"Lady Monogram cared nothing for Melmotte's villainy, as regarded herself … She had but a confused idea of any difference between commerce and fraud".
Mr. Duris, so brutally charismatic in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," here finds himself stuck in a confused idea of his character, who wobbles between tormented genius and mischievous rake.
"They have gotten a confused idea," she wrote, "of Lincoln's Congress meeting [on July 4, 1861] and of the war; they think it is all to help them, and they expected for 'something to turn up.'" These panicked outbursts were merely a prelude to the major insurrectionary scare that broke several weeks later in Natchez.
Châteaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Dachau and Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us that Evil is not an appearance, that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one...
In particular, he reshaped the notion of an idea, of a confused idea, of a clear and distinct idea, and of methodic doubt.
Thus he never gets tired of emphasizing that we only have a confused idea of substance (a claim also made by Leibniz about three-quarters of our knowledge, although he held that we have a clear concept of what substance is), and repeats quite often (at least three times in Book II, chap.
It follows that we are best off when we understand things least, because "a tiny confused idea is always greater than a vast one which is clear".
The simple idea of pain, for example, is a clear and distinct idea of a sensory state in the mind, and the idea of the pain in the hand is a compound and confused idea of something in the hand that exactly resembles pain.
Ethicists have a name for the confused idea that moral conclusions can be deduced from scientific evidence: they call it the "naturalistic fallacy", and it cuts two ways.
(d) This ambiguity is reflected also at the level of the final appearance, resulting in a confused overall idea of the project (Rodermond 1997, p. 42).
Seeing just a splash of wine left in the glass, the waiter has whisked your glass away in some confused idea of good service.
