incapacious

Adjective

incapacious (comparative more incapacious, superlative most incapacious)

1. Small; narrow; cramped; unable to hold or allow the passage of very much.
   • It is a contrast, to be contemplated with grateful emotions, that in a place where a century ago twenty-five families gathered in an incapacious wooden edifice to lift their hearts and voices to God , and to praise him in the forms of the Liturgy , there are now to be found at least a thousand...1865, Eben Edwards Beardsley, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, page 199
   • While the crowd are nestling into their places, the lawyers, preparatory to striking the first blow, are bustling round within the incapacious bar, each viewed with the eye of admiration by about half of the assembled multitude , and each viewed with the eye of scorn by about the other half .1884, A. A. Putnam, Ten Years a Police Court Judge, page 173
2. Not capable; having limited abilities; weak, incompetent, and/or foolish.
   • Can art be so dim-sighted, learnèd sir? I did not think her so incapacious.1617, Thomas Middleton, A Fayre Quarrell
   • When Nature has doom'd him among the incapacious and silly, 't is not in the power of correction or instruction, or in all the arts, to cure him.1620, Owen Feltham, Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political
3. Small; limited, modest, lacking grandeur or nobility.
   • yet, inasmuch as he is capable of understanding the vast disproportions of time and eternity, of a mortal flesh and an immortal spirit, how preposterous a course were it and unworthy of a man, yea, how dishonourable and reproachful to his Maker, should he prefer the momentary pleasures of narrow...1668, John Howe, The Blessedness of the Righteous
   • Souls that are made little and incapacious cannot enlarge their Thoughts to take in any great Compass of Times or Things1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth
4. Insufficient.
   • […] by buzzing them into popular eares and capaci- ties, incapacious of them, unable to comprehend them.1625, Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem: A just Appeale from two Unjust Informers, page 80
   • These my Letters are incapacious for mee to set downe at large the reasons so my dilatory answering your Grace.1674, Ephraim Pagitt, Christianography, page 11
5. Incapacitating.
   • […] Agamben insists, one can still see even in darkness where what one sees is the colour of incapacity. […] Deleuzian obscurity is, like Agamben's incapacious darkness, a darkness that allows one to see.2013, William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview, page 147
   • What we call the corpus exanime is a suffering itself blackened by the incapacious assertion of its suffering; it is invaded, petrified by the gaze; but it can only experience itself as hemorrhaging that precedes every object-relation, every moi, and that follows indifferently from the social death...2023, David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being