inconceivableness

English

Etymology

From inconceivable +‎ -ness.

Noun

inconceivableness (uncountable)

1. The quality of being inconceivable.
   • 1690, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding‎^[1], Book IV, Chapter III:

     An unfair way which some men take with themselves: who, because of the inconceivableness of something they find in one, throw themselves violently into the contrary hypothesis, though altogether as unintelligible to an unbiassed understanding.

   • 1843, John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic‎^[2], London: John W. Parker, Volume I, Book 2, Chapter 5, p. 313:

     Now I cannot but wonder that so much stress should be laid upon the circumstance of inconceivableness, when there is such ample experience to show, that our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing in itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends upon the past history and habits of our own minds.

   • 1872, George MacDonald, chapter 6, in The Vicar’s Daughter‎^[3]:

     He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers,—shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems,—the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness.

Synonyms

• inconceivability

Antonyms

• conceivableness