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Reflex   Listen
noun
Reflex  n.  
1.
Reflection; the light reflected from an illuminated surface to one in shade. "Yon gray is not the morning's eye, 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow." "On the depths of death there swims The reflex of a human face."
2.
(Physiol.) An involuntary movement produced by reflex action.
Patellar reflex. See Knee jerk, under Knee.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Reflex" Quotes from Famous Books



... which in the past meant confidence and goodwill. Political restlessness had already for some years begun to manifest itself in anarchical conspiracies and crimes of violence, when the Great War began. In India, as elsewhere, the reflex action of the war was a disturbing element. High prices, stifled trade, high taxation, nationalist longings and ideas of self-determination and self-government served to reinforce ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... sentiment, Gallic in its esprit. A true salon piece, this prelude has no hint of artificiality. It is a precise antithesis to the mood of the previous one. Graceful and gay, the G major prelude is a fair reflex of Chopin's sensitive and naturally buoyant nature. It requires a light hand and nimble fingers. The melodic idea requires no special comment. Kullak phrases it differently from Riemann and Klindworth. The latter ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... happened proved absolutely accurate. Along the top of the Ertak, from amidships to within a few feet of her pointed stem, was a jagged groove that had destroyed hundreds of the bright, coppery discs, set into the outer skin of the ship, that operated our super-radio reflex charts. The groove was so deep, in places, that it must have bent the outer skin of the Ertak down against the inner skin. A foot or more—it was best not to think of what would ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... two ways—consciously and unconsciously. The conscious manifestations of mind are volitional, while the unconscious, "vegetative," reflex operations of mind are ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... tremulous Domes; Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm, Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells: Her obelisks of ranged Chrysolite, Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth by, And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring To carry through the world those waves, which bore The reflex of my City in their depths. Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais'd To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come When I must render up this glorious home To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand; Darken, ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... mere amusement, but, now that I have tried other kinds of hurry and bustle, I solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication. Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway's. The worst of it is that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... all with respect to national and local questions which I never saw equalled: in fact, the few sheets of their Press which reach this country are alone sufficient to convince any one on that point; for in a free country the Press may always be fairly considered, to a certain extent, as the reflex of the public mind. I suppose it is with nations as with individuals, and that each are alike blind to their own failings. In no other way can I account for the Republic overlooking so entirely the sensitiveness of others. Take for instance the appointment of M. Soule—a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... an architecture peculiarly Italian. Yet in the woodwork of the Italian dwelling-house—alongside of alterations produced by Greek influence—various peculiarities may have been retained or even for the first time developed, and these again may have exercised a reflex influence on the building of the Italian temples. The architectural development of the house proceeded in Italy from the Etruscans. The Latin and even the Sabellian still adhered to the hereditary wooden hut and to the good old ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... we allow His tipsy rites. But what art thou That but by reflex canst show What his deity can do, As the false Egyptian spell Aped the true Hebrew miracle? Some few vapors thou may'st raise, The weak brain may serve to amaze, But to the reins and nobler heart ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... swims out of the water, When the birds soar out of the blue, Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge, And your God be no reflex ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... it has been with the newspapers, which have ever been the obsequious reflex of distempered public opinion, siding always with the strong and powerful; so that in 1831, when the "Liberator" (published in Boston by the intrepid and patriotic Garrison) made its appearance, it was a lone David among a swarm of Goliaths, any one of which was willing ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... disturbances and sensations. Some people cannot go aboard a stationary ship without vomiting, nor see a rose, even though it prove to be a wax one, without the sneezing and watery eyes of hay-fever. This is what is known as a "conditioned reflex." Past associations plus fear have so welded together idea and bodily manifestation that one follows the other as a matter of course, long after the real cause is removed. In such ways innumerable nervous symptoms arise. The same laws which form healthy complexes, and, indeed, which ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... organisation. "When the babe is born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion, cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed. There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing intelligence, developing pari passu with the organism of which it is a function. As the body grows, the mind grows ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... wretchedness and universal odium, the distant reflex of his name and authority was respected by all. Lady Bellingham found her reception very different, as the Protector's friend, in her return through England, than when she fled to Scotland an alarmed fugitive. Conscious ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... one—the key to the situation. We believe readily when it is agreeable to do so, and all pilgrims have ever sought to heighten the attractions of the objects of their interest. It adds to their own enjoyment of them, and, after all, is it not a reflex compliment to ourselves? If "there is but one such pig in the world," ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... The last trace of pretense left Narth and he let his full and rankling hatred come through. "You got this cruiser by trickery and learned how to operate it after a fashion because of an animal-like reflex abnormality. For forty-two days you accidental mutants have given orders to your superiors and thought you were our equals. Now, your fool's ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin

... could not but regard the channel through which anything reached him, as of the nature of that which came to him through it; how could that serve to transmit which was not one in spirit with the thing transmitted? To his eyes, therefore, Jermyn sat in the reflex glory of Shelley, and of every other radiant spirit of which he had widened his knowledge. How could Cosmo for instance regard him as a common man through whom came to him first that thrilling trumpet-cry, full of the glorious despair of a frustrate ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... Northern king of the V[a]icya caste, Cil[a]ditya (in whose reign the Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang, visited India), made Syrian Christians welcome to his court (639 A.D.).[92] The date of the annual Krishna festival, which is a reflex of Christmastide, is variously fixed by the Pur[a]nas as ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... drawn into the vortex of Bigot's splendid dissipation, was the brave, handsome Le Gardeur de Repentigny—a captain of the Royal Marine, a Colonial corps recently embodied at Quebec. In general form and feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... order is a standing-apart, which is only another expression of the expansion and abundance of creative life; but at every remove its reflex is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and curving, making orb and orbit. While in space this attraction is diminished—being inversely as the square of the distance—and so there is maintained and emphasized the appearance of suspension and isolation, yet in time it ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... suffice for literary attainments; billiards, shooting, and hunting, would not come in amiss, for he must not be considered a useless being by men; not that women are much influenced by the opinion of men in their choice of favourites, but the reflex action of the heart, although not so marked as that of the stomach, exists and must be kept in view, besides a man who would succeed with women, must succeed with men; the real Lovelace is loved by all. Like gravitation, love draws all things. Our young man would have to be five feet eleven, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... bear in airy rings The vocal symbols of ideal things, Name each nice change appulsive powers supply To the quick sense of touch, or ear or eye. Or in fine traits abstracted forms suggest Of Beauty, Wisdom, Number, Motion, Rest; Or, as within reflex ideas move, Trace the light steps of Reason, Rage, or Love. The next new sounds adjunctive thoughts recite, As hard, odorous, tuneful, sweet, or white. 380 The next the fleeting images select Of action, suffering, causes and effect; Or mark existence, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... meat stalls all closed, only here and there a cart, offering turnips, cabbages, parsnips, carrots, etc., at outrageous prices. However, the super-abundant paper money is beginning to flow into the Treasury, and that reflex of the financial tide may produce salutary results ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from "the land which is very far off," we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael—the serenity, the [53] durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... poetry to prose, it will be needful to notice some supplementary causes of force in expression, that have not yet been mentioned. These are not, properly speaking, additional causes; but rather secondary ones, originating from those already specified reflex results of them. In the first place, then, we may remark that mental excitement spontaneously prompts the use of those forms of speech which have been pointed out as the most effective. "Out with him!" "Away with him!" ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

... undertaken by man—greatest, not only because of the mechanical difficulties overcome, but because of the influence for good that the ship, when completed, had upon the natives of the Southern Seas, as well as its reflex influence in exciting admiration, emulation, and ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne

... spirit,—not by that man, therefore, whose imaginative powers have been ossified by the continual reaction and assimilating influences of mere objects on his mind, and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex, the passive fancy!—not by him in whom an unbroken familiarity with the organic world, as if it were mechanical, with the sensitive, but as if it were insensate, has engendered the coarse and hard spirit of a sorcerer. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... to the office several persons were waiting to see him. But as he went downstairs he halted on the, landing, his hand going to his forehead, a reflex movement significant of a final attempt to achieve the hitherto unattainable feat of imagining her as his wife. If he might only speak to her again—now, this morning! And yet he knew that he needed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... could not be mistaken. She caught the reflex of his passionate devotion, and thrilled a little beneath his touch. He felt it in a moment, ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green

... full comprehension of "Faust," the commentary on this poem which Mr. Lewes gives in his "Life of Goethe," as perhaps the most excellent portion of that excellent work. Goethe himself has given many a hint on his own conception, and as to how far it was the reflex of his own soul. "The puppet-show-fable of 'Faust,'" he says, "murmured with many voices in my soul. I, too, had wandered into every department of knowledge, and had returned disgusted, and convinced of the vanity of science. And life, too, I had tried under various ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... Gordon's lips a rushing torrent and swept the crowd. Growing each moment more and more conscious of his strength, he attained the heights of eloquence. Intoxicated with the reflex action from the sea of eager listeners, he outdid himself with each succeeding climax of feeling. Never had his voice been so deep, so full, so clear, so penetrating, so thrilling, and never had he been so conscious of its control. Not ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... scalp—his rattles, I mean—when horrid thrills coursed through me. The uncanny thing began to wriggle and rattle with old-time vigour. I do not like to think of that simian inheritance. But, fortified by Nimrod's assurance that it was 'purely reflex neuro-ganglionic movement,' I hardened my heart and captured ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... without effect, during his natural life, to transform himself into a sailor. The destroyer was his victor; the inner man was but a reflex of the outer. He pulled an old cloth cap over his face, which was immersed in a massive black beard, bordering two red, swollen cheeks; and with his begrimed hands he rubbed lustily his inflamed eyes—once brown, large, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... cabin to hear him tell of God, of heaven the reward of the good, and of hell the eternal abode of the unrighteous. But he made few converts. The Indian idea of the future had nothing in common with the Christian idea. The Hurons, it is true, believed in a future state, but it was to be only a reflex of the present life, with the difference that it would give them complete freedom from work and suffering, abundant game, and an unfailing supply ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... cannot be dissociated from their experiences in the field of sport. The exploits of the Battalion in Football, Cross-country Running, and Boxing—revealing as they did the elements of challenge, perseverance, cheerfulness in defeat, and also the power to win honours to their name—have their grand reflex in the more grim and arduous experiences through which the Battalion ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various

... keyholes of print at the sanctified doings of Society and snarled while it groveled. All the shibboleths of a journalism which respected neither itself, its purpose, nor its readers echoed from every page. And this was the reflex of the work and thought of Errol Banneker, who intimately respected himself, and his profession as expressed in himself. There is much of the paradoxical in journalism—as, indeed, in the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... thing known, so that the most thorough knower shall believe himself altogether ignorant. No thief, for example, is such an utter thief—so GOOD a thief—as the kleptomaniac. Until he has become a kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still clinging to him. Yet the kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he can steal at all, much less that he can steal so well. He would be shocked if he were to know the truth. So again, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... the Divine Hand,—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity, he has to do; and he digs where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak. Such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibers naked to the chalk and stone. He does not paint pictures ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... you kept free—a wild dog, outside the kennel—and came dam near starving for your pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in which we were brought up. Civilisation has become reflex with us; you might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something quite different. I defend civilisation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... He had been an excellent horseman, a sturdy swimmer, an unerring shot, compelling respect in those old, wild vacation days on the Florida plantation. If the cruelty had crept into her manner at an age when she could not know, it had been a reflex of the attitude of the stern old planter whose son and daughter had been ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... langian, w. v., reflex, w. dat, to long, yearn: pres. sg. III. him ...fter derum men dyrne langa beorn (the hero longeth secretly ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... been often told of wondrous caverns whereon the halls of Ablamore were built. It must be these. No one descends here ever; and the king only has the keys. I knew the sea flooded the lowest vaults; and it is probably the reflex of the sea which thus illumines us.... They thought to bury us in night. They came down here with torches and flambeaus and saw the darkness only, while the light came out to meet us, seeing we had ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck

... connect one idea with another is clearly apparent in the animal mind, and may be attributed to its excellent memory and powers of attention. In everyday-life this becomes apparent as the reflex of their experiences, the impressions of which, having once impinged on their sensibility have left their mark, so to speak, and this experience thus practically acquired, shows itself at times as the shrewdest of wisdom, even though ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... swell. No one had ever spoken to him like this. The newspapers had been complimentary for a day and had accepted the verdict of circumstances the next. His wife had simply been the reflex of other people's opinion ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... flowers of the meadow; the narcissus was resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes, her ringlets curled more closely than do the clusters of the ivy—her face, therefore, was a reflex ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... country is, in certain respects, a reflex of its character, it may be advisable to introduce this Anthology with some account of the main circumstances which have affected the production of ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... enumerated,—phimosis, preputial adhesions, and short frenum,—all are but a departure from a normal, in a greater or less degree; and whether the resulting discomfort consists in mere mechanical impediment to urination, erection, or as a factor in nocturnal enuresis, dysuria, impotence, either through reflex action or interference with emission, malposition of the urethral orifice during copulation owing to any of these conditions, or in any of the nervous derangements that may accompany this condition, or in the more serious results, ending in positive ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... favor had had a reflex action. In spite of himself, a certain good-will had grown up in him toward this boy, whom his mission it was to ruin. If there had been less of his mother in the lad's appearance, or any thing of his father ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... point, I can paralyse one-half the leaf, so that a stimulus to the other half causes no movement. It is just like dividing the spinal marrow of a frog:—no stimulus can be sent from the brain or anterior part of the spine to the hind legs; but if these latter are stimulated, they move by reflex action. I find my old results about the astonishing sensitiveness of the nervous system (!?)of Drosera to various stimulants ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... Clarice indignantly. She was filled with pity for Mallinson, and experienced, too, a sort of reflex pity for herself as the inappropriate instrument of his suffering. She was consequently altogether tuned to tenderness for him. 'It's not laziness at all. It's—it's—' She cast about for ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason

... us;—to revere With soul, or grateful, or resign'd, the train Of mercies, and of trials, is to gain A quiet Conscience, best of blessings here!— Calm Conscience is a land-encircled bay, On whose smooth surface Tempests never blow; Which shall the reflex of our life display Unstain'd by crime, tho' gloom'd with transient woe; While the bright hopes of Heaven's eternal day Upon the fair and ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... concluded (the agent touching his percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ED. VON HARTMANN, Attention is either spontaneous or reflex. The voluntary fixing our mind upon, or choosing an idea, image, or subject, is spontaneous attention, but when the idea for some reason impresses itself upon us then we have enforced, or reflex attention. That is simply to say, there is active or passive observation—the ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... ascertain the true character of political parties, and induce us for the future more carefully to distinguish between facts and phrases, realities and phantoms, I believe that I shall gain your sympathy, for I shall find a reflex to their efforts in your own generous spirit ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... is highly dramatic, the dialogue being natural and flowing; trenchant and sprightly, but not too witty for a truthful reflex of actual conversation. The humour is genial and unforced; there is no smell of the lamp about it, no premeditated effort at dragging in jests, as in Congreve. As typical examples of Farquhar's vis comica I Would cite the description of Squire Sullen's home-coming, ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar

... Laconians into an ideal nationality. He set up a military sovereignty in the land, and this demanded that the citizens should be soldiers, live in the camp, and devote themselves solely to the art of war. It is likely he perceived the imperfections of the system, anticipated its reflex effect upon the character and manners of the Spartans, and foreknew its weakness and the consequent perils of the people when it should inevitably be put to stress and strain by the aspirations of the subject classes after freedom and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... pursued; but it by no means follows that the thinking power had not a great share in it. It is from the very rapidity and certainty of the mental process, from the utmost clearness of understanding, that thinking in a poet is not perceived as something abstracted, does not wear the appearance of reflex meditation. That notion of poetical inspiration, which many lyrical poets have brought into circulation, as if they were not in their senses, and, like Pythia when possessed by the divinity, delivered oracles unintelligible to themselves—this notion (a mere lyrical invention) ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... The reflex act of the mind, which these new philosophers put forward as the solution of all human pursuits, rarely presents itself but to the speculative enquirer in his closet. The savage never dreams of it. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... test by which the reaction of the leaves of the Sundew and of other plants to stimuli, so fully and carefully studied by Mr. Darwin, can be distinguished from those acts of contraction following upon stimuli, which are called "reflex" in animals. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... desired to peruse a Sermon, Entituled A Looking-Glasse for Levellers, Preached at St. Peters, Paules Wharf, on Sunday, Sept. 24th 1648, by Paul Knell, Mr. of Arts. Another Tract called A Reflex upon our Reformers, with a prayer for the Parliament In an issue of the Mercurius Politicus, published by Marchmont Nedham, who is described as "perhaps both the ablest and the readiest man that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the name of Telemaque. Clever (spirituel) "to an alarming extent" (faire peur) in the minutest detail of his writings, rich, copious, harmonious, but not without tendencies to lengthiness, the style of Fenelon is the reflex of his character; sometimes, a little subtle and covert, like the prelate's mind, it hits and penetrates without any flash (eclat) and without dealing heavy blows. "Graces flowed from his lips," said Chancellor d'Aguesseau, "and he seemed to treat ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... passive that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men. Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of judgment. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seized, and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that there at length spoke forth the poet. It was a work which though as yet but half completed, came from a strong hand; not that shadow trembling on unsteady waters, which is but the pale reflex and imitation of some bright mind, sphered out of reach and afar, but an original substance,—a life, a thing of the Creative Faculty,—breathing back already the breath it had received. This work had paused during Leonard's residence with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... gathering cotton and felting it into purses and heaping it into barricades persists, fruitlessly, until life fails. The Lizard's tail wriggles, curls and uncurls after it is detached from the animal's body. In these reflex movements, I seem to see not an explanation, certainly, but a rough image of the industrious persistency of the insect, still toiling away at its business, even when there is nothing useful left to do. This worker knows no ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... the human infant as made up of a series of systems at different degrees of development and with varying degrees of organisation.[27] Some centres, as e.g. those which have to do with the regulation of certain reflex and automatic actions, start at once into full functional activity; others, as e.g. those which have to do with purely intellectual functions, are relatively unformed and unorganised at birth, and become organised as the result of conscious effort, as the result of an educational process, as the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... consciousness of the affirmation of any quality without having, at the same time, the correlative consciousness of its negation. Now the one consciousness is a positive, the other consciousness is a negative notion; and as all language is the reflex of thought, the positive and negative notions are expressed by positive and negative names. Thus it is with the Infinite.[338] Now let us carefully scrutinize the above deliverance. We are told that "relatives are known only in and through each other;" that is, such relatives as finite and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... ropes dangle loosely from the yards. The flag (which never was struck, thank Heaven!) is entirely hidden under the waters of the bay, but is still doubtless waving in its old place, although it floats to and fro with the swell and reflex of the tide, instead of rustling on the breeze. A remnant of the dead crew still man the sunken ship, and sometimes a drowned body floats up to ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of heaven—a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp, than with "the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow," that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... as far as its length would permit, I cautiously poured a small quantity of the permanganate solution into the extemporized funnel. To my great relief a movement of the throat showed that the swallowing reflex still existed, and, thus encouraged, I poured down the tube as much of the fluid as I thought it wise to administer at ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... my part, I had myself a very slender acquaintance with this chapter of our literature; and what little I had was generally, at that period of my life, as, with most men, it continues to be to the end of life, a reflex knowledge, acquired through those pleasant miscellanies, half gossip, half criticism—such as Warton's Essay on Pope, Boswell's Johnson, Mathias' Pursuits of Literature, and many scores beside of the same indeterminate ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... childhood. It is a thin, flatulent, and innutritious food, and incapable of supporting infantine life with energy. Bread, though the universal regime with the labouring poor, where the infant's stomach and digestive powers are a reflex, in miniature, of the father's, should never be given to an infant under three months, and, even then, however finely beaten up and smoothly made, is a very questionable diet. Flour, when well boiled, though infinitely better than arrowroot, is still only a kind of fermentative paste, that ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... repeated the mixed and moody character of his father. Sunny prosperity was essential to his nature; his virtues were adapted to that condition. And happily that was his fate. He had no personal misfortunes; his path was joyous in this life; and even the reflex sorrow from the calamities of his friends did not press too heavily on his sympathies; none of these were in excess either ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... received ten times as much. But governments, which cannot be brought to book before a sworn jury, are ruled only by public opinion. John Palmer's day was also the day of Thomas Fyshe Palmer,[405] and the governments, in their prosecutions for sedition, knew that these would have a reflex action upon the minds of all ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... of interest; and, despite this reflex result of the English long-blunder with Ireland (how our sins come home to roost), the Great Republic casts its beams across the whole world and I was never so proud to be an American democrat, as I see it light this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... Indian vale. She is the Idea of Beauty incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor's vision, the breathing image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part. At the moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot see her, only feels her influence. The essential thought of Shelley's creed was that ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... But, at bottom, he had too little sympathy with his fellows to find in their mistakes, or sins, or sufferings, the wherewithal to bring out of us our most generous tears. Those he wept once or twice himself when writing were drawn from him by a reflex self-pity that is easily evoked. In genuine pathos, Hugo is ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... far as to attribute much to Him that was ridiculous. One of the ancients said, "The utmost that a man can do is to attribute to the being he worships his imperfections and impurities, magnified to infinity, it may be, and then become worse by their reflex action upon his own nature." This was verified in the ancient mythical religion, without exception, ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... my soul talk to thee in ordered words, O king of kings, O lord of only lords!— When I am thinking thee within my heart, From the broken reflex be not far apart. The troubled water, dim with upstirred soil, Makes not the image which it yet can spoil:— Come nearer, Lord, and smooth the ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... that I like this man, whose face is the reflex of his nature, whose heart is essentially all goodness, whose aims are so high, that I break out impetuously sometimes: "But your family, Doctor, they would like to see you, oh! so much. Let me tempt you to come home with ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... a keen look upon her. "Did it ever occur to you that the words of your 'guides' were, in reality, but a reflex of the wishes ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... work that I don't know what to do. Not that I don't realize my limitations, heaven knows I do. Imagine my efforts at teaching the training class psychology! The other day we were struggling with the subject of reflex action, and one of the girls handed in this definition as she had understood it from me! "Reflex action is of a activity nervous. It is sometimes the don't understand of what it is doing and stops many messages to the brain and sends the motion to the legs." What little knowledge ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... kind of physical ideas, which are retained in the central organs, constituting what might be called physical memory, and may be combined in a manner which answers to association and imagination, or may give rise to muscular contractions, in those "reflex actions" which are the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... strange shadow made by the hair seemed to find a reflex from within. Perhaps the reckless adventurer, the careless gambler with life and liberty, saw through the walls of this squalid room, across the wide, ice-bound river, and beyond even the gloomy pile of buildings opposite, a cool, shady garden at Richmond, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking. But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it. A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself with the thought that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... mantling over a countenance of singular friendliness of expression. He had the power of saying sharp and caustic things, but he used his "giant-strength" with the gentleness of a child. His letters, of which many hundreds have fallen to my lot, are a perfect reflex of his joyous and elastic mind. There was not a pupil under his care who looked forward to a holiday with more unqualified delight than he; and when we strayed together beneath, or upon the heights of, the Dover Cliffs (where I last ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... who are attacked with colds or bronchial troubles, or even in the incipient stages of lung difficulties; as thereby they may lessen the inflammation, and defer the progress of the disease. We have seen people, who, having some slight irritation in the larynx, have, instead of smothering the reflex action, vigorously scraped their throats, and coughed with a persistence entirely unwise, inducing inflammation, from which they might date, perhaps, their subsequent bronchial troubles. It is not in coughs alone that the will exerts a mastery. In a case of fever, by ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... time. Thus, by means of sensation and of memory of the amount of energy expended in the attention each time, I can perceive the equality of time-interval of the rhythmic units. Once this effort of attention becomes definite and fixed, it repeats itself instinctively and mechanically—by reflex action, so to say, like that of walking when we are accustomed to a stride of a given length and rapidity. Here we have truly a sort of metronome which will beat out the rhythm according as we regulate it. And it goes without saying that with this we can not only note the rhythm ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with: 'So there's an end of an auld sang.' All was, or looked, courtly and free from vulgar emotion. Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments and installations and masked balls, with all other secondary splendors in celebration of primary splendors, reflex glories that reverberated the original glories, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis. The 'season,' as it is called in great cities, was over—unfortunately, the last season that was ever destined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... wound, tested the reflex actions of his nerves, gazed through holes in bright mirrors at his eyes, and made him watch perpendicular pencils moving horizontally across his ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... in foreign lands be more unknown to the wandering mariner than the faces and ways of even my own kind were to me. I had never played for one half-hour with boy or girl. I knew nothing of their play-things or their games. I hardly knew what boys were like, except, outwardly, from the dim reflex of myself in the broken mirror in my bed-room, whose lustre was more of the ice than the pool, and, inwardly, from the partly exceptional experiences of my own nature, with which even ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... my mind that story in all its intensity. A chance foolish question, such as thousands of gentle, sheltered women have put to their suddenly, uncomprehended, suddenly deified sons and husbands, had obviously disturbed his nervous equilibrium. That little reflex twitch at the corner of his lips—I have seen it often in the old times. I should like to have had him stripped to the waist so that I could have seen his heart—the infallible test. At moments of mighty moral strain men can keep steady eyes and nostrils ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... stood looking out of the window, his eye fixed out across the roofs of London. There had now fallen from his face all trace of levity, and into his eye and mouth there came reflex of the decision of his speech. Will stirred in his chair, and at length the two faced ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... hospitality, in the conversations as well as the viands has found an epitome and reflex of his most genial hours in Italy: brave soldiers, like Avezzana and Garibaldi, scholars, artists, every form of the national character, were gratefully exhibited in reunions, of which he was the presiding genius, and to which his American friends were admitted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... REMARK these lineaments at the time: I was too horrified for that. I noted them afterwards, when the form returned on my inward sight with a vividness too intense to admit of my doubting the accuracy of the reflex. But the most awful of the features were the eyes. These were ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... uncertain age, who, never having had a love affair of her own, felt a keen interest in those of others, and as she occupied a place in Southton akin to the "personal mention" column of a modern society newspaper, it may be said her remark was a sufficient reflex of public opinion. ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn

... respects the individual, we learn as follows: 'Even while the cerebral hemispheres are entire, and in full possession of their powers, the brain gives rise to actions which are as completely reflex as those of ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... quite a genuine mould of your soul; and there are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas, which would consume all the —-, —-, and —-, like stubble. N.B. An acute man would ask how I should like you, if I do not like your own genuine reflex of you? But a less acute, and an acuter, man, will feel ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... of a figure while he himself is counting. As soon as the dangerous digit is reached, the man will give some unintentional sign. Perhaps his breathing will become a degree deeper, or stop for a moment, his eyelids may make a reflex movement, his fingers may contract a bit. This remains entirely unnoticed by any one in the audience, but the professional mind-reader has heightened his sensibility so much that none of these involuntary signs escapes him. Yet from the standpoint of science ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... bringing every man who will but turn his ear a little towards the voice that calls him, nearer and nearer to the second birth—of sonship and liberty—not only this divine patience must he learn, but the divine insight as well, which in every form spies the reflex of the truth it cannot contain, and in every lowliest lesson sees the highest drawn nearer, and the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... He to visit this world again, and seek a place where His very Spirit had most fully wrought itself out into deeds, I fear that many of our so-called Churches would deserve to be passed by, and that His holy, tender, helpful, divinely-human love would find its most perfect reflex in these Orphan Homes. Still and forever, amidst all changes of creed and of climate, this, this is "pure and undefiled Religion" before God and ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... interfered with the shows of things by a partial revelation of their realities. He had not learned that the face of the moon is the face of a corpse-world; that the sadness upon it is the sadness of utter loss; that her light has in it no dissolved smile, is but the reflex from a lifeless mirror; that of all the orbs we know best she can have least to do with lovers' longings and losses, she alone having no love left in her—the cold cinder of a quenched world. Not an out-burnt cinder, though! she needs but to be cast again ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... somehow, she had given him a scorpion. And his instinct was to hate her. And yet he avoided hating her. He remembered Lilly—and the saying that one must possess oneself, and be alone in possession of oneself. And somehow, under the influence of Lilly, he refused to follow the reflex of his own passion. He refused to hate the Marchesa. He did like her. He did esteem her. And after all, she too was struggling with her fate. He had a genuine sympathy with her. Nay, he was not ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... had the Comic scene, (The flattering reflex of a sensual age) Shown prurient Folly's rank licentious mien, Refined, embellish'd ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... beauty? Is it all a show Flung outward from the healthy blood and nerves, A reflex of well-ordered organism? Is earth a desert? Is a woman's heart No more mysterious, no more beautiful, Than I am to myself this ghastly moment? It must be so—it must, except God is, And means the meaning that we think we see, Sends forth the beauty we are taking in. O Soul of nature, if ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... view which would be more within my range of understanding than Hegel? I can't understand free will as independent of our physical being and I don't see how will can be something different from a kind of complicated reflex. I am afraid there is no help for it. I will have to inform myself somehow. Anyway my head always seems clearer over here. I wish I could be so in America. You would not believe how waked up I can get. I believe it is in the air. There is something both stimulating ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff

... has often seemed to be a fact of interjection, which belongs to the so-called physical expressions of the feelings, common alike to men and animals. But it was soon admitted that an abyss yawns between the "Ah!" which is a physical reflex of pain, and a word; as also between that "Ah!" of pain and the "Ah!" employed as a word. The theory of the interjection being abandoned (jocosely termed the "Ah! Ah!" theory by German linguists), ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... Apostle Peter, in his brave way, is not afraid to say, it makes us 'partakers of the divine nature.' The immovableness of the trustful man is not all unlike the calmness of the trusted God; and the steadfastness of the one is a reflex of the unchangeableness of the other. We have not understood the meaning of faith, nor have we risen to the experience of its best effects upon ourselves, unless we understand that its great blessing and fruit, and the purpose for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... went on pretty briskly; it was all between the other two and left her on one side; yet it was good enough to listen to it. Eleanor was well satisfied. Mr. Rhys was the principal talker; he was telling Mrs. Caxton of different people and things in the course of his labours; which constantly gave a reflex gleam of light upon those labours themselves and upon the labourer. Unconsciously of course, and merely from the necessity of the case; but it was very interesting to Eleanor, and probably to Mrs. Caxton; she looked so. At last she turned ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner

... island, which appears to have been one of the first, if not the first, station of the earliest maritime people, in their advance towards Western Europe, should, now that the tide of civilisation, so long flowing from the East, has evidently taken a reflex course, become again that centre of commercial intercourse for which its geographical position ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... Legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the Universe which he was part Actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman Theater) discolored with the lurid reflex of the Curtain suspended between the Spectator and the Sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated System as resulted in nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient glimpses only ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam



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