"Aberration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Suydam had pronounced the case peculiarly difficult and dangerous, and as the days wore on, bringing no debatement of cerebral excitement, he expressed the opinion that some terrible shock had produced the aberration that baffled his skill, and threatened to permanently ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... present opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or interest. But we may rely with confidence on the judgment of successive generations on departed eminence; for it is detached from the chief cause of present aberration. So various are the prejudices, so contradictory the partialities and predilections of men, in different countries and ages of the world, that they never can concur through a course of centuries in one opinion, if it is not founded in truth and justice. The vox populi ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was under deep "religious impressions", and, in fact, with the exception of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... day; and after Katherine, on Hardy's part, had suggested sundry innovations, involving the condemnation of all the pictures and ornaments she could lay her hands on,—a piece of sacrilege which Mrs. Rogers regarded more in sorrow than in anger, as indicating a pitiable aberration of intellect,—the rooms ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a perfect knowledge of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but only ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... an exclamation of horror; the doctor soothed her with an assurance that there was no cause for alarm. "Incipient aberration" was of easy cure: the mischief lay in delay. "Miss Hardie," said he paternally, "during a long and busy professional career, it has been my painful province to witness the deplorable consequences of the non-recognition, by friends and relatives, of the precedent symptoms of those organic ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... design neither embraced nor required a single one of those details. Did you, Sir, vote against the previous question? On this point you are silent, and the minutes afford no information; but if you did, your vote was a most remarkable aberration from your proslavery course in Congress. After the previous question had been seconded, it was moved to lay the bill on the table. Had this motion been carried, you might have introduced another bill, omitting the "objectionable details," but you voted with the slaveholders. ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... in the presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar incident in a debauched and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... which provide | it with the rudiments of all | knowledge. Of course, Bacon argues, | we cannot get any information about | things except with the senses, and | skeptics are wrong when, questioning | them, they plunge the mind into | despair. "But by far the greatest | hindrance and aberration of the human | understanding proceeds from the | dulness, incompetency, and deceptions | of the senses" (IV, 58). On the one | hand, they are too dull and too | gross, and let the more subtle parts | of nature escape our observation: | their range is limited ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... in course of time. He was happy in his marriage and in his family, and such troubles and distresses as were inevitable he accepted calmly and quietly. In his death, as in his life, he was fortunate: he had no long or painful illness, and he was spared the calamity of aberration of intellect, the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... member of the House, is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament."[725] He was careful to observe himself the deference to parliamentary privilege which he exacted from others. It is no (p. 259) strange aberration from the general tenor of his rule that in 1512 by Strode's case[726] the freedom of speech of members of Parliament was established, and their freedom from arrest by Ferrers' case in 1543. In 1515 ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above knowledge we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind, from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises. So with the anti-slavery fanatics: their conclusions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are," said Perenna, producing the pocket-book which he had taken out of the cripple's jacket. "Here are letters and documents which the villain preserved, owing to a mental aberration common to all great criminals. Here, by good luck, is his correspondence with Hippolyte Fauville. Here is the original of the prospectus from which I learned that the house on the Place du Palais-Bourbon was for sale. Here is a memorandum of Jean Vernocq's journeys to ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... himself, in a reflective gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a controlling power is recognised by every church; and moral and mental aberration, such as no communion could tolerate, justified the interposition of authority. An exact conformity with the English custom required the legalisation of an ecclesiastical court; but the church act had subverted the dominant status of the English church. A court requires to subpoena witnesses, to ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... horse, that had neighed gleefully to see him, and rode away through the avenue and along the empty ways among the untenanted summer cottages, all the drearier and more forlorn because of the rain, he felt as if he had left an aberration, some hideous dream, behind, instead of the stark reality of the gaunt and ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a pile ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and glanced over the edge of the stone at Bastin's lantern which was sailing alongside of us, till presently we passed it. Bastin had lit it before we started, I think in a moment of aberration, and it burned for quite a long while, showing like a star when the shaft grew darker as it did by degrees, a circumstance that testifies to the excellence of the make, which is one advertised not to go out in any wind. Not that we felt wind, or even draught, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... such experienced officers necessarily are to death in all its phases, it was with no common emotion that the aged detective entered the presence of the dead girl and took his first look at this latest victim of mental or moral aberration. So young! so innocent! so fair! A schoolgirl, or little more, of a class certainly above the average, whether judged from the contour of her features or the niceties of her dress. With no evidences of great wealth about her, there was yet something in ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... I choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we may consider ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... might be interesting, but scarcely worth while, to attempt to penetrate to the just thought which misled M. Comte, for there is almost always a grain of truth in the errors of an original and powerful mind. There is another grave aberration in M. Comte's view of the method of positive science, which though not more unphilosophical than the last mentioned, is of greater practical importance. He rejects totally, as an invalid process, psychological observation ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, What has America done for mankind? let our answer be this:—America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the party drew him into the vortex of their intemperate career; separated him still farther from his real friends, and excited him to actions and expressions of dissatisfaction, which grieved them, but could not loosen their affections from him. They would not suffer the temporary aberration to weigh against the immeasurable merits of his life; and although they tumbled his seducers from their places, they preserved his memory embalmed in their hearts, with undiminished love and devotion; and there it for ever will remain embalmed, in entire oblivion of every ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the letter that Janetta read under the beech trees; and as she read it tears gathered in her eyes and fell upon the pages. But they were not tears of sadness—rather tears of joy and thankfulness. For Wyvis Brand's aberration of mind—so it had always appeared to her—had given her much pain and sorrow. And he seemed now to have placed his foot upon the road ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... are violently jealous are suffering from mental aberration. The jealous person loses, for he drives away the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... entirely at variance with the theory of the society in which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations. Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence. It is the old story of freedom and hardship being preferable to chains and luxury. The material environment ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... acknowledge that the practice of burying or destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain stages of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... have occurred to any other man but this; to him, however, it did not occur. The crying, shrieking need for money was the thing that stunned him and petrified him. Shattered and tossed to the brink of aberration, stretched at frightful mental tension for a fortnight, he finally succumbed, and told himself that ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... things, and that geniuses[10] and clever people are as common as rats. Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Although there are people who utterly deny any such thing, and say that no man in his right senses ever yet saw any supernatural phantom or apparition, but that children only, and silly women, or men disordered by sickness, in some aberration of the mind or distemperature of the body, have had empty and extravagant imaginations, whilst the real evil genius, superstition, was in themselves. Yet if Dion and Brutus, men of solid understanding, and philosophers, not to be easily deluded by fancy or discomposed by any ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... days she had united in herself a seductive grace of carriage, beauty of person, and dignity of rank, which made her the ornament of the French Court. She was almost the only one about the unfortunate Charles VI. who could influence him in his moments of mental aberration. Coming from the luxury of the most splendid court in Italy, she brought into France the most refined taste in matters connected with the arts. The inventory of her jewels at the time of her marriage includes three Books of Hours, three German MSS., and a volume called Mandavilla. Like her ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... the centre before he can trace the limits and imperfections. Once there, once identified with his object, he can observe its irregularities without being irritated or perturbed. As for that Rhadamanthine criticism which sits aloof from its object, and treats every aberration from a straight line as something abnormal and abominable, he leaves it to the immaculate. In truth, such criticism, with all its pretences to authority, is open to this fatal objection,—it tends to destroy our relish for literature; instead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of speech. They could now discuss an address to the sovereign, and give full publicity to their debates. Inquiry could now be made to some purpose, whether the Italian policy of Napoleon III. was sanctioned by France, whether that aberration were national which impelled to the violation of all right and law, in order to unify Italy, and pave the way, at the same time, for the unification of Germany. The revolutionary left of the French parliament, as a matter of course, favored the Emperor's revolutionary foreign ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will say that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of mysterious separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart—in the teeth of Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged Swift into such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous perplexity—in spite of the verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my experience and conversation go, generally take Vanessa's part in the controversy—in spite of the tears which Swift ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Scripture; if, on the other hand, you affirm absence of motive on its part, you must affirm absence of activity also.—Let us then assume that just as sometimes an intelligent person when in a state of frenzy proceeds, owing to his mental aberration, to action without a motive, so the highest Self also created this world without any motive.—That, we reply, would contradict the omniscience of the highest Self, which is vouched for by Scripture.—Hence ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... far. It was unworthy of the president of the Sylvan Silver Hollow Company, and he was not quite sure but that his confidences with Collinson might have imperiled even the interests of the company. To atone for this momentary aberration, and correct his dismal fancies, he resolved to attend to some business at Skinner's before returning, and branched off on a long detour that would intersect the traveled stage-road. But here a singular incident overtook him. As he wheeled into the turnpike, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... expresses itself by nothing more certainly than elegant wraps," she said, parodying another famous dictum; "and I should not like to be able to understand the state of mind a lady was in when she bought herself a blue woollen shawl; but I could believe she was suffering at the time from a temporary aberration of intellect—only, if she wore it afterwards the thing would be quite inexplicable." Claudia drew the wrap round her with dignity, and made no reply; then Ideala laughed and turned to me. "Certainly your friend," she said, alluding to a young sculptor ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... was, it is said, about two thousand pounds; and, as has been already observed, the money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct—of acts and omissions; there ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... secret sin, Some aberration fraught with morbid gloom, A buried hope which ever burst its ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... have been laughed at; and the lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... letters, and a photograph which he had presented to Holm. Ibsen brooded and brooded over the incident, and at last came to the conclusion that the young man had intended to return her letters and photograph to a young lady to whom he was known to be attached, and had in a fit of aberration mixed up the two objects of his worship. Some time after, Holm appeared at Ibsen's rooms. He talked quite rationally, but professed to have no knowledge whatever of the letter-incident, though he admitted the truth of Ibsen's conjecture that the "belle dame ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... must have been for a long time out of her wits; some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof had fallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmed that the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause of her mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time when this woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become a beggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in those days this old woman exercised a peculiar ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... were the only members of the family at home. I could not see or hear them anywhere, so, presuming they were out walking, I washed my hands, lit a lamp, and sat down to my tea, where it had been left for me on the dining-table. I remembered—wonderful aberration from my usual thoughtlessness—that the book I had left in the hammock had a beautiful cover which the dew would spoil, so I left my tea to bring it in. Two little white squares struck my eye in the gathering dusk. I picked them up also, and, bringing them to the light, opened the ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... brought our family few smiles but many tears, and the death-angel passed close to our doors. My eldest brother, while at work in the hayfield, was smitten by the sun, causing a mental aberration which made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and finally led him to cut the thread of life with his own hand; my second brother was pulled by his coat entangled in a wheel, beneath a heavy load which crushed ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... was completed, they were led in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... he. The Compact had indeed set an indelible mark upon him—a mark which he was to carry to his grave, for during the forty-four years of life that remained to him he was never again the Robert Gourlay of old, and was subject to periodical seasons of mental aberration. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Aberration: a form that departs in some striking way from the normal type; either single or occurring rarely, ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... avez bien raison, Monsieur. Je suis evidemment dans mon tort. Ma visite a Varsovie etait une aberration. As to my stay, je suis deja tout ce qu'il y a de plus ennuye. I have seen enough of Warsaw to last for the rest of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... who looked after him, and of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, very little ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... aberration in which everything is pardonable. Whatever you do, you will be acquitted ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 'Blackwood,' do you see an article called 'Poetic Aberration'? It came into my head that it might be a stone thrown at me, and Robert went to Monaldini's to glance at it. Sure enough it is a stone. He says a violent attack. And let me do him justice. It was only the misstatement in the 'Athenaeum' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... am liable to fits of delirium but by a sudden and alarming aberration while waiting for her answer I became mentally aware of three trained dogs dancing on their hind legs. I don't know why. Perhaps because of the pervading solemnity. There's nothing more solemn on earth than a ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... bit too late—not by any means too late. What has happened can be hushed up—or at any rate can be explained away as a purely temporary, though regrettable, aberration. But—there is one step that it is absolutely ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... atrocious custom, a dearth of provisions, which is an evil counsellor; not so the Necrophori, for, thanks to my generosity, victuals are more than plentiful, both beneath the soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this slaughter. What we see is an aberration due to exhaustion, the morbid fury of a life on the point of extinction. As is generally the case, work bestows a peaceable disposition on the grave-digger, while inaction inspires him with perverted tastes. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... time we should be on our guard against so insidious a habit. Its reduction to absurdity may be found (alackaday!) in Fors Clavigera for June 1, 1874. With shame and sorrow I transcribe the passage, for the time has not yet come for it to be forgotten. If it were merely the aberration of an individual, however distinguished, it were better kept out of sight, out of mind; but it is, I repeat, the reckless exaggeration of a not ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... extremely lucid remark, our conversation on this particular subject ended; but I wondered, during a few uneasy moments, whether the temporary mental aberration which had once afflicted Helen's grandfather and mine was not reappearing in this, his youngest descendant. My wondering was cut short by Budge, who remarked, in a ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the regiment who would accept the theory that any one of the three had connived at the escape. As for the sergeant—he had served four enlistments in the —teenth, and without a flaw in his record beyond an occasional aberration in the now distant past, due to the potency of the poteen distilled by certain Hibernian experts not far from an old-time "plains fort," where the regiment had rested on its march 'cross continent. As for the officers—but who would suppose an officer guilty of anything of the kind—a ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... was a hard-working general practitioner in Birmingham, where his name is still remembered and respected. About ten years ago he began to show signs of mental aberration, which we were inclined to put down to overwork and the effects of a sunstroke. Feeling my own incompetence to pronounce upon a case of such importance, I at once sought the highest advice in Birmingham and London. Among ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... after she had turned away. Marishka sighed gently. Her companion's gaze left her and he peered straight before him, frowning. All this she knew by her woman's sixth sense without even looking at him. Even a thinking machine must have its moments of aberration. In a little while, the choice of roads having been decided, he turned to her again and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... parting her long, clustering hair over her shoulders. Notwithstanding the spectacle of horror presented in this living skeleton, there is something in her look and action which bespeaks more the abuse of long confinement than the result of natural aberration of mind. "She gets fierce now and then, and yells," says the unmoved Glentworthy, "but ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... are due to putrefaction; the colours always show best when the oyster has been a bad one. Hence they are considered a defect and are called chromatic aberration. ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... and again, in the belief that women easily forgive the ill-doing of which they are the cause, to that specious plea, and Marsa asked herself, in amazement, what aberration had possession of this man that he should even pretend to excuse his ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... lathe; he was a turner! As subsidiary to this pursuit, he took up a fancy for making collections. Philosophical doctors, devoted to the study of madness, regard this tendency towards collecting as a first degree of mental aberration when it is set on small things. The Baron de Watteville treasured shells and geological fragments of the neighborhood of Besancon. Some contradictory folk, especially women, would say of Monsieur de Watteville, "He has a noble soul! He ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... cruelty revolt and displease us in the literature of Newgate and the hulks. His crime does, in fact, belong to those startling paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and especially of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and examine. Whenever crime appears the aberration and monstrous product of a great intellect or of a nature ordinarily virtuous, it becomes not only the subject for genius, which deals with passions, to describe, but a problem for philosophy, which ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... highest authority. He merely nods his head, says a word now and then, or holds his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my own part, I had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabaeus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip-cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the meantime ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... her, and it would be so inconvenient—" The Prioress's thoughts faded away; for even to herself she did not like to admit that it would be inconvenient for Evelyn to confess to Father Daly the sins she had committed—if she had committed any. Perhaps it might be all an aberration, an illusion in the interval between her father's death and her return to the convent. "Her sins have been absolved, and for guidance she will not turn to Father Daly but to me." The Reverend Mother ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... this unexpected lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan was concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to Harley under the first rough shock of her mother's startling and what then had appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make up for it to the big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously in love. Also she was still all alone in the mental chaos into which everything that had happened last night ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... free and high of heart, or recurred to the din and crash of the battle-field, with the mad bounding of the war-horse, and the loud clang of the trumpet. Perhaps the acute pain of my swollen and suffering arm gave the character to my mental aberration; for I have more than once observed among the wounded in battle, that even when torn and mangled by grape from a howitzer, their ravings have partaken of a high feature of enthusiasm,—shouts of triumph and exclamations of pleasure, even songs have I heard, but never once the low muttering ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... run over me, my table, and my desk; others, more vigorous, fly, quite regardless of consequences, until they hit against something, upon which, half spreading their wings, they make their heads a pivot and spin round in a circle, in a manner which indicates a temporary aberration of the cockroach mind. It is these outbreaks alone which rouse us from our lassitude. Knocks are heard resounding on all sides, and each inhabitant of a cabin, armed with a slipper, is seen taking ample revenge upon the disturbers of his rest and the destroyers ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... had failed to notice a change in Mrs. Dinneford. She was not able to hide her troubled feelings. Edith was watching her far more closely than she imagined; and now that she was temporarily out of her mind, she did not let a word or look escape her. The first aspect of her temporary aberration was that of fear and deprecation. She was pursued by some one who filled her with terror, and she would lift her hands to keep him off, or hide her head in abject alarm. Then she would beg him to keep away. ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural. It is frequently a pathological aberration in an organic entity that allows us to see in physical appearance things that do not come outwardly to the fore in the more balanced condition of normal development, although they are equally part ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... recommended a curacy as the best means of clearing up Trinitarian difficulties, that "orders" are a sort of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he were strait, end by making him so. According to Carlyle, on the contrary, the real "aberration" of Sterling was his choice of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... it all as an unfortunate aberration; and if you regret it, and change your mind, you will be free at any time you like to come back and nothing shall be ever said about it. But I'm not begging you to do so. I may be wrong; perhaps she's the woman to make you happy. Let me know within ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... majesty of the mountains, the great stretches of shining sand, the long peaceful nights, all tend to hallucinations. Sheepmen are in constant danger of mental aberration. Society is needed quite ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... her husband and her children. This is not right. Like man, woman is born and lives in society, and she can not and must not remain indifferent to social distress and suffering. To think otherwise would be selfishness and aberration and would leave society a prey to much suffering which only the blessed hand of woman can cure or relieve. Let woman be the glory and happiness of the home; but do not forget that she must extend her beneficent action beyond the confines of the household, that she must make the world outside the ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... misanthropists, would hardly dare to suggest, is accomplished as a matter of course by simple peasants in their devotion to whatever method of salvation they believe to be in accordance with God's will. Thus came into existence the self-mutilators, or skoptzi, victims, no doubt, of some mental aberration, some misdirected sense of duty, but yet ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... proposal." One has only to read our Ambassador's description of his interview with the German Chancellor after our decision was announced, "so evidently overcome by the news of our action," to see that through some extraordinary mental aberration the German rulers did actually believe that a vital treaty with Britain's signature upon it could be regarded by this country as a mere ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... humour came out under the cloak of mental disease. The first is of a Scottish nobleman of the last century who had been a soldier the greater part of his life, but was obliged to come home on account of aberration of mind, superinduced by hereditary propensity. Desirous of putting him under due restraint, and at the same time of engaging his mind in his favourite pursuit, his friends secured a Sergeant Briggs ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... of chromatic, spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible—it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. I could ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... serene, smiling face showed no sign of any aberration of intellect, and Margery took Grace's hand, and hurried her through the crowd, resolved that she should not, for another instant, stand by and countenance such ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... I granted. He was a dealer in merchandise, in a small way, at St. Mary's, where he was known as a reputable, modest, and temperate man, who had been honorably discharged, with some small means, from the army. He visited Detroit in May to renew his stock. Symptoms of aberration there showed themselves, which became very decided after his return. Utter madness supervened. It was necessary to confine him in a separate building, and to chain him to a post, where he passed five months as an appalling spectacle of a human being, without ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... me this morning when you assured me your daughter had left this house to return to her employment at Stading?" said Merrington, with a cruel smile. "That wasn't true, you know. How do you describe that untruth? As a temporary aberration of memory, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of Xenia, states, that on one occasion, while Tecumseh was quite young, he saw him intoxicated. This is the only aberration of the kind, which we ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... no question here about the genuineness of his lying as a symptom of mental aberration; i.e., the fabrication as manifested by this individual is something over which he has no more control than the dementia praecox patient has over his delusions. In both instances the symptoms ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... conclusion was at last forced upon me that he had been endeavoring to commit suicide by a slow course of starvation and exposure. Either as the cause or the result of this attempt, I read, in the final notes, signs of an aberration of mind. This also explained the singular demeanor of the man when found, and his refusal to take medicine or nourishment. He had selected a long way to accomplish his purpose, but had reached the end ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Serene Republic that the books of magic found by their apparitors in his possession—"The Clavicula of Solomon," the "Zecor-ben," and other kindred works—had been collected by him as curious instances of human aberration. But the Inquisitors of State would not have believed him, for the Inquisitors were among those who took magic seriously. And, anyhow, they had never asked him to explain, but had left him as if forgotten in that abominable ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... said, "that I may be forgiven my temporary fit of aberration. I cannot thank you sufficiently, Duchess, for ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... certain of my colleagues have marred the exposition of their most valuable discoveries. But why should a work planned so sanely have met with so fantastic a fate? By what freak of destiny should it have proved the cause of the monstrous aberration of my mind? But let me not anticipate events nor confuse dates. My dissertation was intended to be read at a public sitting of the five academies, a distinction all the more precious, as it rarely falls to the lot of works ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... must be very careful not to confound monomania with eccentricity. The distinction is as important as it is real. Eccentricity is a conscious aberration from the common course of life; it consists in peculiarities in reasoning, words, and actions, which are wilfully indulged, in defiance of popular sentiment. The eccentric man knows that he is eccentric; he is willing ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... call Divinity, is only the product of their phantasy, of a psychological aberration. It is not Divinity that has created man, but man who creates Divinity in his own image. In God man only adores his own being. God is only a fiction, but a very harmful fiction. The Christian God is ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... not to hint," he said; "hinting is not in my line. I dare to say it out. I dare to say that in one of those moments of aberration, of deviation, whatever you choose to call it, that sometimes descend upon the most unlikely people, you pulled that paper out, from idle curiosity, I daresay, and finding out what it was you sent it to ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Rev. Dr. John M. Krebbs, of New York, states through this clairvoyant that the cause of his mental aberration while on earth was a misinterpretation by him of a spiritual vision which he was permitted to receive. Thus misunderstanding the aim of his spiritual visitants, he became haunted with a fallacy which ultimated in his ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... struck a bargain, and Sir Charles was to be shifted to Burdoch's asylum, and nobody allowed to see him there, etc., etc.; the old system, in short, than which no better has as yet been devised for perpetuating, or even causing, mental aberration. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... and misfortune, until they forgot their regiments, companies, places and date of capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead Line, and giving the young brats of guards the coveted ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and that the Theatre-Francais had made very flattering offers to the poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will be ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the "sphere's aberration," Mention the "leathery globe," Say he got "free transportation"— Though that try the patience of Job. But if you're wise you'll discard en- Cumbrances such as we thwack— Especially "sinister garden" And ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... money, the disgrace falls upon me, and not upon the man who is robbed, according to the world's rule of honor; but if I rob him of his wife, it is not I, but the robbed man who is disgraced. What does it mean? Is it a mere aberration of the moral sense, or is it that between stealing a man's purse and stealing his wife, there is such a vast difference that the two cases cannot be even compared? I have often thought over this, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Her Majesty in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the dead and restored to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... ABERRATION. An apparent change of place, or alteration of their mean position, in the fixed stars, caused by the earth's orbital movement.—Aberration of a planet signifies its progressive geocentric motion, or the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth |
