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To resist with success; as, to defeat an assault. Sharp reasons to defeat the law. Shak.

not, but lieth in the true meridian. Sir T. Browne. To deflect from the line of truth and reason. Warburton.

The bending which a beam or girder undergoes from its own weight or by reason of a load.

Direct; proving directly; -- applied to reasoning, and opposed to elenchtic or refutative.

To weigh in the mind; to consider the reasons for and against; to consider maturely; to reflect upon; to ponder; as, to deliberate a question.

The act of deliberating, or of weighing and examining the reasons for and against a choice or measure; careful consideration; mature reflection. Choosing the fairest way with a calm deliberation. W. Montagu.

To deprive of reason; to make mad. [R.] Bale.

Deprived of reason. Arise, thou dementate sinner! Hammond.

The act of depriving of reason; madness. Whitlock.

Insanity; madness; esp. that form which consists in weakness or total loss of thought and reason; mental imbecility; idiocy.

To show, or make evident, by reasoning or proof; to prove by deduction; to establish so as to exclude the possibility of doubt or denial. We can not demonstrate these things so as to show that the contrary often involves a contradiction. Tillotson.

especially, proof beyond the possibility of doubt; indubitable evidence, to the senses or reason. Those intervening ideas which serve to show the agreement of any two others are called "proofs;" and where agreement or disagreement is by this means plainly and clearly perceived, it is called demonstration. Locke.…

erning; to doubt of or hesitate about. [Obs.] The latter I demur, for in their looks Much reason, and in their actions, oft appears. Milton.

A personal chattel which had caused the death of a person, and for that reason was given to God, that is, forfeited to the crown, to be applied to pious uses, and distributed in alms by the high almoner. Thus, if a cart ran over a man and killed him, it was forfeited as a deodand.

ance, usually, but not necessarily, in the descending line; title to inherit an estate by reason of consanguinity. Abbott.

structive distillation. See Distillation. -- Destructive sorties ( (Logic), a process of reasoning which involves the denial of the first of a series of dependent propositions as a consequence of the denial of the last; a species of reductio ad absurdum. Whately.

mpass, the angle which the needle of a ship's compass makes with the magnetic meridian by reason of the magnetism of the iron parts of the ship. -- Deviation of the line of the vertical, the difference between the actual direction of a plumb line and the direction it would have if the earth were a perfect ellipsoid an…

One versed in dialectics; a logician; a reasoner.

That branch of logic which teaches the rules and modes of reasoning; the application of logical principles to discursive reasoning; the science or art of discriminating truth from error; logical discussion.

A written composition in which two or more persons are represented as conversing or reasoning on some topic; as, the Dialogues of Plato.