"Predisposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and especially if he has the example of an older and expert one, will, almost without the teaching of the master, become everything that can be wished, obedient to every order, even to the slightest motion of the hand. There is a natural predisposition for the office he has to discharge, which it requires little trouble or skill to develop ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... but take note that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... been recorded. Enough that half an hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other evidence of mental and moral disturbance. His cordiality and oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress in the doorway, who waved to him a ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... act, and, consequently, for every talent, an innate tendency is requisite, working automatically, and unconsciously carrying with itself the necessary predisposition; yet, for this very reason, it works on and on inconsequently, so that, although it contains its laws within itself, it may, nevertheless, ultimately run out, devoid of end or aim. The earlier a man perceives that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... not naturally possessed of a presentiment, or an apperception of a God, as the cause and reason of the universe. "If education be not already preceded by an innate consciousness of God, as an operative predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to act upon."[92] A mere verbal revelation can not communicate the knowledge of God, if man have not already the idea of a God in his mind. A name is a mere empty sign, a meaningless symbol, without a mental image of the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... these predispositions influence very strongly the early formation of habits of thought. But the fact remains that the character is built by long-continued habits of thought. If the mature edifice of character usually shows in an exaggerated form the peculiarities of the original predisposition, this merely indicates a probability that the slow erection of the edifice has proceeded at haphazard, and that reason has not presided over it. A child may be born with a tendency to bent shoulders. If nothing is done, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... mugs covered with white enamel, minute particles of which chipped off and mingled with what you drank. These particles were hard and sharp, like pure glass, and they cut and lodged in the intestines, causing, with other things, an excessive predisposition to appendicitis—a frequent disease in the penitentiary. This was also promoted by the bread, which was made of the poorest grade of white flour, without nourishing quality, the value per loaf being about two cents; the flour was ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... sickness, for instance, or those of surgery, resulting from accident. And yet even there it does apply, for the condition of the mind may predispose to infection, and to recovery or collapse in the instance of the sufferer from injuries. But these questions of predisposition and consequence are too great to argue here, though even the most rule-of-thumb village practitioner, with a black draught in one hand and a pot of ointment in the other, will agree that they admit of ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... This predisposition has another effect upon the character of the legal profession and upon the general course of society. The English and American lawyers investigate what has been done; the French advocate inquires what should ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... said, gently. "There is always the first time with every rebel against man-made laws. But, where the predisposition so indubitably exists, it is inevitable, soon or late it must come to you, my dear—the time when the will is too weak, temptation too strong. Against it we must be forever ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... there was a strong predisposition on the part of the Jamaica planters to defraud their labourers of their wages. They hoped that by yielding, before they were driven quite to the last extremity, by the tide of public sentiment in England, they should escape from all philanthropic interference and surveillance, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... conjugation of the two procreative germs. In such a case it is comparatively easy to prove that this is a pathological symptom independent of the will of the individual. But a continuous series of degrees in the intensity of a hereditary predisposition to a certain sexual anomaly, or to other anomalies or peculiarities apt to provoke this anomaly, insensibly connects the purely hereditary pathological appetite with that which is simply the effect of acquired ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... in the use of unwholesome food, want of cleanliness, and want of exercise; and sometimes from an hereditary predisposition. They are also frequently dependent on a disordered or deranged state of the stomach, liver, and bowels, and are often attended with great debility and depression of spirits. They generally appear most evident in cold and moist seasons; and, I may add, that since the introduction of vaccination, ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... new lesson! The boy sat bemused, looking at the glass but not tasting it, while the Doctor emptied and refilled his own, at first with clouded brow, but gradually yielding to the sun, the heady, prickling beverage, and his own predisposition to be happy. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... collective. Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing progress we see now making in the externals of life. We must first free our bodies from disease and predisposition to disease. We must perfect these bodies and make them fine instruments of the mind and the spirit. Only thus, when the body becomes an aid instead of a hindrance to human expression may we attain any civilization ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... in Professor Wilson, I have long satisfied myself that it takes its rise from a more comprehensive weakness, the greatest in fact which besets his mind, viz. a general tendency to bend to the prevailing opinion of the world, and a constitutional predisposition, to sympathise with power and whatsoever is triumphant. Hence, I could not but regret most poignantly the capital opportunity I had forfeited of throwing in a deep and stinging sarcasm at his idol, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of good-nature and passive strength than either in the general expression. One could see that some genial influence had dominated what was inherently cruel and sinister in him. Still the sinister predisposition ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... function by the several parts, is characteristic, in fact, of the simpler and lower forms of life, and disappears gradually as evolution progresses to higher orders. In all military performance, it is not the faculty for segregation that chiefly tells. It is the predisposition to united action, the habit of mutual concert and reliance. By this, concentration of purpose, subordination to a common impulse, ceases to be an effort, becoming the second nature of the man; and concentration of action, not merely in great operations but in the inner spirit, ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... labor, is highly beneficial, especially when it leads one into the fresh air, the sunshine, and the country. A particular kind of exercise is to be recommended for those whose chests are narrow, whose shoulders stoop, and who have a hereditary predisposition to consumption. If it is systematically practised along with other means of health, we would guarantee any child, no matter how many relatives have died of this disease, against its invasion. It is voluntary inspiration. Nothing is more simple. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... air, being among the most frequent causes of the complaint, it is necessary, as far as possible, to counteract them. Should a strong predisposition to cholera be suspected, the best plan will be to send the child into the country during the summer. Both as a preventive and a remedy, country air is decidedly the most effectual, to which we can resort. But in most instances, it would be ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... fermenting opinion and decaying faith. Then, as now, men's minds were seething and unsettled, and that unrest which is the precursor of great changes in intellectual and spiritual habitudes affected the civilised world. Such a period is ever one of predisposition to superstition. The one true bond which unites God and man being obscured, and to the consciousness of many snapped, men's minds become the prey of visionary terrors. Demand creates supply, and the magician ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Cryptogamic Botany," it was proposed to unite them in one alliance, under the name of Mycetales, in the same manner as the late Dr. Lindley had united allied orders under alliances in his "Vegetable Kingdom;" but, beyond this, there was no predisposition towards the theory since propounded, and which, like all new theories, has collected a small but zealous circle of adherents. It will be necessary briefly to summarize this theory and the arguments by which ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... the bath, that must, to a great extent, depend upon the conditions of life, and the predisposition and susceptibility of the individual; but the cold bath should always be employed in preference to the warm bath, when conditions permit. The cold bath is a powerful stimulant to the sympathetic nervous system. and as that is the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... psychic body; and, when he comes to be born again, that body will become his outermost vesture, upon which, with its wound still there, bodily tissue will be built up. So the man will be born maimed, or with the predisposition to some mortal injury; he is unguarded at that point, and any trifling accidental blow will pierce the broken Joints of his psychic armour. Thus do the dynamic mind-images manifest themselves, coming ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... predisposition one soon forms a kind of tacit intimacy by often meeting on the same walks. Once or twice I accommodated him with a bench, after which we touched hats on passing each other; at length we got so far as ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... like a slap in the face. With every possible predisposition to look favorably on its teachings, I was unable to find anything in them but the prejudiced judgments of a one-sided thinker, fond of brilliant general propositions which really had nothing serious to rest upon either in fact or reason. The following ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... predisposition to good and evil is found among persons of all classes and ages; and as this predisposition is especially strong at your age, when the sympathies are most tender, when the heart so candid and open is ready to receive and reciprocate ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... the old bottomless tub of the Danaides, they may be excused for devoting their time and wits to such riddles, perhaps. But when the mind has positive, practical work to perform, and time keeps bringing all the time specific duties, or when, as in your case, a predisposition to vague speculation is the intellectual besetting sin, I think addition to such subjects to be avoided. I suppose all human beings have, in some shape or degree, the desire for that knowledge which is still the growth ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... can affect surprise if they develop licentious tendencies? Are not such parents largely to blame? Are they not criminals in a high degree? Have they not fouled their own nest, and transmitted to their children predisposition to moral evil? ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... that spot, with no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who have sold goods ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... it. It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to intemperance. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... angels were endowed with grace according to the measure of their natural perfection,(435) we may well suppose that man receives grace likewise according to his natural constitution (gratia sequitur naturam)—a predisposition or aptitude which God ordained in His infinite wisdom to be the instrument through which His graces should operate either for personal sanctification or ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... suffering, are content. The sense of existence, under the influence of the action which is necessary to their living, counterbalances all misery. But when a man has a peculiar structure, when he is born with a predisposition, or is, in vulgar language, a man of genius, his content entirely depends upon the predisposition being developed and indulged. And this is philosophical education, ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... gentleman to witness," he went on, turning to me. "He has just come. He is unbiased. Therefore I ask him: has one the right to spoil a Bambara cook by addling his head with theological discussions for which he has no predisposition?" ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... is a special object of worship in autumn, and moon cakes dedicated to it are sold at this season." [94] We have little doubt that what the Chinese look for they see. We in the West characterize and colour objects which we behold, as we see them through the painted windows of our predisposition or prejudice. As a great novelist writes: "From the same object different conclusions are drawn; the most common externals of nature, the wind and the wave, the stars and the heavens, the very earth on which we tread, never ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... to the human race, for it supposes a predisposition for food, for the place of meeting, and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... powerful appeal to the Mother Country, and they also expected great pecuniary assistance from those resident near the establishment, and more directly interested in its prosperity. They would as soon as possible establish a system of collegiate education, and there was a predisposition to engraft upon the College the well-known and respectable Medical Institution now in existence in the city. The door of the building was at length open, and it was the duty of all to proceed with vigour. They might at first complain of a great want of ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... and cardinal; in 1779 succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of Strasburg, and became Abbot of Noirmoutiers and La Chaise. He led a gay, luxurious, and extravagant life rather than performed his clerical duties; he had political ambitions, but he was never able to overcome the predisposition against him with which Marie Antoinette had come to France. He was a dupe of Cagliostro, and of Mme. de Lamotte-Valois, the adventuress who, in 1782, drew him into the intrigue of the diamond necklace, for which he was sent to the Bastille, and which gave him the name of le cardinal Collier; ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... leads to the enquiry, what is to be the polity of our new state. And the answer is, that we are to fear God, and honour our parents, and to cultivate virtue and justice; these are to be our first principles. Laws must be definite, and we should create in the citizens a predisposition to obey them. The legislator will teach as well as command; and with this view he will prefix preambles ...
— Laws • Plato
... aware that he was hunting what might well be a cold line, and he thought persistently of Leh Shin, putting the other possible issues upon one side. Hartley had allowed himself to be dominated by a predisposition to account for everything through Heath, and Coryndon warned himself against falling into the same snare with Leh Shin. He thought of the Chinaman's shop, and he knew that it was built on the same plan as his ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... the consultation was over, not one of the doctors gave me the least hope; they all believe that Louise will die with the fall of the leaves. The dear child's constitution has wonderfully helped the success of her plan. It seems she has a predisposition to this complaint; and though, in the ordinary course, she might have lived a long time, a few days' folly ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... amount of passion into everything, I should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any great ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... simultaneously. Judkins cites an instance of a man who was sick in the morning while his wife was carrying a child. This occurred during every pregnancy, and the man related that his own father was similarly affected while his mother was in the early months of pregnancy with him, showing an hereditary predisposition. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... soils, and the occurrence of bloody urine in the advanced stages of several contagious diseases. Some mineral poisons—such as iodin, arsenic, and phosphorus taken to excess—may cause hematuria, and finally the symptoms may be merely the result of a constitutional predisposition of the individual or family to bleeding. In some predisposed subjects, exposure of the body to cold or wet ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Scripture narrative, that they break down of themselves.[52] And, indeed, M. Maury is the first to allow that there is a fundamental opposition between the Biblical tradition and the legend of Brahminical India or of Hesiod. In this last, as he himself remarks, we see "no trace of a predisposition to sin transmitted by inheritance from the first man to his descendants, no vestige of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... started with a predisposition in favour of Hilda Wade—a pretty girl appeals to most of us—I could see from the beginning that Hilda Wade was by no means enthusiastic for Sebastian, like the ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... staunch to the principles of that system of the Church to which he had always belonged. Since his severance from Mr Newman, no one had had so strong an influence over him as the head of his college. During the time of his expected apostasy, Dr Gwynne had not felt much predisposition in favour of the young fellow. Though a High Churchman himself within moderate limits, Dr Gwynne felt no sympathy with men who could not satisfy their faiths with the Thirty-nine Articles. He regarded the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... a dragon of a mother," the evil seed is sown. From that time until the pair are forever united at the altar, it grows, and with marriage it begins to bring forth the unpeaceable fruits of endless dissensions. I sometimes wonder if the new life could be begun with a predisposition towards amity, what ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the one true tincture which braced the heart to throw itself upon the spears of trial. Now the trial had come, and that which was in him as deep as being, the habit of youth, the mother-fibre and predisposition, responded to the draught he had drunk then. As a body freed from the quivering, unrelenting grasp of an electric battery subsides into a cool quiet, so, through his veins seemed to pass an ether which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one class