Disable. Our ancestors felt that to injure the character of another was the most effectual way of disabling him; and out of a sense of this they often used ‘to disable’ in the sense of to disparage, to speak slightingly of.
Farewell, mounsieur traveller. Look, you lisp, and wear strange suits: disable all the benefits of your own country.—Shakespeare, As You Like It, act. iv. sc. 1.
If affection lead a man to favour the less worthy in desert, let him do it without depraving or disabling the better deserver.—Bacon, Essays, 49.
Discourse. It is very characteristic of the slight acquaintance with our elder literature—the most obvious source for elucidating Shakespeare’s text—which was possessed by many of his commentators down to a late day, that the phrase ‘discourse of reason,’ which he puts into Hamlet’s mouth, should have perplexed them so greatly. Gifford, a pitiless animadverter on the real or imaginary mistakes of others, and who tramples upon Warburton for attempting to explain this phrase as though Shakespeare could have ever written it, declares ‘“discourse of reason” is so poor and perplexed a phrase that I should dismiss it at once for what I believe to be his genuine language;’ and then proceeds to suggest the obvious but erroneous correction ‘discourse and reason’ (see his Massinger, vol. i. p. 148); while yet, if there be a phrase of continual recurrence among the writers of our Elizabethan age and down to Milton, it is this. I have little doubt that it occurs fifty times in Holland’s translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. What our fathers intended by ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse of reason,’ the following passages will abundantly declare.
There is not so great difference and distance between beast and beast, as there is odds in the matter of wisdom, discourse of reason, and use of memory between man and man.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 570; cf. pp. 313, 566, 570, 752, 955, 966, 977, 980.
If you mean, by discourse, right reason, grounded on Divine Revelation and common notions, written by God in the hearts of all men, and deducing, according to the never-failing rules of logic, consequent deductions from them; if this be it which you mean by discourse, it is very meet and reasonable and necessary that men, as in all their actions, so especially in that of greatest importance, the choice of their way to happiness, should be left unto it.—Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, Preface.
As the intuitive knowledge is more perfect than that which insinuates itself into the soul gradually by discourse, so more beautiful the prospect of that building which is all visible at one view than what discovers itself to the sight by parcels and degrees.—Fuller, Worthies of England: Canterbury.
Whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive; discourse