captured, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to Theism, and to sink again from Theism into idolatry. The vulgar—that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted—being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens, or penetrate by their disquisitions into the secret structure of vegetable or animal bodies; so far as, to discover a Supreme Mind or Original Providence, which bestowed order on every part ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... that I have had the opportunity to study the way in which these things come about in complete disconnection from them, and I do not suspect that any man has deliberately planned the system. I am not so uninstructed and misinformed as to suppose that there is a deliberate and malevolent combination somewhere to dominate the government of the United States. I merely say that, by certain processes, now well known, and perhaps natural in themselves, there has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... panels, and full of "reflected lights," that would have gladdened the heart of Maclise. There were couches of velvet, and lounging chairs of every variety and shape. There was a Broadwood's grand pianoforte, on which Mr. Foote, although uninstructed, could play skilfully. There were round tables and square tables, and writing tables; and there were side tables with statuettes, and Swiss carvings, and old china, and gold apostle-spoons, and lava ware, and Etruscan vases, and a swarm of Spiers's elegant knick-knackeries. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... this organisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformity to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their being advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from uninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered by continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical law and moral law. Physical law is the regulated course of every physical circumstance in the order evidently most ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley

... himself: "There are obviously many contradictions in General Gordon's different proposals"; but he went on to express his agreement in Gordon's new policy, strongly supported the selection of Zebehr, and sneered at us for having regard to uninstructed opinion in England. On the same day Gordon telegraphed: "If a hundred British troops were sent to Assouan or Wady Halfa, they would run no more risk than Nile tourists, and would have the best effect." At the same time Baring said: "I certainly would not ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... place, this limit set to our knowledge of the objects which stimulate our sensations is only accepted without difficulty by well-informed persons; it much astonishes the uninstructed when first explained to them. And this astonishment, although it may seem so, is not a point that can be neglected, for it proves that, in the first and simple state of our knowledge, we believe ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... In a letter to Mr. Bellamy, of Bethlehem, he describes his labors, and asks for ministers to help him, from "New England or elsewhere." So true is it, as Colonel Byrd had observed in North Carolina, that "people uninstructed in any religion are ready to embrace ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... cruel horrors he intends, Takes pleasure in a net, by cunning hands Contrived, which near his mansion he extends; So well concealed beneath the crumbling sands, That whoso uninstructed thither wends, Nought of the subtle mischief understands; And so the giant scares him with his cries, That he within the toils ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... from this, their proper though troublesome task, by distrust, by the jealousies of their position, by the impossibility of conceiving that anything so strange could really be true and sound. And at length they found themselves going along with the outside current of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the movement, which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish misrepresentation, and really allowed itself to acquiesce in ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... great natural talents for painting and sculpture. They generally produce striking likenesses, but being uninstructed in the principles of these arts, their pictures have no other merit. There is, however, a female figure, done in 1711, by a native of Quito, which is considered as one of the finest paintings in a very good collection belonging to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various

... Heliobas, who at that moment entered the room accompanied by Father Paul. He greeted his guests with warmth and unaffected heartiness, and all present were, I could see, at once fascinated by the dignity of his presence and the charm of his manner. To an uninstructed eye there was nothing unusual about him; but to me there was a change in his expression which, as it were, warned and startled me. A deep shadow of anxiety in his eyes made them look more sombre and less keen; his smile was not so sweet as it was stern, and there was an undefinable ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... found utterance at length under the scourge of a resentment of very mingled quality. Let half be put to the various forms of disinterested feeling, at least half was due to personal exasperation. The whole change that her life had perforce undergone was an outrage upon the stubbornness of uninstructed habit; the old woman could see nothing but evil omens in a revolution which cost her bodily discomfort and the misery of a mind perplexed amid alien conditions. She was prepared for evil; for months she had brooded over every sign which seemed to foretell ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... caught deserting from his caravans; tales of striking down insubordinates and leaving them unconscious to die in the desert. It would have amused Stanton, if the idea had presented itself, to think of a love-sick young man helplessly watching him teach an uninstructed young girl the art of becoming a woman. But the idea did not present itself. He was too deeply absorbed in himself, and in trying to think how infinitely superior was a white dove like Sanda to a creature of the Ahmara type. He wished savagely that Ahmara ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... uninstructed in the learning of books, there were other parts of practical education, of infinitely more importance to him, in which he became an adept. His native strength of mind, keen habits of observation, and imperturbable tranquility under whatever perils or reverses, gave ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... which once we travelled through the skies, until we found a better way, and that the uninstructed used till the end," she answered carelessly, leaving me wondering what ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... to gratify, may be clearly perceived in the efforts of infancy, in the exertions of youth, in the pursuits of manhood, in the feeble endeavours of old age, and in the pastimes which human creatures, even the uninstructed savage nations themselves, have invented for their relaxation and delight. This appetite evinces a necessity for its gratification as much as hunger, thirst, and weariness, intimate the necessity of bodily refection by eating, drinking, and sleeping; and not ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... he held that the mob, or, as we more decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true freedom. "I cannot read in history," he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw, "of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military despotism." But he does not seem ever to have perceived that educated men identify themselves with "the rascal ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... soul just entering the path of Holiness: 'Can it be?' 'Have I been deceiving myself?' 'I thought I should have such and such sensations; where are the feelings of ecstasy which I expected?' The uninstructed soul often confuses feelings with assurance, particularly if in the moment of deliverance some special wave of feeling swept over the soul. When this wave subsides the sensations are different, and the soul is tempted to doubt the reality of ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard

... that he smoked the hashish and could sing the love songs of the Sahara; that he had travelled far in the desert, to Souf and to Ouargla beyond the ramparts of the Dunes; that he composed verses in the night when the uninstructed, the brawlers, the drinkers of absinthe and the domino players were sleeping or wasting their time in the darkness over the pastimes of the lewd, when the sybarites were sweating under the smoky arches of the Moorish baths, and the marechale of the dancing-girls ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... for the Court of Directors; they therefore examined him concerning every particular sum of money the receipt of which Mr. Hastings had confessed in his account. It was to their surprise that Mr. Scott professed himself perfectly uninstructed upon almost every part of the subject, though the express object of his mission to England was to clear up such matters as might be objected to Mr. Hastings; and for that purpose he had early qualified himself by the production to your Committee of his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... pleasure of looking especially at two. It is a good sign of the times when such articles as these (I mean the articles in The times and Saturday Review) appear in our public prints about our public men. They educate us, as it were, to admire rightly. An uninstructed person in a museum or at a concert may pass by without recognizing a picture or a passage of music, which the connoisseur by his side may show him is a masterpiece of harmony, or a wonder of artistic skill. After reading these papers you like and respect more the person you have admired so much ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the latter, he has no sufficient consciousness of his capacity to awake a due reaction of his thought upon the matter received from his teachers. Again, the decline of the sovereignty of the people would be the negation of all rule, if it meant that the uninstructed many should govern themselves by their own insight, and that the instructed few should simply be their servants and their instruments. But where the people are not recognized as the ultimate source of power, where their consent is not in ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... evidence lies in the process rather than the results. You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some conclusion which is entirely wrong: within a week you are set right by some fellow with a Parish Register. Well, but meanwhile you have been reading poetry, and he has not. Only the uninstructed judge ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... motion, and equally without people. There were, it is true, a few specks in the rigging of the Coquette, which might be men; but the distance prevented him from being sure of the fact; and, admitting them to be seamen busied aloft, there were no visible consequences of their presence, that his uninstructed eye could trace. In a minute or two, even these scattered specks were seen no longer; though the attentive black thought that the mast-heads and the rigging beneath the tops thickened, as if surrounded by more than their usual mazes of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... An uninstructed person might have passed that point of wood a thousand times, without the least consciousness of the presence of a single insect of the sort now searched for. In general, the bees flew too high to be easily perceptible from the ground, though a practised ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... signboard popped its welcome when I had walked ten miles of sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather than the divinity that keeps the place in memory. The owner was absent on an errand, and his daughter, who had been clumping about the kitchen on my arrival, was uninstructed in the price marks. So I read and fanned ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"—early works—a power in idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those details which none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable effect. Miss Austen's is not the style of startling tricks: nor has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to return to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton



Words linked to "Uninstructed" :   uninformed, unenlightened



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com