of cases mental disorders, and not in another, indicates either that some predisposition to these disorders existed, or that the habit of self-pollution was merely an expression of mental alienation (insanity). The images which pervade the minds of boys possessed of the highly-developed nervous organization of masturbators are ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... attribute of the divinity; the absolute manifestation of power—the reality of all the possible—and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity. The way to divinity—if the word "way" can be applied to what never leads to its end—is open ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... order would not effect great changes, possibly for good, and possibly for ill. The same economic laws might be made to bear very different fruits, but they themselves would remain unchanged. What is true in all these other fields—this should be our predisposition—is not likely to be quite untrue in ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... another feature of early marriages that should receive serious consideration. A girl of eighteen or twenty has not reached that period of growth where certain inherited tendencies will show. If she has inherited a predisposition to consumption she may outgrow this period provided she is permitted to reach her full growth without subjecting her constitution to any strenuous physical or mental strain. If, however, this girl marries and becomes ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... I believe in them, there are in fact few things I can not believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Paestum, I had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not explain, wherein I was out of sympathy ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... taking in his new duties. The children would be pleased to be able to render their new instructor some service, and would go to the school-room on the next morning with a feeling of acquaintance with him, and a predisposition to be pleased. And if by chance any family should be thus called upon that had heretofore been captious or complaining, or disposed to be jealous of the higher importance or influence of other families, that spirit would be entirely softened ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... that underlie and govern these forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of the different varieties ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Now, in our case, we've only the little kindling corner to smother, and the New Mexico air is water and blanket—a whole fire department, if need be. The doctor assures me that with mother's good constitution, and the absence of any hereditary predisposition to this sort of thing, we've only to give her the ten or twelve months of rest and reenforcement—the winter in New Mexico, the summer in Colorado—to nip the whole thing in the bud. I believe him, and you must believe him—and me. More than all, you ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... be abnormal from hereditary predisposition, as e.g. the impulse to drink, but only through strengthening inhibition can these impulses be controlled,—their existence must ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... and any particular death, if not actually more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined, locked back into a startling unity, and restored ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... progress, whether he went directly from one chamber to others, whether he took any, and what precautions. It is important to know that several women were exposed to infection derived from the patient, so that allowance may be made for want of predisposition. Now if of negative facts so sifted there could be accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of communication here recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are bound to guard and watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold, though the ninety and nine ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... however, more predisposed to certain types of mood than are others. The organization of our nervous system which we get through heredity undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling tone into which we most easily fall. We call this predisposition temperament. On the effects of temperament, our ancestors must divide the responsibility with us. I say divide the responsibility, for even if we find ourselves predisposed toward a certain undesirable type of moods, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... suspicion of the worthlessness of her lover, some enlightenment as to his perfidy, or his unaccountable disappearance alone, may have occasioned its manifestation. But there is great reason to believe that she had a natural predisposition to it. And having never been taught to provide for her own mental sustenance, and so nourish a necessary independence, she had been too ready to squander the wealth of a rich and lovely nature upon an unworthy person, and the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... was needed at home to help mother. Then my poor pa died—an accident down in the docks,"—Aurora, lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,—"then Ben, then Joe, then—will you believe it?—Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had taken care of them all. I wasn't twenty-three when I was the ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... himself ever deeplier in a web of his own spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man, with a great command of language, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... consideration is regarded, save that of wealth; and the fact remains, explain it as we may, that the intermarriage of near relatives during several successive generations is followed by a marked deterioration of the children, physical, mental, and moral; and by the intensifying of any hereditary predisposition to consumption, scrofula, and other constitutional ailments which form the second great cause of early sickness ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... attitude in his high-backed chair, and commence to read one of the discourses (taking out a paper mark beforehand) in a particularly stately voice. It is not exceeding the truth to say that George oftentimes was driven to frantic efforts to keep himself awake; and even Arthur felt the predisposition of Eutychus come ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... not an uncommon fault to use one arm exclusively, and to give that a uniform