unfathomability

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ fathom +‎ -ability.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ʌnˈfæðəməbɪləti/, /ʌnˈfæðməˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/

Noun

unfathomability (uncountable)

1. The quality of being unfathomable.
   • 1874, George William Bagby, Caesar Maurice, What I Did with My Fifty Millions‎^[1], J.B. Lippincott and Company, page 50:

     It is as the infinitesimal droplet of the ordinary aqueous fluid in the bounding and boundless ocean of unfathomability.

   • 1890, Hegeler Institute, Edward C. Hegeler, Paul Carus, The Monist‎^[2], Open Court for the Hegeler Institute, pages 10–11:

     The motives operating on a man do not explain his act till we know what sort of a man he is; and this, his original disposition or character, is a mere datum or brute fact. Things are so and so, and no reasons, ultimately, can be given for them. This unaccountability and unfathomability of the world, its purely empirical character, was to Schopenhauer proof that in it we have something more than merely mental phenomena which as products of the subject would sooner or later be intelligible to the subject just as are those other unquestioned products, the forms of space and time.

   • 1906, Henry David Thoreau, Bradford Torrey, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau‎^[3], Houghton, Mifflin and Company, page 172:

     It is a remarkably warm night for the season, the ground almost entirely bare. The stars are dazzlingly bright. The fault may be in my own barrenness, but methinks there is a certain poverty about the winter night's sky. The stars of higher magnitude are more bright and dazzling, and therefore appear more near and numerable, while those that appear indistinct and infinitely remote in the summer, imparting the impression of unfathomability to the sky, are scarcely seen at all. The front halls of heaven are so brilliantly lighted that they quite eclipse the more remote. The sky has fallen many degrees.

   • 1920, Samuel Alexander White, North of the Law‎^[4], Doubleday, Page, page 126:

     Watching the captain under cover of the rapid-fire small talk of the animated group, Jules noted that his cinnamon-coloured eyes hardly ever left Sonia's face. So he had ambitions! How many men, Dane wondered, were fired with that same longing? And what about the woman invested her with such power? It might have been her unfathomability. Men love the mysterious, that which they cannot probe, which ever eludes and beckons from beyond. Sonia had this attribute.

   • 2015, Janis H. Jenkins, Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness‎^[5], University of California Press, →ISBN, page 17:

     The case study presented in “This Is How God Wants It? The Struggle of Sebastian” is a vivid instance of how sociocultural and psychodynamic milieu affects the formation of extraordinary experience, how the core of that experience is better characterized in terms of struggle than of symptoms, and the ultimate unfathomability of schizophrenia as a form of human subjectivity.