"Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hard at work; thanks to them, the conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is working ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... any metropolis of modern Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in more ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... laws affect him in the air he breathes, the food he eats, the clothes he wears, and (in) every circumstance surrounding his habilitation. In the wholesale violation of these laws after the war, as previously stated, was laid the foundation of the degeneration of the physical and mental condition of the Negro. Licentiousness left its slimy trail of sometimes ineradicable disease upon his physical being, and neglected bronchitis, pneumonia, and pleurisy lent their ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... so-called magical literature, but such foul deeds are no more real Magic than are the horrors of religious fanaticism the outcome of true Mohammedanism or Christianity. This is the abuse, the superstition, the degeneration of all that is good and true, rendered all the more vile because it pertains to denser planes of matter than even the physical. It is a strange thing that the highest should pair with the lowest where man is concerned, but it ever ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... development of a style is reached a change is sure to come. It may be a degeneration, or it may be the introduction of a new style through some great artistic impulse either native or introduced by contact with an outside influence. Fortunately, the Gothic passed through no pallid process of ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... nocturnal emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... writers who have endeavored to make an estimate of Sterne's character have ignored this part of Garrick's opinion, though his statement with reference to the degeneration of Sterne's moral ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... at least ahead of some of its "very proper" predecessors in that weddings do not have to be set for noon because a bridegroom's sobriety is not to be counted on later in the day! That young people of to-day prefer games to conversation scarcely proves degeneration. That they wear very few clothes is not a symptom of decline. There have always been recurring cycles of undress, followed by muffling from shoe-soles to chin. We have not yet reached the undress of Pauline Bonaparte, so the muffling period may ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... meet with no religious phenomena to which we cannot assign their place in the development. We must remember that ground is often lost as well as won in human history, and that in religions as in nations degeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not be too sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading through the immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices. Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Russian campaign, have been more than compensated by five years of peace, and by the horses that were left by the allied troops. An annual supply is also drawn from Mecklenburg and the adjacent countries. Importations of this kind are regarded as indispensable, to prevent a degeneration in the stock. A Frenchman can scarcely be brought to believe it possible; that we in England can preserve our fine breed of horses without having recourse to similar expedients; and if at last, by dint of repeated asseverations, you succeed in obtaining ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... helplessness, filled her heart. She had written many brave letters to her Eastern friends, but the vital contests, the important factors of her life, she had not mentioned. She had given no hint of her mother's physical and moral degeneration, and she had set down no word of her longing to return; but now that she was within sight of the railway the call of the East, the temptation to escape all her discomforts, was almost great enough to carry her away; but into her mind came the thought of the ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... did them. Neither did any one else." "Studying Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher (between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to myself or to others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration, item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got it—habits of imagination, and expression, headway of personality—are ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... found for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... she described herself whenever anyone asked her as to her status in life. To her more intimate friends she confided that she was not a "weed widder," but one of the "grass" variety. The story of how her husband, Madison, had never been "No 'count, even befo' de wah," and of his rapid degeneration thereafter, was ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... broke out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... is the conception of Deity as a means of final emancipation of the human soul from further transmigration, and of union with the Universal Spirit or World Soul. There is, however, perhaps no sadder chapter in the history of human thought than the story of the later degeneration of the Yoga system into one of bloody and cruel rites in India, and of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... shore. Nearly all of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few healthy men to ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of the general public I have explained. It was not really opposition. It was simply a part of the disease of the period; the dropsical, fatty degeneration of a people. But the mere fact that the reformers sent forth their cries and still laboured beside the public's crowded race-course; that such people as the lady I have mentioned existed—and there were many like her—should show that London as I found it was not all ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... she is not tragic: she is too rational. And in her career there is no progression, no decline or degeneration. Her condition is once and for always. There is and will ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... men who were talking in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them did not, indeed, originate with himself. It is entirely probable that he would never have thought of despising them as he did but for Mrs. Cinch. That excellent lady, with all her many virtues, could never forgive those legs. Their degeneration, as she regarded it, had not begun when she married Mr. Cinch. He was then a slight young man and his legs were unexceptionable in size and shape. They had become bowed and insufficient within comparatively recent years, and she had never felt quite able to accept Mr. Cinch's ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... and at what hour he dined, and whether he wrote with a quill or a J pen. Whether the quality of the pens he used was or was not intimately connected with the quality of his moral fibre, and whether his ethical degeneration could or could not be dated from his ceasing to make two fair copies of his manuscripts. We should also like to be informed whether his studs were gold or gilt, and, if they were gold, whether it was 18-carat gold, or only 15. If they were gilt, whether he wore them gilt on ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... 