movement. Such movement may, sometimes, have become habitual from one's profession or employment; but in learners, also, there is often a predisposition to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... was to displace its gods. "It was more than a mere worldly impulse," says a famous northern divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek, like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonderful facility with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Psychical Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More, or beyond its pale, like Richard Baxter and many Scotch divines, defended witchcraft and apparitions as outworks of faith in general. The modern Psychical Society, whatever the predisposition of some of its members may be, explores abnormal phenomena, not in the interests of faith, but of knowledge. Again, the old inquirers were dominated by a belief in the devil. They saw witchcraft ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... most willingly discoursed. Whatever friendship he might entertain for Berthollet, it was easy to perceive that he preferred Monge, and that he was led to that preference because Monge, endowed with an ardent imagination, without exactly possessing religious principles, had a kind of predisposition for religious ideas which harmonised with the notions of Bonaparte. On this subject Berthollet sometimes rallied his inseparable friend Monge. Besides, Berthollet was, with his cold imagination, constantly devoted to analysis and abstractions, inclined towards materialism, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a "personal emotion" is quite ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, Omnes Graeci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity runs ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... this sort upon my wife's side," I whispered the little lord; "her uncle's symptoms were identical. Dr. Peterson says that the sunstroke was only the determining cause. The predisposition was already there. I may tell you that the footman will always be in the next room, so that you can call him if you need ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... against window-panes, and of looking over fences, or of the habit of biting large apples hastily—than an indication of scorn or juvenile superciliousness. The vulgar little boy is more remarkable for his obtrusive familiarity. It is my experience of his predisposition to this quality which has induced me to ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... phases of the eye explains everything. A small eye is a sign of strength; a large eye is a sign of languor. A small oblique eye (the Chinese eye), when associated with lateral development of the cranium, and ears drawn back, indicates a predisposition to murder. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... smile means. I know what you wish to say to me.... I can see myself; you believe without doubt that such has been my former life. No,... no! You are mistaken. I have not been that. There has to be a special predisposition, a certain talent for feigning what I do not feel.... I have tried to sell myself, and I cannot, I cannot avail myself of that. I embitter the life of men when they do not interest me; I am their adversary. I hate them and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a man's experiences, changing as his experiences change. In the two years following the publication of the first volume, Strindberg's experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive, active force ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... disease as such there is little room for misunderstanding: no biologist now believes a disease is actually handed down from parent to child in the germ-plasm. But what the doctors call a diathesis, a predisposition to some given disease, is most certainly heritable—a fact which Karl Pearson and others have proved by statistics that can not be given here.[58] And any individual who has inherited this diathesis, this lack of resistance to a given disease, is marked as a possible victim ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... reasoning; but those more frequent cases in which simple inspection creates a presumption in favor of a proposition; not sufficient for belief, but sufficient to cause the strict principles of a regular induction to be dispensed with, and creating a predisposition to believe it on evidence which would be seen to be insufficient if no such presumption existed. This class, comprehending the whole of what may be termed Natural Prejudices, and which I shall call indiscriminately Fallacies of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... veins, Senorita Isolda was a most charmingly ingenuous, unsophisticated girl, frank and open as the day; furthermore, she had been so long accustomed to hear Jack spoken of admiringly by Carlos that she had insensibly acquired a strong predisposition in his favour; and, finally, and quite contrary to rule, when at length she met him in the flesh she instantly decided that this stalwart, handsome young Englishman was all that Carlos had represented him ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... victualling is completed; she ceases to accumulate when that impulse is satisfied, irrespective of the result, which in this case happens to be worthless. No mental faculty, assisted by sight, informs her when she has enough, or when she has too little. An instinctive predisposition is her only guide, an infallible guide under normal conditions, but hopelessly lost when subjected to the wiles of the experimenter. Had the Bee the least glimmer of reason would she lay her egg on the third, on the tenth part of the necessary provender? Would she lay ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the imported ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... it appears that if obesity be not a disease, it is at least a very troublesome predisposition, into which we fall from ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... eloquence and fluency of his harangues, commanded the unlimited confidence of his band. He has, most probably, been overrated both for his eloquence and his skill in the battle field. He is no doubt a man of courage, and seems, from early life, to have had a strong predisposition for war. Many of his measures as a leader, have been more influenced by a sense of what was right in the abstract, than expedient in practice. This circumstance has often placed him in situations, inimical to the permanent prosperity of ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... heard. The public mind of England was soon stirred to its inmost depths; and the influence of the new doctrines was soon felt, even in the distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long been a predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely assailed at once in England and in the German empire, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the regime of the school. But on further inquiry it appeared: first, that the mother of the girl had always been subject to menorrhagia, and it is well known that this often occurs exclusively as the result of hereditary predisposition. Second, that just before the entrance to school, and the disturbance of menstruation, the girl had been living in a malarial district, and had suffered from malarial infection, which is again a frequent cause of menorrhagia. Third, that the studies pursued at school were ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Americanism, his inborn predisposition to innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old wood, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... bread, if he could live in affluence, he might exhibit some eccentricity of character, but would not cross the threshold of an insane asylum. The same happens in the case of criminality. One may have a congenital predisposition toward crime, but if he lives in favorable surroundings, he will live to the end of his natural life without violating any criminal or moral law. At any rate we must drop the prejudice that only those are criminals on whose backs the judge has pasted a number. For there are many scoundrels ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... contain them. A girl named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac and subject to fits, imagined that an old Irish woman, named Glover, had bewitched her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was apparently a predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were so stiff that they could not be moved; while at others, said the neighbours, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages? Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of relinquishing all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes for want of its accustomed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... practised. No ordinary shoe, except a few devised for the purpose, such as the Charlier or the tip, allows the frog to come in contact with the ground. This we take to be the main factor in the causation of contracted heels, especially with a predisposition already present in the foot itself. In the words of Lungwitz: 'Regarded from this point of view, there is no greater evil than shoeing. It abolishes the necessary counter-pressure, and thus interferes with expansion. Bars, sole, and frog cannot perform the functions that naturally belong to them ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... predisposition to this most painful disease, and require to keep a strict watch on their diet. Meat, specially the internal organs, meat extracts, alcohol, tea, and coffee must be avoided, and milk, buttermilk and porridge, cheese, eggs, and vegetables, especially green vegetables, made into ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of conscience gradually and later in life. They first take the form of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble, and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... healthier than the average girl, and had no predisposition to a premature decline; and in reviewing these absurdities of my pen, I feel like saying to any young girl who inclines to rhyme, "Don't sentimentalize! Write more of what you see than of what you feel, and let your feelings realize themselves to others in ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... and formulate. Don't you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing—more nauseous than any physic. Even now I did not like the taste ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... assured that the "ex-Emperor" was pre-disposed to the "cruel complaint of which his father died." "The progress of the disease is slow and insidious," says he, which may be true enough, but predisposition can be either checked or accelerated, and the course adopted towards Napoleon was not calculated to retard, but encourage it. But in order to palliate the actions of the British Government and their blindly devoted adherents at St. Helena, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... soon came to an end. He felt there a clear call, to neglect which would be to have seen the light and not to have followed it, ever for him the most tragic error to be made in life. His natural predisposition towards it was too great for him to do other than trust this new revelation; and now he must gird himself for 'the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... several cases had begun to read them into a different construction. Yet, on the other hand, in spite of any colorable excuses that may be pleaded for this prejudice, it is pretty plain that, after all, there is in human nature a deep-laid predisposition to an obstinate craze of this nature. Else why is it that, in every age alike, men have asserted or even assumed the downward tendency of the human race in all that regards moral qualities. For the physical degeneration ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... genius. Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... on both sides, the children got a Celtic strain; and this is a matter of significance, meaning a predisposition to the superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work. Their mother, Maria Branwell, was of a good middle-class Cornish family, long established as merchants in Penzance. Their father was the son of an Irish peasant, Hugh Prunty, settled ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... through the instrumentality of the association, been greatly ameliorated; that as regards consumption,— although the nature of the employment itself, however modified by kindness, has a tendency to develop the disease where the predisposition exists,—he is happy to state that the average number of cases, even in the incipient stage, has not been so great as might, from the circumstances, have been anticipated; that during the last two years, out of about two hundred and fifty ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of all the care of her mother, to the development of her imagination, in case indeed she possessed that terrible and fatal gift. She passed her days in unbroken solitude, or broken only by affections which softened her heart, and in a scene which itself might well promote any predisposition of the kind; beautiful and picturesque objects surrounded her on all sides; she wandered, at it were, in an enchanted wilderness, and watched the deer reposing under the green shadow of stately trees; the old hall itself was calculated to excite mysterious ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... quoted. In regard to hereditary transmission, Dr. Caldwell observes: "Every constitutional quality, whether good or bad, may descend, by inheritance, from parent to child. And a long-continued habit of drunkenness becomes as essentially constitutional as a predisposition to gout or pulmonary consumption. This increases, in a manifold degree, the responsibility of parents in relation to temperance. By habits of intemperance, they not only degrade and ruin themselves, but transmit the elements of like degradation and ruin to their posterity. This is no visionary ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... would as likely commit crime as he who possessed all the characteristics which Lombroso describes as typical. Manouvrier regards the social life of a person from childhood as being the most important factor in moulding character. He emphatically denies that there is in the embryo a predisposition to crime. Dr Magnan likewise refuses his assent to ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... own home; and the admiration and esteem with which she already inspired him might have ripened into much warmer feeling, had he thus been brought into clearer comprehension of the soft and womanly heart, and its tender predisposition towards himself. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peculiarly rich in material. The career of David and still more that of Saul—David with his weakness and his magnanimity, and Saul, a noble character, ruined by jealousy and failure combined working upon a predisposition to melancholy—present a most fascinating psychological study. The ethical interest, too, though seldom obtruded, is always present. In the parable of Nathan, it receives direct and dramatic expression; but the whole story of David's ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... distinguished by a certain nasal twang—an asthmatic wheezing—and a sort of disagreeable noise in respiration, which is nearly allied to incipient snoring. Snuff also frequently occasions fleshy excrescences in the nose, which, in some instances, end in polypi. Individuals have oftentimes a predisposition to cancer in little scirrhous intumescencies, which, if kept easy and free from every thing of an irritating character, will continue harmless, but which the use of snuff sometimes frets into incurable ulcers and cancers. By the use of snuff, tumours are also generated in the throat, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... decided on becoming a priest in order to satisfy that craving for a superhuman affection which was his sole torment. He could not see where greater love could be. In that state of life he satisfied his being, his inherited predisposition, his youthful dreams, his first virile desires. If temptation must come, he awaited it with the calmness of the seminarist ignorant of the world. He felt that his manhood had been killed in him: it gladdened him to feel himself a creature set apart, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... than elsewhere: but it maybe more justly traced to that good sense, which is at work in all orders of our people, and which understands when to obey and to hearken. In the seaman it displays itself in a predisposition to regard his officer as one worthy of his confidence, and whom it is his safety as well as duty to obey in the hour of danger. And this confidence is justified by the almost unfailing manner, in which the officer ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... mental disorders occur ten times as frequently in prison as in freedom. The criminal, who in most instances is already burdened with a more or less strong predisposition to mental disorder, upon being placed in prison finds himself at once in a most favorable environment for a mental breakdown. It is true, imprisonment acts more deleteriously upon the psyche of the criminal by passion, the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... committees, and the leading exponent of the godly activities of St. Matthew's. She was regarded by the heretofore rulers of these various provinces with a mixture of respect, contempt, and apprehension. She was an incalculable force, with a predisposition towards novelty, and novelty, especially if founded on theory, is abhorrent to such as old Johnny Galvin the steward, or Peter Flood the gardener, or, stiffest in her own conceit of all, Mrs. Twomey of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... such was her name, kept up her war-footing as long as we knew her, and the dignity invested in her hulk, which had a strong predisposition toward bilge, was, to say the least, extraordinary. Never was better craft for the purpose; and during a long cruise among the small keys that form the extreme end of the Florida peninsula, she always showed a dogged ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... my bench-legged fyce Hed most o' the virtues, an' nary a vice. Some folks called him Sooner, a name that arose From his predisposition to chronic repose; But, rouse his ambition, he couldn't be beat— Yer bet yer he got thar on ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... susceptibility to the action of strychnia or of narcotics, the explanation must of necessity, for the present, be more or less speculative. But how are we to account, even in the way of speculation, for the peculiar immunity, lack of predisposition and hereditary tendencies to disease exhibited by the Hebrew, who, since the history of the world, has been a civilized and rational being,—even for decades of centuries before the civilization of Europe? Living under the same forms of government, climate, and shelter, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... affairs, and because Helen was a member of the committee she felt it her duty to attend. One of the young men, accompanied by his mother and sister, drove out for her, but she left the house with reluctance and a marked predisposition not to enjoy herself. But she forgot this when she presently beheld the young man from the East whom she had encountered on the mesa. He was standing close beside a rather frail little woman, undoubtedly ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... only been destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude |
