Both Uses of
irrational
in
Middlemarch
- He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work.†
Chpt 2irrational = unreasonable
- But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate, inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact," Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear.†
Chpt 3 *
Definitions:
-
(1)
(irrational) not reasonable
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, irrational numbers in mathematics are numbers that cannot be expressed as a fraction consisting of only an integer in the numerator and denominator. For example, pi is an irrational number while 1/3 is rational.