"Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... medicine, and reflects before it sentences. But in the case of those poor nameless creatures, justice does not stop to consider whether that microbe in the criminal world who steals under the influence of hereditary or acquired degeneration, or in the delirium of chronic hunger, is not worthy of more pity. It rather replies with a mephistophelian grin when he begs for a humane understanding of ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... by vote, by arms if need be, against the enforced equality of an inferior race. Equality anywhere, means ultimately, equality everywhere. Equality at the polls means social equality; social equality means intermarriage and corruption of blood, and degeneration and decay. What gentleman here would want his daughter to marry a blubber-lipped, cocoanut-headed, kidney-footed, etc., ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... teaching. The principle of law was in the air during the Victorian era, and we have already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced by it. With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom and inclination. Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as gravitation. Tito's degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and Lydgate in Middlemarch, may be explained as simply as the fall of an apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance. A certain act produces a definite moral effect on the individual; and character is the added ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early writers,—[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world's history—namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own day—see Roscher's Political Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq.] —Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws ought to be made by all the citizens; and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... into Russia, where Wentworth Dilke was commissioned to represent England at the Horticultural Congress. In May a sudden telegram called Charles Dilke to St. Petersburg. His father had been attacked with 'that deadly form of Russian influenza, a local degeneration of the tissues, which kills a man in three days, without his being able to tell you that he feels anything except weakness.' Before Charles Dilke could reach the Russian capital, his father had been already 'embalmed ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell, avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to arms in the history of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... relentment. Others conceived it most natural to end in fire, as due unto the master principle in the composition, according to the doctrine of Heraclitus; and therefore heaped up large piles, more actively to waft them toward that element, whereby they also declined a visible degeneration into worms, and left a lasting parcel ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... The laws of heredity, though as yet only partially determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution—not disintegration and degeneration—two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote and encourage parenthood on the part of the best ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... found for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from those of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... their position more than a century or two, when the nations of Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition and preservation of landed property during many ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the "folly" of "Ivanhoe"; for the folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... not notice the corresponding decline and final disappearance of those who were highly placed, since this is a more gradual process and has nothing sensational about it. Yet the two processes are equally great and far- reaching in their effects, and are like those two of Elaboration and Degeneration which go on side by side for ever in nature, in the animal world; and like darkness and light and heat and cold ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... styles that great masters had made conventional, the degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much, however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly when ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... his doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that decadence and degeneration which is now rampant in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his spiritual death, exhorting us to abjure Wagner the musician ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... through the figures of some social aspects, as if dancing the "Lancers," with its forward and back movements, gallop, etc., and have finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have but little to record for ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... N. deterioration, debasement; wane, ebb; recession &c 287; retrogradation &c 283 [Obs.]; decrease &c 36. degeneracy, degeneration, degenerateness; degradation; depravation, depravement; devolution; depravity &c 945; demoralization, retrogression; masochism. impairment, inquination^, injury, damage, loss, detriment, delaceration^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people may be ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... characteristic of the prognathous species of the genus homo, but all the varieties of all the prognathous species are not equally black. Nor are the individuals of the same family or variety equally so. The lighter shades of color, when not derived from admixture with Mongolian or Caucasian blood, indicate degeneration in the prognathous species. The Hottentots, Bushmen and aborigines of Australia are inferior in mind and body to the typical African of Guinea and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... splendid breadth of high forehead, which was crowned with a shock of coal-black hair, while the jaws were bearded to the eyes. It was the face of an ascetic Crusader, sensualized in a measure by years of isolated frontier service and its attendant vices and degeneration, but still a face full of the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... condition of genius. We are too far away from any real knowledge of heredity to advise for or against marriage in the most of cases on this basis, and certainly we must not repeat Lombroso and Nordau's errors and call all variations from stupidity degeneration. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Anastacio Buenavida of the corkscrew curls and quaint taste in pigs. Certainly he was of the old landowning class, and in his refined features and delicate little hands and feet gave evidence of good blood, but the marks of degeneration were equally plain; he was an effeminate, futile person, and not properly to be ranked with the patriarchs. His ugly grotesque neighbour of the piebald horses was more like one. I described the people that lived nearest to us, our next-door neighbours so to speak, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... a sentence or a phrase in it rises above commonplace. That a crowd of people should listen to such stuff on a Sunday afternoon, when they might be taking a walk or enjoying a snooze, is a striking evidence of the degeneration of the human mind, at least ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... and body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one that demanded ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... safety, pleasure before all else—who had no ideal of womanhood—who could not have protected women—who would not fight to save women from the apish Huns—who remained behind to fall in the wreck of the war's degeneration, and to dance, to drink, to smoke, to ride the women ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... "Fatty degeneration of the heart," replied Temple, with a laugh. On the other hand, quite shocked at people who "make pigs" of themselves, is Mrs. Pavanne, who starves her stomach to beautify her back, and who, I assure you, would prefer after three days' fasting a new boiled ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have—Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson—this sounds like a paper for a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... tissue is replaced by a fibrous cicatrix. It would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its function ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... wholly and exclusively to their own city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be deemed a narrow one—Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the denizen of so many foreign homes—could speak of the degeneration of the pure Florentine blood by the admixture of that of foreigners whose native place was some five or ten miles outside the walls of Florence it may be estimated how smaller minds and narrower natures would feel on the subject. Each townsman felt that he was the heir to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the sky. There is surely something divine in man himself that he should rise so superior to the limitations which Creation seemed to impose—rise, too, by such unselfish, heroic devotion as this air-conquest has shown. Talk of human degeneration! When has such a story as this been written in the annals ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a closely-adherent placenta. Tarnier reports an instance of partus serotinus in which the product of conception was carried in the uterus forty days after term. The fetus was macerated but not putrid, and the placenta had undergone fatty degeneration. At a recent meeting of the Chicago Gynecological Society, Dr. F. A. Stahl reported the case of a German-Bohemian woman in which the fifth pregnancy terminated three hundred and two days after the last menstruation. Twenty days before there had ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of evolutionary processes, we have learned to talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be constrained to eradicate ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... obvious. This is especially true since it has been shown in Germany that under the influence of a continuous high bodily temperature, not intense enough at any time to compromise life, all the muscular tissues of the body undergo a peculiar granular degeneration. Many a typhoid-fever patient has undoubtedly died from the heart-muscle having undergone this change, when, if by artificial cooling the temperature of the body had been kept down, the alteration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... Israel's moral degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water strengthens, another weakens; one ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Professor August Weissmann that death is not a natural necessity, that many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... complications, and see with our own eyes their successful treatment, the more we learn to appreciate the fact, that Apis cures to a certainty the most dangerous affections of this kind, and that the anti-psoric remedy corrects at the same time the primary degeneration of the tissues, without either interfering with the operations of the other drug, on the contrary, by assisting ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... or suppression of urine, delirium, convulsions, coma, and death. Usually there are remissions for two to three days, then jaundice comes on, with enlargement of the liver; haemorrhages from the mucous surfaces and under the skin; later, coma and convulsions. In chronic cases there is fatty degeneration of most of the organs and tissues of the body. The inhalation of the fumes of phosphorus, as in making vermin-killers, etc., gives rise ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... legions were pressing down upon Egypt. The renegade Mark Antony was fighting for his life. For a time he was successful, but youth was no longer his, the spring had gone out of his veins, and pride and prosperity had pushed him toward fatty degeneration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... his resources. If I do not find happiness within the next five years, I am never likely to find it at all. At three-and-thirty a man has done with a heart, in a moral and poetic sense, and begins to entertain vague alarms on the subject of fatty degeneration." ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... of sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent strategic errors, which made a portion only of ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... frantic lamentation among the younger scholars as over Marion's. They had learned to love her. To all who were her elders there was gentle deference, to her equals and associates a frank and cordial bearing without degeneration into "confidences." To younger girls and to children Marion Sanford was an angel, the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most winning girl that lived. No matter who was with her, no matter what her occupation, for them she had ever smiles ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want. These go straight for the career, looking ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... dealing they particularly abhor. Mr. Gladstone is too lenient, and although his failings lean to virtue's side, his action is too oily altogether. He is old and weak, and lubricates too much. They in effect accuse him of fatty degeneration of the brain. Something heroic must be done. Those low-bred ruffians, the Unionists, must be swept from the path of Erin, while her eloquent sons, actuated by patriotism and six pounds a week, and spurred on by the hope ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... the fourth stage the stones have entirely disappeared, leaving only the trenches which the horses have formed, so that the path is like a sheet of violently corrugated iron. Most of the tracks are now between the third and fourth stages of degeneration. One never knows how far the horse will plunge his legs into the trenches, for sometimes they are very shallow, and sometimes the leg is engulfed ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... enchanters like Simon Magus or Apollonius; and such satellites were believed to be supplied by the souls of innocent young persons violently slain. Whether this secondary meaning of the title indicates a degeneration of the other, and forms the first step of the process whereby classic heroes were degraded into the foul fiends of mediaeval fancy, or whether we find in it a wholly new application of the word, is questionable. I am inclined to believe that, while [Greek: paredros theos] in the one case means ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... reading with much pleasure. I have, however, read the first, and am much disappointed with it. It seems to me the weakest and most inconclusive thing he has yet written. At p. 17 he states his theory as to degeneration of eyes, and again, on p. 18, of anthers and filaments; but in both cases he fails to prove it, and apparently does not see that his panmixia, or "cessation of selection," cannot possibly produce continuous degeneration culminating in the total or almost ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... pretty nearly hits us all, doesn't it?" said Griffin apprehensively. "I'm not so sure about myself, now you mention it. Doris Leighton may be one ahead of me in this business. Fatty degeneration of the soul is ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... period of conjugation in the plasmodia, which were animal micro-organisms? If he had borne in mind the complete cycle of the protozoa, he would have recognized them. But evidently Morel's theories of the degeneration of man had made a much livelier impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... deaf, lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it, for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given the right of way? Then the Bureau of Children will see to it that ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ancestral worth ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... preparation for those last sallies from a besieged fortress in which the defenders threw away their lives. There is little reason to doubt that they considered the frenzy and carelessness of death produced by the liquor as a form of divine possession. Opium has contributed much to the degeneration of the Rajputs, and their relapse to an idle, sensuous life when their energies were no longer maintained by the need of continuous fighting for the protection of their country. The following account by Forbes of a Rajput's daily life well illustrates ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Vilna, D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly flying ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... working woman has also a special interest in doing battle hand in hand with the male portion of the working class, for all the means and institutions that may protect the working woman from physical and moral degeneration, and which promise to secure to her the vitality and fitness necessary for motherhood and for the education of children. Furthermore, as already indicated, it is the part of the working-woman to make common ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... as useless to contend against the purist fad as against the holiness fake. Like a plague of army worms or epidemic of epizootic, it must run its course. Preternicety of expression, an affectation of euphemism, has in every age and clime evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay. When people emasculate their minds, they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus, for nature preserves the equipoise. Every writer of virility is now voted obscene, every man who strikes sledge-hammer blows at brutal wrong intrenched in prescriptive right is ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... highest development of a style is reached a change is sure to come. It may be a degeneration, or it may be the introduction of a new style through some great artistic impulse either native or introduced by contact with an outside influence. Fortunately, the Gothic passed through no pallid process of deterioration. The examples that nest comfortably ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Gardens, and was pleased to find her recognise the aptness of this description. But heaviest of all on the spirits of the whole party sat the anxiety about Lady Ashbridge. There could be no doubt that some cerebral degeneration was occurring, and Lady Barbara's urgent representation to her brother had the effect of making him promise to take her up to London without delay after Christmas, and let a specialist see her. For the present the pious fraud practised on her that Michael and his father had had "a good talk" together, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... disaster, and defeat. Big nights, sixty years ago, left a goodly number of men, either under the table or in a condition only a few degrees less undignified. But, in spite of the outcry against modern degeneration, these things are not so to-day; and the big nights of the Frontier Force, on the eve of active service, are singularly free from this, the least admirable part ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... They are the deep ones. Their naivete is nothing but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... chief distinctive characters of humanity. The highest human types, as represented in men of genius, present a striking approximation to the child-type. In man, from about the third year onward, further growth is to some extent growth in degeneration and senility.' Hence the true tendency of the progressive evolution of the race is to become child-like, to become feminine." (Psych. Rev. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... a degeneration of all things of heaven and of earth that might be termed disenchantment, or if you preferred, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been pronounced dead by those who held its place. Like a soldier who was asked: "In what do you believe?" and who replied: "In myself." Thus the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... he may advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... origin of the Zen Activity can easily be traced to the Sixth Patriarch and his direct disciples. After the Sung dynasty Chinese Zen masters seem to have given undue weight to the Activity, and neglected the serious study of the doctrine. This brought out the degeneration severely reproached by some of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... GEORGE: Silas Marner, an intensely human story, a heart history; Romola, a thrilling story of Florence in the days of Savonarola, a study in the degeneration of character that comes from doing only the agreeable things ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and under-goes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified. The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... called simply good or bad, is for the historian as absurd as to praise or blame an earthquake. It was simply inevitable under the conditions. We may, of course, take it as an essential stage in a social evolution, which if described as progress is therefore to be blessed, or if as degeneration may provoke lamentation. We may, if we please, ask whether superior statesmanship might have attained the good results without the violent catastrophes, or whether a wise and good man who could appreciate the real position would have approved or condemned the actual policy. But ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the higher and larger groups does not imply any universal law of progress in organisation, because we have at the same time numerous examples (as has been already pointed out) of the persistence of lowly organised forms, and also of absolute degradation or degeneration. Serpents, for example, have been developed from some lizard-like type which has lost its limbs; and though this loss has enabled them to occupy fresh places in nature and to increase and flourish to a marvellous extent, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... one-quarter of their wages, sometimes one-half, and sometimes more than one-half, on intoxicants. According to some of the foremost authorities on social science, and according to some of the most prominent medical men, drink is chiefly responsible for poverty, underfeeding, ill-health, and racial degeneration. Nevertheless, the British Socialists, instead of condemning drunkenness, rather encourage, or at least excuse, this terrible vice; and again, the universally discredited Iron Law of Wages is solemnly brought forth to prove ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... without introduction. They are part of us. Fedya is in all of us. His one cry "There has always been so much lacking between what I felt and what I could do" instantly makes him brother to all mankind. His simultaneous physical degeneration and spiritual regeneration is the glory that all people have invested in death. Tolstoi's cry against convention that disregards spiritual struggle, and system that ignores human growth, will find answering cries in many breasts in ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... interpretations of what he thinks he has learnt from fragments of Sanskrit literature, judge of the nature of all that he knows nothing about—i.e., to speculate upon the past history of a great nation he has lost sight of from its "nascent state," and caught up again but at the period of its last degeneration—the native student never knew, nor can ever know, anything of that history. Until the Orientalist has proved all this, he can be accorded but small justification for assuming that air of authority and supreme contempt which is found in almost every work upon India ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... biological necessity in the development of the human race—God's housecleaning, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox calls it. War may be a great soul stimulant meant to purge mankind of evils greater than itself, evils of baseness and world degeneration. We know there are blighted forests that must be swept clean by fire. Let us not scoff at such a theory until we understand the immeasurable mysteries of life and death. We know that, through the ages, ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... its action. Under civilization with its division of labour, the various functions of mind and body are very unequally exercised. There is overwork or misuse of one part and disuse and neglect of others, leading to the partial breakdown or degeneration of various organs and to general deterioration of health through disturbed balance of the constitution. The brain, or rather particular parts of it, are often over-stimulated, while the body is neglected. In many ways education and ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration in our village." ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... English playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier was himself a ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Hitherto at least want and care have been the strongest incentives to human activity; if these incentives are weakened, if the torturing anxiety about to-morrow ceases, then will progress be slackened, stagnation and then degeneration will follow, and together with the consequent inevitable impoverishment want and care will come again. I must admit that none of this has so far shown itself among you; but this does not remove my fears. For at present you ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... with a specific organism, all having the common character, however, that abundant granulation tissue is formed in which cellular changes are more in evidence than changes in the blood vessels, and in which the subsequent degeneration and necrosis of the granulation tissue results in the breaking down and destruction of the tissue in which it is formed. Another group is that in which chronic inflammation is due to mild or attenuated forms of pyogenic ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... cigarette and sip a pale greenish liquor smelling strongly of aniseed, which isn't half so interesting as a commonplace whiskey and soda, but which, I am told, has the recommendation of being ten times as wicked. I sip it with a delicious thrill of degeneration, as though I were Eve tasting the apple for the first time,—for "such a power hath white simplicity." Sin is for the innocent,—a truth which sinners will be the first to regret. It was so, I said to myself, Alfred ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... philosophy, Carneades was led to recommend his theory of the probable. "That which has been most perfectly analyzed and examined, and found to be devoid of improbability, is the most probable idea." The degeneration of philosophy now became truly complete, the labours of so many great men being degraded to rhetorical and artistic purposes. It was seen by all that Plato had destroyed all trust in the indications of the senses, and substituted ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... also most diligent in setting before the king's eyes the dangerous condition of the obedient Netherlands, the poverty of the finances, the mutinous degeneration of the once magnificent Spanish army, the misery of the country, the ruin of the people, the discontent of the nobles, the rapid strides made by the republic, the vast improvement in its military organization, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... attitude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover. The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. What the psychopathist since Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. For although ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... workingman's {58} club, and, until some satisfactory substitute is found for it, all our denunciations will fail to banish it. It is none the less true that, of all personal habits, the drink habit stands next to licentiousness as a cause of poverty and degeneration. ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... night, half its bulk is torn away, the neighborhood notes with surprise that what seemed solid wood is dry and crumbling pith. During the last fifteen years of Daniel Webster's life, his wonderfully imposing form and his immense reputation concealed from the public the decay of his powers and the degeneration of his morals. At least, few said what perhaps many felt, that "he was not the man he had been." People went away from one of his ponderous and empty speeches disappointed, but not ill pleased to boast that they too had "heard Daniel Webster speak," and feeling very sure that he could ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... reached for the dishes. Now some tables, or sections of tables, still maintain this lofty standard of good breeding, by the sheer fact that the most of the men are well bred and the rest are ashamed not to be. But where the proportion is reversed degeneration is rapid. The men furtively hang up their hats and turn over their plates before the order, and if a bunch of them take to doing this, there appears to be no remedy for it. "It's up to you," said a sergeant to us on the first day. "You can be gentlemen, or you can ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... fair, its gates were open, and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from religion just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of the later ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic (conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves, and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the tints and poses of his figures. Among his most ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Mediterranean in the elder ages of Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to Evelyn in his youth (about Cromwell's time) by an unpleasant travelling experience. These gigantic races, however, were no arguments for a degeneration amongst the rest of mankind. They were evidently a variety of man, coexistent with the ordinary races, but liable to be absorbed and gradually lost by intermarriage amongst other tribes of the ordinary standard. Occasional exhumations ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... would bid you to note the many words which men have dragged downward with themselves, and made more or less partakers of their own fall. Having once an honourable meaning, they have yet with the deterioration and degeneration of those that used them, or of those about whom they were used, deteriorated and degenerated too. How many, harmless once, have assumed a harmful as their secondary meaning; how many worthy have acquired an unworthy. Thus 'knave' meant once no more than lad (nor does 'knabe' now in German mean more); ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... 6" is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful story that Tchekoff has written. It is an analysis of moral degeneration, leading progressively to insanity, in a doctor who is seized by the pervasive banality of the village in which he practises. Tchekoff, like many other Russian writers, has shown himself a master in the study of certain psychological ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Minute herniae at these openings are sometimes present. Dilatation and tortuosity of the anterior ciliary veins are due apparently to excessive flow of blood through them on account of the abnormally small amount carried off by the venae vorticosae. In the stage of degeneration, ectasae of the sclera occur most frequently near the equator of the globe. Spontaneous ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... unlike other Indians in many respects, lighter in color, and peculiar in manners and customs. What is conjectured may be true, but we have no means of proving its truth. That the Mandans were like what a lost community of Mound-Builders might have become by degeneration through mixture and association with barbarians may be supposed, but the actual history of that remarkable tribe might give its peculiarities a very different explanation. The Mandans were supposed to be a branch of the Dacotahs. They may have been, like the Navajos, a changed community of Pueblos, ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the digestive functions. It cannot ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... the abdominal, thoracic, and cerebro-spinal cavities; (2) marked leucocytosis, with destruction of red corpuscles, setting free haemoglobin which lodges in the epithelial cells of the tubules of the kidneys; (3) minute thrombi and extravasations throughout the tissues of the body; (4) degeneration of the ganglion cells of the solar plexus; (5) oedema and degeneration of the lymphoid tissue throughout the body; (6) cloudy swelling of the liver and kidneys, and softening and enlargement of the spleen. Bardeen suggests that these morbid phenomena correspond so closely to those met ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Webster showed, in handling his subject, not only the variety, richness, and force which he had displayed in the Senate, but the capacity of presenting it in a way thoroughly adapted to the popular mind, and yet, at the same time, of preserving the impressive tone of a dignified statesman, without any degeneration into mere stump oratory. This wonderful series of speeches produced the greatest possible effect. They were heard by thousands and read by tens of thousands. They fell, of course, upon willing ears. The people, smarting under bankruptcy, ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... are you?' And I'll say, 'I'm Elam Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander down to ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... overlooked one great value of knowledge. Again, when the student is told by Rousseau that "in the hands of man everything degenerates," he can, no doubt, justify the assertion to some extent by recalling observed instances of such degeneration. But, in addition, when he recalls what he has observed and read about the wonderful advance made by man toward a higher civilization, and realizes that Rousseau is denying that there has been an advance, he is in a position ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to the average mind. All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex. The latter day degeneration of sex is the "trail of the serpent," which Woman is to crush with her heel. And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though Woman had fallen from her high estate, to take her ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia of mental and physical degeneration. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... measures you with his eye, and hands you out a book of murders if you are fond of theology; or Tupper or a dictionary or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman in any, bookstore. But here I am running on as if business men had nothing to do but listen to women talk. You must pardon me, for I was not thinking.—And you must let ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... with a critical and unfriendly eye. He disliked this fatty degeneration excessively. Looking him up and down, he could find no point about him that gave him the least pleasure, with the single exception of the state of his hat, in the side of which he was rejoiced to perceive there was a ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lowering of the mental vitality of the higher race. That is the price it has to pay for the privilege of survival under the new conditions. But, in conformity to the principles already laid down as accepted by all anthropologists, such a lowering must correspond to a degeneration in the highest grades of structure, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view that they ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... of the best German novels of the last decades, is entitled The Buddenbrooks, the Degeneration of a Family (1901). The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the finest ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to him contrary to all discipline that soldiers should sing this domestic and revolutionary refrain which on days of riot had been uttered by the lips of jeering workmen. On this occasion he deplored the moral degeneration of the army, and thought with a bitter smile that his old comrade Greatauk, the head of this degenerate army, basely exposed him to the malice of an unpatriotic government. And he promised himself that he would make ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... It is seldom, I knew, that whalers come that way, or enter far through the Straits of Behring. Still, undoubtedly, a few did so every year. It was worth risking, any way, for any kind of action was better than that ghastly wearing out of body and fatty degeneration of soul. One or two more letters passed, stimulated by the tobacco-money, and the day of rendezvous ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. If it be a principle that we ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... long since subsided into a respectable exponent of high and dry Whiggery, which in these later days has undergone a further degeneration or evolution into Unionism.... Audacity, wit, unconventionality, enthusiasm—all these qualities have long since evaporated, and with them has disappeared the political influence ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... which terminate fatally, death usually results from meningeal, pulmonary, or general tuberculosis, or from pyogenic complications and waxy degeneration. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Socialist. He is a man with a history. It is a sad history, for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of Degeneration. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to say that in ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... we neglect almost any of the domestic animals, they will rapidly revert to wild and worthless forms. Now, the same thing exactly would happen in the case of you or me. Why should man be an exception to any of the laws of nature? Natural Law, Degeneration, p. 99. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience—a more lengthened observation—is wanting on the subject. But after what you have said, it is my duty to tell you that death from this ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... people would remain at their original and normal degree of badness, instead of going from bad to worse, as they always have done hitherto in the history of mankind. Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe. It invariably either debauches or martyrizes men and women, accordingly as it renders them desperate and hardened, or makes ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much as they can, and place ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Rashtra-pala-paripriccha (Ed. Finot, pp. ix-xi, 28-33) inveighs against the moral degeneration of the Buddhist clergy. This work was translated into Chinese between 589 and 618, so that demoralisation must have begun in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... James Mesurier fulfilled his threat on that occasion, and had in fact written to the "forward little girl's" parents. Could he have seen the rather amused reception of his letter, he would have realised with sorrow that an age of parental leniency, little short of degeneration, was in certain quarters unmistakably supplanting the stern age of which he was in a degree an anachronistic survival. That forward little girl's parents chanced to know James Mesurier enough by sight and reputation to respect ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... is not tragic: she is too rational. And in her career there is no progression, no decline or degeneration. Her condition is once and for always. There is and will be ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... threw her weight against it with quick, firm movements like the movements of a man. Indeed, she was a better man than her companion; of a stronger common sense; with lither limbs and a stouter heart; the best man that France has latterly produced, and, so far as the student of racial degeneration may foretell, will ever ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... general public I have explained. It was not really opposition. It was simply a part of the disease of the period; the dropsical, fatty degeneration of a people. But the mere fact that the reformers sent forth their cries and still laboured beside the public's crowded race-course; that such people as the lady I have mentioned existed—and there were ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... prevalent from thirty to fifty years ago. But there is one great difference between then and now. Then, rural civilisation was passing through a stage of marked social advancement which was common throughout the country; now, there are distinct indications of social degeneration, which Mr. Ross regards as the inevitable consequence of the new landlord and tenant system. Many members of these communities must have left the Old World to escape from the selfsame conditions which they are reproducing ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... sorts of business, of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender and spread are chaotic and undisciplined, so badly done that here is enormous hardship, and there enormous waste, here excess and degeneration, and there privation and death. He declares that for these collective purposes, in the satisfaction of these universal needs, mankind presents the appearance and follows the methods of a mob when it ought to ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... in Theobald's Road. They were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Communistic or Capitalistic, a Trade Union, or a Church, to suppress individual liberty in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he makes a ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the termination of its mission. Whenever the family boundaries are overstepped, the curse of nature is breathed upon the generative functions, and the illegitimate product dies out, or subsides into hopeless degeneration. The mule is a monster, and has ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... primitive backboned ancestor. It may be an offshoot from the same group. The sea-squirt further illustrates the origin of the backbone, since it has a similar rod of cartilage in its youth, and loses it, by degeneration, in its maturity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Regency that the great artist and sculptor in metal, Charles Cressant, flourished. He was made ebeniste of the Regent, and his influence was always to keep up the traditions when the reaction against the severe might easily have led to degeneration. There are beautiful examples of his work in many of the great collections of furniture, notably the wonderful commode in the Wallace collection. The dragon mounts of ormolu on it show the strong influence the Orient had at the time. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... preparation; thus is zeal animated and are efforts sustained. In the economic realm, as is now seen to be the case in the biologic realm, competition of some effective kind is an indispensable condition not only of progress but of life without degeneration. Monopoly, as we have noted, never has ceased to rest under the ban of Anglo-Saxon law, and therefore to exemplify compulsory, as opposed to competitive distribution. A striking feature of the competitive ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... patients to declare "I feel as if there was another person in me," or "I feel compelled as if by another agency to act thus." The explanation of a supernatural agent weighing upon them becomes very easy. For the purpose of this discussion, it is not important whether psychasthenia arises purely from degeneration of structure, or from faults in the chemistry of the plasma which bathes the nerve structures, or whether it is a purely psychopathological condition to which the physical phenomena are secondary, as some would have us believe. Our object is merely the setting forth of the fact that it is a diseased ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... say at my suggestion—he was subjected to the wholesome discipline equally of his schoolmates and his masters; in fact, sir, as you are probably aware, the most perfect democracy that we have yet known, in which the mere accidents of wealth, position, luxury, effeminacy, physical degeneration, and over-civilized stimulation, are not recognized. He was put into compulsory cricket, football, and rounders. As an undersized boy he was subjected to that ingenious preparation for future mastership by the pupillary state ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of studying probabilities are great helps against such attackers; but, on the other hand, the man who drinks a glass of wine when he feels low will beat the hypnotist, who will doubtless harm him by causing degeneration. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... the working of the process of natural selection in the human species. Overpopulation, at least until artificial selection arrives, is not an evil, but a good in human society. Without it there would not be sufficient elimination of the unfit in human society to prevent wholesale social degeneration. Even with artificial selection, however, some overpopulation would be necessary for the working of any scheme of selection. We must conclude, then, that Malthus's theory, either as an explanation of the growth of modern populations ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... a short stalk, and white-ribbed, oblong leaves. The stem by which the flower is supported unites at the head of the primary branches into thick, short, irregular bundles, in the form of a corymb. It appears to be a degeneration of the Brassica oleracea costata, or ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... get out of it ... there ought to be people who can shove things along. But there aren't ... except Balfour, and he's getting old and anyhow he hasn't got much health. You see what I mean, don't you? There ought to be a strong Opposition, otherwise the Liberals will develop fatty degeneration of the political sense.... The trouble with a lot of these fellows is that they believe that twaddle that Lord Randolph Churchill talked about the duty of an Opposition being to oppose. Of course it ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... allude to war; it might be urged that we attribute this rather to the will of the people or kings than to Nature. But poverty, for instance, which we still rank with irremediable ills such as shipwreck or plague; poverty, with all its crushing sorrows and transmitted degeneration—how often may this be ascribed to the injustice of the elements, and how often to the injustice of our social condition, which is the crowning injustice of man? Need we, at the sight of unmerited wretchedness, look to the skies for a reason, as though ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck |
