unobservableadj.n.

1615 T. Jackson Justifying Faith iii. vi. 314 Riches..will..by degrees vnobseruable breed such distempers in the soule as will be ready to bring forth death.

1664 R. Boyle Exper. & Considerations Colours 114 Little and Singly Unobservable Images of the Lucid Body.

1715 R. South 12 Serm. IV. 163 Such small, such contemptible, and almost unobservable Hints have sometimes unraveled..the deepest-laid Villanies.

1895 S. Baring-Gould Noémi xiii He had to beware of putting his hand on fire that was unobservable by daylight.

1949 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 196 562 The solar flux in the unobservable spectral region.

2012 Guardian (Nexis) 31 Oct. 37 Scientific theories (and the unobservable entities they depend on) are merely helpful, but arbitrary and disposable, human tools.

1658 J. Durham Comm. Bk. Revelation xiii. 564 Neither is it unobservable that Bellarmine attributeth that greatnesse of the Popes Dominion to the time preceeding the Reformation.

1674 M. Clifford Treat. Humane Reason 40 It is not unobservable, that the Unity of the Church of God is compared not to the unity of one Man, but of a Man and Woman joyned in Marriage.

1791 A. Bicknell Instances Mutability of Fortune xv. 302 Those..prognostics which often mark the early days of such as are born to singularly eminent situations in life, were not unobservable in the earlier days of Felix.

1874 Athenæum 5 Dec. 743/1 His prejudices against all Denominations outside his own Church were not unobservable.

1908 Japan Weekly Mail 24 Oct. 493/1 Exhorting to virtue instead of laying claim to its previous possession, which latter propensity is not unobservable in other lands.

2004 S. Auguste Ess. on School Choice (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Michigan) 139 If there is not unobservable variation in fixed costs across markets, this evidence is against models of perfect competition.

1851 E. A. Dormer Lady Selina Clifford I. xii. 220 The ‘unobservables’, as she called them, received more encouragement from her; they were ‘quiet, good sort of people, contented with their station’.

1925 Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 36 349 Imageless thoughts, special acts, unconscious or unnoticed acts and sensations are all cast into the limbo of unobservables.

1939 A. Eddington Philos. Physical Sci. iii. 33 The detection of even a single unobservable, which has gate-crashed into physical knowledge, may have farreaching consequences.

2000 J. Haldane in A. Hastings et al. Oxf. Compan. Christian Thought 467/2 It may not be possible to use observational terms in a literal way to characterize unobservables.

1898 Sci. Proc. Royal Dublin Soc. 8 148 The ivy bloom is small and inconspicuous, but then it has the season to itself, and its unobservability is no disadvantage.

1944 Mind 53 224 The positivist principle..does not tell us anything at all about the observability or unobservability of the facts stated in P.

2013 G. M. Køien & V. A. Oleshchuk Aspects Personal Privacy iii. 40 If unobservability is attained then the adversary will not even know that there is any communication.