'The degeneration and depravity of the mongrels was so great that they deified the emperors. And many of the emperors were of a character so vile that their deification proves that the post-Roman soul must have been more depraved than that of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... question of a medusa ever having arisen suddenly and de novo from a polyp-bud, if only because both forms are adapted in their structure as a whole, and in every detail to the conditions of their life. A sudden origin, in a natural way, of numerous adaptations is inconceivable. Even the degeneration of a medusoid from a free-swimming animal to a mere brood-sac (gonophore) is not sudden and saltatory, but occurs by imperceptible modifications throughout hundreds of years, as we can learn from the numerous stages of the process of degeneration ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... peroneal element is of course somewhat the more exposed, as lying posterior; but it seems unreasonable to assume that so large a proportion of the injuries can implicate the posterior segment of the nerve as to make the startling difference in the incidence of degeneration explicable. In this relation we may bear in mind that the muscles supplied by this nerve suffer most in the degeneration subsequent to anterior polio-myelitis, and again that in cerebral hemiplegia or spinal-cord injuries they are the last to recover. Unfortunately ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... It causes a softening of the muscles of the heart, and a fatty degeneration, thus clogging the workings of this ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... was slow in seeing this degeneration. The Gracchi brothers tried to stem the tide, and they were slain, sacrificed by the nation they sought to save.[16] Cornelius Sulla was the man who completed, and at the same time made plain to all, the change that had been growing up. Having bitter grievances against his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... from external dangers. It may be observed in certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain unaffected by it, incapable of effort, unintelligent, slothful, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... process of natural selection in the human species. Overpopulation, at least until artificial selection arrives, is not an evil, but a good in human society. Without it there would not be sufficient elimination of the unfit in human society to prevent wholesale social degeneration. Even with artificial selection, however, some overpopulation would be necessary for the working of any scheme of selection. We must conclude, then, that Malthus's theory, either as an explanation of the growth of modern populations or as an implied practical ethical ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent strategic errors, which made ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... you are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience—a more lengthened observation—is wanting on the subject. But after what you have said, it is my duty to tell ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... this connection that in such cases the sure instinct with which these species were originally endowed has been distorted, but that is to admit some degree of variation; the hypothesis of degeneration is as gratuitous as the other, and if we go so far as to risk a hypothesis, it would be better to use it to explain facts ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... civilized world. As a result of the dissemination of this poison, children are born blind, or are born to die, or, if they live, they are compelled to carry all through their helpless lives the stigma of disease and degeneration. It would surely seem that the individual to whom God has given intelligence and a conscience cannot think of these, the saddest facts in human experience, without resentment and humility. Surely the time has arrived when every ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... to Europe. M. Fourcault has addressed a communication to the Academie on 'Remedies against the Physical and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species,' intended more especially for the working-classes. He would have schools of gymnastics and swimming established along the great rivers, and on the sea-shore; gymnastic dispensaries, and clinical gymnastic in towns; and agricultural and other hospitals, combining simple and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... tandems are all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration in our village." ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... social aspects, as if dancing the "Lancers," with its forward and back movements, gallop, etc., and have finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have but little to record for some six thousand years—either ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Nerano Newspaper reading, to be discouraged Nice Nietzsche, his blind spot Nightingales, too much of a good thing; cease from troubling Ninetta, an attractive maiden Nose, degeneration of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... again until the valley of the Vilia opened out. And here, almost within sight of Vilna, D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... goes up." Nephritis, also, may result from emotional stress, because of the strain put upon the kidneys by the unconsumed activating substances. The increased heart action and the presence of these activating secretions may cause myocarditis and heart degeneration. Claudication also may result from the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... horde of ignorant negro men when at that time there were nearly 4,000,000 intelligent white women keenly alive to the interests of their country to whom the ballot was denied." He sketched the steady degeneration of national and State politics and exposed the conditions in Louisiana. He showed how the reforms that had been accomplished had been largely ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... sometimes present. Dilatation and tortuosity of the anterior ciliary veins are due apparently to excessive flow of blood through them on account of the abnormally small amount carried off by the venae vorticosae. In the stage of degeneration, ectasae of the sclera occur most frequently near the equator of the globe. Spontaneous ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he makes a ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have been ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... laws of heredity, though as yet only partially determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution—not disintegration and degeneration—two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote and encourage parenthood on the part of the best and ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... must not hasten to conclude, with Professor Flournoy, that if there is a future life it is one of wretched degeneration, one more misery added to all the others which overwhelm us ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... the best thing that could have happened. I have been getting abominably lazy. If I had gone on living my present life for another year or two, why, dash it! I honestly believe I should have succumbed to some sort of senile decay. Positively I should have got fatty degeneration of the brain! This will ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... happened to races on other planets that complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... excess in a community, but it is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war and with Mammon, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... temporary degeneration of character had vanished since his walk to Dover. He was as alert as ever in his care of Maurice, as anxiously solicitous for Cecile's benefit, and had also developed a remarkable and valuable faculty for finding small towns and out-of- the-way villages, where Cecile's slender store ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... I burned with curiosity. Also, fatty degeneration of the heart prompted me to annoy Dierdre O'Farrell. To spite me, she had refused to talk of the doctor. I was determined to hear all about him to spite her. You see to what a low level I have ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... or a dictionary or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman in any, bookstore. But here I am running on as if business men had nothing to do but listen to women talk. You must pardon me, for I was not thinking.—And you must let me thank you again for helping me. I read a good ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of history have recognized the gravity of the population question, but they were mostly concerned with the tendency of the numbers in the State to increase beyond the means of subsistence, instead of the tendency to degeneration ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... legions were pressing down upon Egypt. The renegade Mark Antony was fighting for his life. For a time he was successful, but youth was no longer his, the spring had gone out of his veins, and pride and prosperity had pushed him toward fatty degeneration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... of genius as degeneration may be grouped with the naturalistic theories. His argument is in essence the following. Great mental efforts, and total absorption in one dominant thought, often produce physiological disorders or atrophy of important vital functions. Now these disorders ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... much more difficult than feminising of males because the testicular tissue was less resistent, and could not be grafted so easily. When it succeeded, however, degeneration of the seminal tubules took place, with increase of the interstitial or Leydig's cells. The vaginal opening in rats disappeared, partly or completely. The sexual instincts became male, the animals recognised a female in heat from one that was ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... delirium, convulsions, coma, and death. Usually there are remissions for two to three days, then jaundice comes on, with enlargement of the liver; haemorrhages from the mucous surfaces and under the skin; later, coma and convulsions. In chronic cases there is fatty degeneration of most of the organs and tissues of the body. The inhalation of the fumes of phosphorus, as in making vermin-killers, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... way challenged public opinion—society women with whom the public has no concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a powerful individuality has fallen—is the most significant foreboding of the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad, a fussy contempt and hatred for ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... though I think it the greatest possible mistake for legally married people to intentionally remain childless, for any reason other than mental or physical degeneration, I am strongly against the Lutheran doctrine of unlimited families. Times have changed since Luther's day, and the necessity for small families is fairly obvious in the twentieth century for all but very wealthy people. Where money is no object, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander down to ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only sentiment that lay hid ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. If it be a principle that we abandon, it does not matter what the principle is, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... fortress in which the defenders threw away their lives. There is little reason to doubt that they considered the frenzy and carelessness of death produced by the liquor as a form of divine possession. Opium has contributed much to the degeneration of the Rajputs, and their relapse to an idle, sensuous life when their energies were no longer maintained by the need of continuous fighting for the protection of their country. The following account by Forbes of a Rajput's daily life well illustrates the slothful effeminacy caused by ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to the mind trained in modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... would the absence of sharp competition within the group lead to racial degeneration? This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps a diminution of pugnacity and of the means to gratify this instinct would not be a misfortune. But it is certainly true that, if the operation of natural selection is suspended, rational ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes than that of statement. There ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation ANY HOW, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church. Which side is right here, who can say? Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... apparent detriment, but it is universally admitted that the animals selected for such inbreeding must be sound constitutionally, and free from disease. After a certain number of generations however, degeneration apparently sets in. The number of generations through which inbreeding may be carried varies with the species, and the purpose for which the animals are bred. Where they are bred primarily for their flesh, as for beef, ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed. Really happy people do not write stories—they accumulate adipose tissue and die at the top through fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. A certain disappointment in life, a dissatisfaction with environment, is necessary to stir the imagination to a creative point. If things are all to your taste you sit back and enjoy them. You forget the flight of time, the march of the seasons, your future life, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather, the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was typical: the course of cosmic life is ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... I had to cut it all out. 'Cut it out,' that certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have—Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson—this sounds like a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know the species; it is all too common. Meanwhile we must congratulate ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... flesh-and-blood natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. For although there have been retrogressions in the history of life, continued ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... capital of Neustria; or, if it ever had been more advanced there, which could have been only under the Roman sway, that it had retrograded into a barbarous state.—Moreover, the Gothic style, mentioned by Fridegode, was no other than a degeneration of the Roman, or, more properly, of the Lombardic architecture, distinguished by the circular arch, by insulated columns, by a paucity of ornaments, and by a general massiveness. It is by no means to be confounded with the style which has since passed under the same name, a style introduced about ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... Spain, particularly those north of the mountains which divide the two Castiles, may be seen gangs of fives and sixes of these people lolling or sleeping beneath the broiling sun on their gigantic and heavily laden mutes and mules, the boast of Spain, but dearly purchased by the debasement and degeneration of a once noble breed of horses. In a word, almost the entire commerce of nearly one half of Spain passes through the hands of the Maragatos, whose fidelity to their trust is such that no one accustomed to employ them would hesitate to entrust them with the transport ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... a cultivated intelligence, a college education, a skilled hand, an observant eye, valuable experience, great tact, all exchanged for rum, for a muddled brain, a bewildered intellect, a shattered nervous system, poisoned blood, a diseased body, for fatty degeneration of the heart, for Bright's disease, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of Ivanhoe; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as hear, how ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to whether any such message had been sent. The denial was made, and then the lie was given; and many to this day wonder exactly where the truth lay. At any rate, votes were lost and few gained, and many a worthy friend of good government lost heart and bemoaned the degeneration of the gentleman ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... means unpatriotic, people, like Peggy, at the beginning of the war thought trivial disappointments rotten nuisances. We had all waxed too fat during the opening years of the twentieth century, and, not having a spiritual ideal in God's universe, we were in danger of perishing from Fatty Degeneration of the Soul. As it was, it took a year or more of war ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... afterwards, who found the immediate cause to be heart-failure, held that such a supposition was unwarranted by facts. They asserted that a long day's journey, a hurried drive, and then an exhausting dance, were sufficient for such a result upon a heart enfeebled by fatty degeneration after the privations of a Crimean winter and other trying experiences, the coincidence of the sad event with any disclosure of hers ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... affected a rough-coated kind. Another instance has been given (11/146. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 5 pages 65 and 68. See also Prof. Hildebrand with a coloured figure in 'Bot. Zeitung' May 15, 1868 page 327. Puvis also has collected 'De La Degeneration' 1837 page 36) several other instances; but it is not in all cases possible to distinguish between the direct action of foreign pollen and bud-variations.) of two very different apple-trees growing close to each other, which bore fruit resembling ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia of mental and physical degeneration. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... must have been before the Phoenicians came to Britain, for they are certainly reputed to have brought the secret of clotted (or clouted) cream with them, and to have landed in Cornwall and Devon with their scald-pans with them, so that the degeneration of the Damnonii in the matter of delicacies ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Antef Nub-kheper-Ra, and his descendants, Antefs III and IV, were buried. In their time the pressure of foreign invasion seems to have been felt, for, to judge from their coffins, which show progressive degeneration of style and workmanship, poverty now afflicted Upper Egypt and art had fallen sadly from the high standard which it had reached in the days of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties. Probably the later Antefs and Sebekemsafs were vassals of the Hyksos. Their descendants ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... dead hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... subject, not only the variety, richness, and force which he had displayed in the Senate, but the capacity of presenting it in a way thoroughly adapted to the popular mind, and yet, at the same time, of preserving the impressive tone of a dignified statesman, without any degeneration into mere stump oratory. This wonderful series of speeches produced the greatest possible effect. They were heard by thousands and read by tens of thousands. They fell, of course, upon willing ears. The people, smarting under bankruptcy, poverty, and business depression, were wild for a change; ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fallen in his first sorrow, his hardy constitution had been shaken, if not weakened, by them. Physically his nerves were almost as good as ever, but morally he was not the same man. He felt the need of sympathy and confidence, which with such natures is the first sign of breaking down, and of the degeneration of pride. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... chief was on the way to be a man no more. There were stooped backs among them, a forward hang to arms, a sprouting of coarse, lank hair. Foreheads fell away, noses flattened coarsely, eyes grew small and shifty. Sadau informed Parr that such evidences of degeneration meant a residence of a year or so on the ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... Israel's moral degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water strengthens, another weakens; one makes beautiful, another ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... critical and unfriendly eye. He disliked this fatty degeneration excessively. Looking him up and down, he could find no point about him that gave him the least pleasure, with the single exception of the state of his hat, in the side of which he was rejoiced to perceive there was a large and ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... degeneration into the realm of pure foolery. It is a patent declaration: "This is only a play; laugh and we are content." Once more we venture to point a parallel on the modern stage, in the vaudeville comedian who interlards his dancing with comments such as: "I hate to do this, but it's the only way ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... and condemning the sins and follies of others and sublimely unconscious of our own until one day—ah, yes—one day we meet Ourselves face to face and see beneath all our pitiful shams and hypocrisies and know ourselves at last for what we really are—behold the decay of faculties, the degeneration of intellect bred of sloth and inanition and know ourselves at last—for exactly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... could say as much for you or your imitation dog," retorted Jim. "There's just three things in Borealis that go around smellin' thick of perfume, and you and that little two-ounce package of dog-degeneration are maybe some ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... are still used in the English playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard to pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a real test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cutting their beards till they found ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... as degenerative, and places among the signs of degeneration, deviations from the average normal, whether physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... had been propagated, but had not yet been passed into law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes, while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia was still, in theory, a Power of the second ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... schools must be judged by the cogency of the evidence put forth by each. The appearance of a degenerate form of a noble idea may closely resemble that of a refined product of a coarse idea, and the only method of deciding between degeneration and evolution would be the examination, if possible, of intermediate and remote ancestors. The evidence brought forward by believers in the Wisdom is of this kind. They allege: that the Founders of religions, judged by the records of their teachings, were far above the level of average humanity; ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... cause of degeneration among animals, yet it is not the sole cause. It is evident that if for any other reason animals should become fixed, and live inactive lives, they would degenerate. There are not a few instances of degeneration due simply to a quiescent ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it, for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given the right of way? Then the Bureau of Children will see to it that such provision is made. It will not be the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... ease, but there would be room in the world for milliards of additional human beings. When compared with this splendid struggle, how puny seems the great war! What has that war to do with the real struggle for existence? It is a product of degeneration. War is justifiable. Not war between human beings. But creative war for man's mastery over natural forces, the young war of which hardly a millionth part has yet been waged. In this war we can foresee victories such as no human ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... and to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind. Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam hath not only fallen from his Creator, but we ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... specially interesting in modern English modes of present-giving. We may, however, perhaps see in the custom of Christmas boxes, inexorably demanded and not always willingly bestowed, a degeneration of what was once friendly entertainment given in return for the good wishes and the luck brought by wassailers. Instances of gifts to calling neighbours have already come before our notice at several pre-Christmas festivals, notably All Souls', ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... disarrangements which over-feeding produces in stock. He found the heart of a one-year old Southdown wether, fattened according to the high-pressure system, to be little more than a mass of fat. In several other young, but so-called "matured" sheep, he found more or less fatty degeneration of the heart, and extensively spread disease of the liver and of the lungs. A four-year old Devon heifer, exhibited by the late Prince Consort at a Smithfield show, was found to be in a highly diseased state. It was slaughtered, and of ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops. Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine kings to death, particularly the method ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... points out that our present standard of living has not changed for generations, and argues that degeneration must result. Of course, he is right in his fact but wrong in ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... assistance of her detachment from European quarrels to such an arrangement, Europe of herself may not prove capable of it. Second, that if Europe does not come to some such arrangement the resulting unrest, militarism, moral and material degeneration, for the reasons above indicated and for others to be indicated presently, will most unfavorably affect the development of America, and expose her to dangers internal and external much greater than those ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... ovaries of the child being estimated at over 70,000. In view of the unquestionably large number of follicles in very young ovaries, and the relatively small number of ova which reach maturity, the degeneration of many follicles after reaching a certain degree of ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... evolutionary processes, we have learned to talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be constrained to eradicate ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... primitive backboned ancestor. It may be an offshoot from the same group. The sea-squirt further illustrates the origin of the backbone, since it has a similar rod of cartilage in its youth, and loses it, by degeneration, in its maturity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destruction when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... deep chairs, with their knees higher than their heads. There were no such chairs in this library, just as there was no afternoon tea except for ladies. Sir John Meredith was distressed to observe a great many signs of the degeneration of manhood, which he attributed to the indulgence in afternoon tea. Sir John had lately noticed another degeneration, namely, in the quality of the London gas. So serious was this falling off that he had taken to a lamp in the evening, which lamp stood ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... what cases should it be performed?—1. For disease of the elbow-joint which has resisted ordinary remedies, and is wearing down the patient's strength, including caries, ulceration of cartilages, and gelatinous synovial degeneration. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Rev. Warren Burton was assigned to this special form of ministry, and to that of a systematic investigation of the condition of the poor. He gave much attention to the needs of children, and made inquiry as to intemperance, licentiousness, and other forms of social degeneration. He was a diligent and successful worker until his ministry came to an end in October, 1848. For about a year, in 1847, Rev. William Ware also devoted himself to the house-to-house ministry; but failing health compelled his withdrawal. In April, 1845, Rev. Andrew Bigelow ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke |
