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More "Aberration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to reward with ingratitude the magnanimity which he displayed in ascending the throne—was not such conduct abominable? Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie had inflicted this vexation upon honest men. To sulk at his country's happiness, alack, what aberration! ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... tempted me greatly. I do not mind saying, also, that I am rather proud of the way you got yourself out of your scrape, and I am glad there were no more serious results than a sprained ankle for the Chevalier Le Moyne and a temporary aberration of mind for the sentry. I am told you sent him spinning in such fashion that his brains flew out of the top of his head, and it was some hours before he got them back again. I hear, too, that he insists it could ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... preceptors engaged in lecturing to their disciples on the Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief of the celestials! O, what are these ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... with one set of thoughts, he had now lost the consciousness of his own identity, and addressed his wife and children as strangers. When the former first heard her husband speaking of 'John Clare' as a third person, she became terribly frightened; but thinking he might recover from his mental aberration by being carefully nursed and kept as quiet as possible, she resolved to do her own duty independent of the world. She was successful, to some extent; for after a while the clouds began, to disappear, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... sickness in all its forms, and you have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached, you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or mental abnormality ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... stood still, bewildered, as if I'd walked into a dream, beguiled by a false clue of boots; and during my few seconds of temporary aberration my dazed eyes fell upon a book which lay on the table. It was Sir Lionel's "Morte d'Arthur" (second volume; he's lent me the first), and in it for a marker was a glove of mine. I'd lost it at Torquay, after we had our dear, good talk, and he knew I was looking for it, all about the sitting ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... had been on the point of going into hysterics, recovered herself, and overcame the still lingering impulse: she felt as if she had awaked from a momentary aberration of the intellect. Mr. Arnold proceeded to light the candles, saying, in ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we may consider our ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient. "The mirror," remarks Bloch (Beitraege 1, p. 201), "plays an important part in the genesis of sexual aberration.... It cannot be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual excitement at the sight of their own bodies in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... education as merely another weapon to use in making society contribute more to purse and pleasure. And on the firing line, formed by these noisy agitators, mistaken by many as educational leaders, these were the things striven for. But this aberration was only temporary. The real educational leaders, in trying to realize the goal of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and to do it having to combat this movement of wildcat educational speculation, gradually came to see a more important truth even than the one they were seeking. As on ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... security threat is, of course, a most obvious aspect of the difficulty in defining the future defense posture of the nation. The United States has long resisted maintaining a large standing military and the Cold War years could prove an aberration to that history. Extending this historical observation of small standing forces, it is clear that there is no adversary on the horizon even remotely approaching the military power of the former USSR. While we might conjure up nominal regional contingencies against Korea or Iraq as ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... next to the Carpenter-bees come the Lithurgi, of whom my district possesses two species: L. cornutus, FAB., and L. chrysurus, BOY. By what aberration of nomenclature was the name of Lithurgus, a worker in stone, given to insects which work solely in wood? I have caught the first, the stronger of the two, digging galleries in a large block of oak that ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... it is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private letter—long since addressed to the present commentator by the most illustrious of writers ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reflection: The intelligence, then, is threatened by dangers, like the spirit. It may be obscured, it may contain a contradiction, an "error," without perceiving it, and as a result of a single unnoticed error it may rush into a species of delirium, a mortal aberration. Like the spirit, then, it has its way of salvation, and it needs to be sustained lest it should perish. The support it requires is not that of the senses. Like the spirit, it needs a continual purification, which, like ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither. Religion, then, is simply another form of hope; and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect, and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. If we only consider religious institutions in a purely human ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... mountain bore nearly east instead of N. E. N. I saw three of my fixed points, however, by which, with my pocket sextant, I could ascertain our true position, which proved to be very wide of my intended course. It was, like many other accidental frustrations of my plans in this journey, an aberration that did us good, for we had thereby avoided the bad scrub formerly passed through, and also a rocky part of the range. We next descended into a valley in which, after following down a dry watercourse ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... starting. This is used by Fromundus with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, second ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... little mention of insanity in the domesticated animals in any of our modern authors, whether treating on agriculture, horsemanship, or veterinary medicine, and yet there are some singular and very interesting cases of aberration of intellect. The inferior animals are, to a certain extent, endowed with the same faculties as ourselves. They are even susceptible of the same moral qualities. Hatred, love, fear, hope, joy, distress, courage, timidity, jealousy, and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... now in the serene light of reason, cannot be looked on as anything but an aberration. Libya is an immense box of sand which never had any value, nor has it now. Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan cover more than one million one hundred thousand square kilometres and have less than nine hundred thousand inhabitants, ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... we do; in spite of every aberration of the individual. And so, when we saw it was impossible that my brother and his wife should live together, we simply transferred our allegiance to the child—we constituted him ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... proves that "nations do not always express the same passions by the same sounds." If one obtains music from the clang and clamour of full-throated frogs, may it not be because his ears are more attuned to natural than to artificial harmonies, not because, of any defect in, or aberration of, hearing, or any lack of melody on the part ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of all degrees. He would have explained to the Inquisitors of State of the Most Serene Republic that the books of magic found by their apparitors in his possession—"The Clavicula of Solomon," the "Zecor-ben," and other kindred works—had been collected by him as curious instances of human aberration. But the Inquisitors of State would not have believed him, for the Inquisitors were among those who took magic seriously. And, anyhow, they had never asked him to explain, but had left him as if forgotten in that abominable verminous cell under the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... like it in France during the first year of war when I was there. But I will say that he must have been both physically and mentally above the average before he went to fight. My examination extended through periods of his unconsciousness and aberration. Once, for a little time, he came to, apparently sane. The nurse said he had noticed several periods of this rationality during the last forty-eight hours. But these, and the prolonged vitality, do not offer ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Weismann, Merrifield, Standfuss, and Fischer, on seasonal dimorphism and the aberration of colour in butterflies have so often been discussed in biological literature that a short reference to them will suffice. By seasonal dimorphism is meant the fact that species may appear at different seasons of the year in a somewhat different ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... it all as an unfortunate aberration; and if you regret it, and change your mind, you will be free at any time you like to come back and nothing shall be ever said about it. But I'm not begging you to do so. I may be wrong; perhaps she's the woman to make you happy. Let me know within three months how you feel about ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... must he question his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The struggle, the self-denial, the pain, and the victory, are of the very essence of martyrdom,—are ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... distress and depression, of which she would have died had you not come, she reacted first into mental lethargy, and now into almost complete mental inactivity. I cannot discover that any disturbed physical functions have been an element in her mental aberration, for more perfect physical life and loveliness I have never seen. Her white hair, which might have made her look old, is a foil to a beauty which seems to ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... sense. An aberration in which everything is pardonable. Whatever you do, you will ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of eminence has told us of the melancholy termination of the life of a gentleman who in a state of mental aberration cut his throat; the loss of blood restored his mind to a healthy condition; but the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... we learn that he belonged neither to the animal worshippers, the believers in Seker, nor to the Osiride race, but to a fourth people. The compound god Ptah-Seker is shown as a bandy-legged dwarf, with wide flat head, a known aberration of growth. It seems as if we should connect this with the pataikoi who were worshipped by Phoenician sailors as dwarf figures, the name being similar. This points to a connection of the Phoenician race with the dynastic Egyptians. Ptah was worshipped ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... were the only members of the family at home. I could not see or hear them anywhere, so, presuming they were out walking, I washed my hands, lit a lamp, and sat down to my tea, where it had been left for me on the dining-table. I remembered—wonderful aberration from my usual thoughtlessness—that the book I had left in the hammock had a beautiful cover which the dew would spoil, so I left my tea to bring it in. Two little white squares struck my eye in the gathering dusk. I picked them up also, and, bringing them to the light, opened the one ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... weigh, and got round to the fish. It was still there. I could see its expressionless eye (about as big as a sixpence) out of the water and its mouth wide open, when I remembered I had forgotten the landing-net in my hurry. Then came the period of mental aberration common to the amateur. The fish was certainly 4 lbs. in weight, yet I tried to get him in with my hands. Of course he gave one big flop, slipped out, and disappeared—the biggest chub I ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... am liable to fits of delirium but by a sudden and alarming aberration while waiting for her answer I became mentally aware of three trained dogs dancing on their hind legs. I don't know why. Perhaps because of the pervading solemnity. There's nothing more solemn on earth than a dance of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... innovations, involving the condemnation of all the pictures and ornaments she could lay her hands on,—a piece of sacrilege which Mrs. Rogers regarded more in sorrow than in anger, as indicating a pitiable aberration of intellect,—the rooms were taken from ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... answered his partner. "That temporary aberration of judgment, due to oxygen-stimulus, will have no results. Herzog won't dare fill out the check, anyhow, because he knows he'd get into trouble if he did; and even though he should, he can collect nothing. I'll have payment stopped, at once, on that ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... preparatory smack of his lips he began: "Free speech being permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing tone of FORCED SUBLIMITY..." ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... it. I own that your blunder was providential. It is sure and certain that but for you the DUNCAN would have fallen into the hands of the convicts; but for you we should have been recaptured by the Maories. But for my sake tell me by what supernatural aberration of mind you were induced to write New ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... but by the recorded opinion of those members of our profession who have given the subject close and earnest attention. To the first query, the reply must be made that in one-half, or nearly one-half, of the cases of this variety of insanity there is traceable a hereditary tendency to aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be presumed that the mania ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... exception, in firm adherence to the administration. One popular paper is endeavoring to maintain equivocal ground; approving the administration in all its proceedings, and Mr. Randolph in all those which have heretofore merited approbation, carefully avoiding to mention his late aberration. The ultimate view of this paper is friendly to you, and the editor, with more judgment than him who assumes to be at the head of your friends, sees that the ground of opposition to the administration is not that on ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... must get to the centre before he can trace the limits and imperfections. Once there, once identified with his object, he can observe its irregularities without being irritated or perturbed. As for that Rhadamanthine criticism which sits aloof from its object, and treats every aberration from a straight line as something abnormal and abominable, he leaves it to the immaculate. In truth, such criticism, with all its pretences to authority, is open to this fatal objection,—it tends to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... New Vetzlar Eye-pieces, as exhibited at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Lenses of these Eye-pieces are so constructed that the rays of light fall nearly perpendicular to the surface of the various lenses, by which the aberration is completely removed; and a telescope so fitted give one-third more magnifying power and light than could be obtained by the old Eye-pieces. Prices of the various sizes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... into her flesh: an invisible force, a Satanic impulse, urged him to strangle with his own hands the woman he had loved so dearly, had at one time adored on his knees. The count rushed out of the room with gestures of desperation, muttering incoherent words; and as he shewed plain signs of mental aberration, his father, Charles of Artois, took him away, and they went that same evening to their palace of St. Agatha, and there prepared a defence in case they ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... soldiers in the regiment who would accept the theory that any one of the three had connived at the escape. As for the sergeant—he had served four enlistments in the —teenth, and without a flaw in his record beyond an occasional aberration in the now distant past, due to the potency of the poteen distilled by certain Hibernian experts not far from an old-time "plains fort," where the regiment had rested on its march 'cross continent. As for the officers—but who would suppose an officer guilty of anything of the kind—a flagrant military ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... that she believed, in giving people what they wanted. As for the consequences, there was no mortal lapse or aberration that could trouble her serenity or bring a blush to her enduring candor. If you came a cropper you might be sure that Fanny's judgment of you would be pure from the superstition of morality. She herself had never swerved ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... intervals of mental aberration, Mr. Graham spoke of "Helena," imploring her forgiveness for his leaving her so long, and promising to return. Sometimes he spoke of her as being dead, and in piteous accents he would ask of Durward to bring him back his "beautiful 'Lena," who ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... in all these cases, is the lack of self-control. Weakness, aberration or disease of the Will. The Individual Intelligence fails to exercise its divine prerogative and be Master in and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... take an interest in my folly for a moment, is encountered with great acrimony by less gentle friends. They who are not bound to me by blood or intimacy—and some who are—deride, insult, and revile me in every way for my subjection to a mental aberration which is rapidly consuming a pretty property, more than average talents, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... have demonstrated that the action of alcohol on the digestive fluid is to destroy its active principle, the pepsin, thus confirming the observations of physiologists, that its use gives rise to serious disorders of the stomach and malignant aberration of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... insanity he may be occasionally afflicted with results more from an excessive indulgence in liquor than from any other cause. Be that, however, as it may, there is no question but that he is occasionally seized with fits of mental aberration. From what you tell me, and his exaggerated suspicions of a plot between you and Sir Thomas Gourlay, I think it most probable that he ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... fact that "perfection here below" is relative, not absolute—and illustrating this by the circumstance that European animals, and especially plants, are now proving to be better adapted for New Zealand than many of the indigenous ones—that "the correction for the aberration of light is said, on high authority, not to be quite perfect even in that most perfect organ, the eye." And then follows the second extract of the reviewer. But what is the position of the reviewer upon his own interpretation ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... A flicker of aberration lighted in the old man's eye. "H'm, yes," said he, pondering. "Stuck to one business. So you did. H'm." Then, suddenly sly, he chirped: "But I've struck it rich now." He tapped his box. "Jewelry," he ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... morning, but the hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this sentimental inspection, and after meditating a while over the strings under my silent ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... they were always there to succour him; they would never desert him—never. In a moment of fierce elation he raised his hat to them, then seemed to see Grizel crying "I woke up," and in horror of himself clapped it on again. It was but a momentary aberration, and is recorded only to show that, however remorseful he felt afterwards, there was ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... a ray of the imagination necessary to a comprehension of Poe's genius given us at least a decent sketch of his brief life! Was Poe in a state of mental aberration when he made Griswold his literary executor? Is the world forever to hear of him only from those who see the dark side of his life and know nothing of his life's work?—from those who look at his life and ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... indicates that every human being, however normal and "good," has somewhere in him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration. But no human being, however abnormal or however "criminal," is born into the world without this ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... General Synod conceive to be taught in Scripture, and which they would recommend to the Church at large, is this, that we should view with charity, and treat with forbearance, those who have fallen into an aberration of non-fundamental importance either from the faith or the practise of the Bible and the Augsburg Confession; and on the other hand, that we are bound 'not to eat with a fornicator, or a covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner,' ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... on, and that fine intellect, which had ever been unclouded, began to give signs of aberration. One day he said to an Italian delegation, "The French are Italians; the Italians are French. French and Italians ought to go to Africa together and found the United ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... last forced upon me that he had been endeavoring to commit suicide by a slow course of starvation and exposure. Either as the cause or the result of this attempt, I read, in the final notes, signs of an aberration of mind. This also explained the singular demeanor of the man when found, and his refusal to take medicine or nourishment. He had selected a long way to accomplish his purpose, but had reached the ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and brand of our failure—it is our aberration from the normal type as it is fully revealed in Christ. "Nothing is so unnatural as sin,"[56] nothing is so irrational, nothing so abnormal—it is always a break from the unity of the divine Life, a movement towards ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... he also loses his critical faculty, his judgment. He no longer perceives the defects of his work—does not know that it is mediocre or bad. That is the horror of it! The artist who has fallen from his original high estate is no more conscious of his failings than the lunatic is aware of his mental aberration. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... poems, who had served the cause of Parliament by some splendid pamphlets for Church-reformation and against Episcopacy, and who had in these pamphlets encountered even the great Bishop Hall. All this only made the doctrine more dangerous, the aberration more lamentable. This Mr. Milton must be avoided, and denounced as a Sectary of the worst kind! Some said it was all owing to the conduct of his wife, a rank Royalist, who had deserted him and gone back to her friends! If that were the case, he ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... vitreous humors are segments of circles, of different diameters from their concave surfaces. (Fig. 139.) All these circumstances still further influence the refracting character of the visual organ. The achromatic arrangement of the transparent refracting mediums of the eye, remedies the aberration of refraction in the different portions of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... which had apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were an aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his confused ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... they think at all, that this frequent visitor and attendant of theirs is more kin than kind. I have related in a former work that I once saw a peregrine strike down and kill an owl—a sight that made me gasp with astonishment. But I am inclined to think of this act as only a slip, a slight aberration, on the part of the falcon, so universal is the sense of relationship among the kinds that have the rapacious habit; or, at the worst, it was merely an isolated act of deviltry and daring of the sharp-winged pirate of the sky, a sudden assertion of over-mastering energy and power, and a very slight ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... of light, founded upon his study of "the aberration of light," is even less worthy ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... supernatural agency in this play, and the final aberration from the truth of history, have been considerably censured by the German critics: Schlegel, we recollect, calls Joanna's end a 'rosy death.' In this dramaturgic discussion, the mere reader need take no great interest. To require our belief in apparitions and miracles, things which ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... face showed no sign of any aberration of intellect, and Margery took Grace's hand, and hurried her through the crowd, resolved that she should not, for another instant, stand by ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... shadow of the crumbling portal. At vespers nearly all Buckeye, hitherto virtuously skeptical and good-humoredly secure in Works without Faith, made a point of attending; it was alleged by some to see if Jovita's glossy Indian-inky eyes would suffer aberration in her devotions. But the rose-crested head was never lifted from the well-worn prayer-book or the brown hands which held a certain poor little cheap rosary like a child's string of battered copper coins. Buckeye lounged by the wall through the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of course by simple peasants in their devotion to whatever method of salvation they believe to be in accordance with God's will. Thus came into existence the self-mutilators, or skoptzi, victims, no doubt, of some mental aberration, some misdirected sense of duty, but yet how impressive ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... produced during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of the confusion of tongues at Babel, that it was only a labial failure, so that the people could not articulate. It was not an aberration in words or language, but a failure and incapacity in labial utterance. Epiphanius says that Babel, or Babylon, was the first city built ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... your confession shall come as a complete surprise. We will make a clean sweep of all these psychological points, of a suspicion against you, so that your crime will appear to have been something like an aberration, for in truth it was an aberration. I am an honest man, Rodion Romanovitch, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a-, privative, chroma, colour), in optics, the property of transmitting white light, without decomposing it into the colours of the spectrum; "achromatic lenses'' are lenses which possess this property. (See LENS, ABERRATION and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... respect of the high estimation of prophecy, our age were to follow in the steps of Jesus, it would also most readily agree with Him as regards the subject of the prophecy before us. This alone is the cause of the aberration from Him, that people confined and shut up the prophet within the horizon of his time, and then imagined that he could not know anything of the suffering of Christ. It was altogether different in the [Pg 249] ancient Christian Church. In ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... constituted, ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell was ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... of mind, madness, lunacy, craziness, derangement, frenzy, delirium, mania, hallucination, aberration of mind, bedlamism; paranoia, monomania. Antonyms: sanity, rationality, lucidity. Associated Words: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... allows its votaries to feel A glowing ardour, an intense delight, On every subject but the one that lifts The soul above its sensual, vain pursuits, And elevates the mind and thoughts to God! Zeal in a sacred cause alone is deemed An aberration of our mental powers. The sons of pleasure cannot bear that light Of heavenly birth which penetrates the souls Of men, who, deeply conscious of their guilt, Mourn o'er their lost, degraded state, and seek, Through faith in Christ's atonement, to regain The glorious liberty of sons of ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... other conclusion, because any other would be a madman's mental aberration, the breaking of the rules of sense and logic. And now do you know how the cycle of these novels really ended? By a hymn in the worship ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... it altered?" "Another person has come between us." He hesitated a moment. "I won't pretend not to know whom you mean." He smiled in pity for my aberration, but he meant to be kind. "A ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... assassination from revenge, yet when the national prejudices of the prisoner had been explained, which made him consider himself as stained with indelible dishonour, the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard his crime as the aberration of a false idea of honour, rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or habitually vicious. I shall never forget the charge of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... but on comparing his notes with those of his companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had made some most preposterous statements. Of course I shall explain it away as being the result of a moment of aberration, but I feel only too sure that it will be the first of a series. It is but a month now to the end of the session, and I pray that I may be able to hold out ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his wits were at present too bewildered for her purpose, being always subject to aberration under any peculiar excitement of either mind ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... error would be appreciable—to lines of perceptible breadth or thickness, parallels which deviate sensibly from equidistance, and the like—we correct our conclusions, by combining with them a fresh set of propositions relating to the aberration; just as we also take in propositions relating to the physical or chemical properties of the material, if those properties happen to introduce any modification into the result; which they easily may, even with respect to figure and magnitude, as in the case, for instance, of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... and those of the old Egyptian necromancers turning into serpents! Why, I could have sworn that this knife of mine did precisely the same thing! Now, there is a problem for you, Doctor: What sort of mental aberration was it that caused me to imagine such an ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... that tics are not morbid entities but episodic syndromes of mental degeneration. Charcot referred to tic as a sort of hereditary aberration, which, I may add, is surely true when we view it from the phylogenetic standpoint, as representing a resurrection of what was at one time a normal tendency or reaction. Noir has called attention to the fact that the movements ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Army and Navy, the all-white Marine Corps seemed to consider the wartime enlistment of over 19,000 Negroes a temporary aberration. Forced by the Navy's nondiscrimination policy to retain Negroes after the war, Marine Corps officials at first decided on a black representation of some 2,200 men, roughly the same proportion as during the war. But the ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and anxieties flocked back on him as time passed and no Americans appeared. Americans. How precious. How clean, and straight, and admirable. Actually he had sometimes, he remembered, thought they weren't. What an aberration. Actually he had been, he remembered, impatient with them when first he came back from France. What folly. Americans. The very word was refreshing, was like clear water on a thirsty day. One American, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Fanaticism has its martyrs, like religion. It is not only the savage heathen who run under Juggernaut every day. Diseased brains, corrupt hearts, and impossible desires go far to constitute aberration of intellect. Unreasoning love, and unlimited liquor, will make a man fool ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... him, wearied his body but other faculties and potencies were restless at night. This man who could grind a lens so that a line from the center of the earth to the center of the sun would pass through it without chromatic aberration, was more shocked than the other three by the cursory killing of the days, his imagination intoxicated and sleep perverted. His companion who imagined himself of coarser and heavier texture often placed his hand upon the dreaming one. Spenski would start, open his ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... the pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... that mental aberration which is called religion, and a survey of the present state of the world, from the fetish worshipper of central Africa to the super-subtle Theist of educated Europe, furnish us with countless illustrations of the truth of Montaigne's exclamation. God-making has always been a prevalent pastime, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Governor of Paris. The Emperor, informed of this scandal, sent for him, and demanded of him (he was still very angry), if he had sworn to live and die mad. This might have been, from the sequel, taken as a prediction; for the unfortunate general died at last in a fit of mental aberration. He replied in such improper terms to the reprimands of the Emperor that he was sent, perhaps in order that he might have time to calm himself, to the army of England. It was not only in gaming-houses, however, that ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... lip. Remembering his own recent aberration, he did not see as much difference as he would have ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... this aberration cannot hurt the wondrous inspired work directed by Morris, and which it were well for a beauty-loving world to have often repeated. Unhappily, the Merton Abbey works are bound not to repeat the superb ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... humour came out under the cloak of mental disease. The first is of a Scottish nobleman of the last century who had been a soldier the greater part of his life, but was obliged to come home on account of aberration of mind, superinduced by hereditary propensity. Desirous of putting him under due restraint, and at the same time of engaging his mind in his favourite pursuit, his friends secured a Sergeant Briggs to be his companion, and, in fact, keeper. To ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... position. Hope deserted him, and his senses became confused. He thought that he saw green fields, and cities, and inhabitants. His reason was departing: he saw his father coming down to him with the tide, and called to him for help, when the actual sight of something recalled him from his temporary aberration. There was a dark object upon the water, evidently approaching. His respiration was almost suspended as he watched its coming. At last he distinguished that it must either be a whale asleep, or a boat bottom up. Fortunately for Newton, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual. Degeneracy in morals roots in a one-sided and wavering philosophy, doubly dangerous, because it blinds the beclouded intellect with an appearance of correctness, truth, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him he has a nervous way of lunging with his stick that I can't quite get over. They say he once dreamt that I had poked fun at him in a newspaper; and the hallucination continues to produce an angry aberration of his mind, coupled with gnashing of the teeth ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... where custom had fastened upon him. Thus he still spelled traffick, almanack, frolick, havock, and it was quite possible for his critics to follow him through a long list of words of this class and detect his frequent aberration from a uniform rule. Yet, instead of receding from his position, the latest edition advances; a nicer discrimination is made in the etymological origin of the variation, but in point of practice a much more ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... immorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by the most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be essential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But the severest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners a single aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves. And what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in moral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which its progress ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... as soon as lessons were over, he fell again to thinking what could have befallen him the night before. At what point did the aberration begin? The earl must have taken notice of it, for surely Simmons had not given Davie those injunctions of himself—except indeed he had exposed his condition even to him! If the earl had spoken to Simmons, kindness seemed intended him; but it might have ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... must acknowledge that the practice of burying or destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain stages of evolution become heavier and heavier, as the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... I have endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the ipsissima verba of the valued friend from whom I received it, conscious that any aberration from HER mode of telling the tale of her own life would at once impair ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... he said, "that I may be forgiven my temporary fit of aberration. I cannot thank you sufficiently, ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... recurred to the din and crash of the battle-field, with the mad bounding of the war-horse, and the loud clang of the trumpet. Perhaps the acute pain of my swollen and suffering arm gave the character to my mental aberration; for I have more than once observed among the wounded in battle, that even when torn and mangled by grape from a howitzer, their ravings have partaken of a high feature of enthusiasm,—shouts of triumph and exclamations of pleasure, even songs have ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn;—to love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent un-Christian wish or habit;—to watch over the secret movements of the heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... unity, resided in the earliest exertion of thought: and this monotheism of the primitive ages, makes every succeeding epoch, unless it be the present appear only as a stage in the progress of degeneracy and aberration Everywhere in the old faiths we find the idea of a supreme or presiding Deity. Amun or Osiris presides among the many gods of Egypt; Pan, with the music of his pipe, directs the chorus of the constellations, as Zeus leads the solemn procession of the celestial troops in the astronomical ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... moment of temporary aberration I suggested that the "dragon" might not be, after all, such an objectionable person as she appeared, and that perhaps she could be won over by kindness. Instantly a motion was put, and carried unanimously, appointing me a committee to try the effect of kindness on the "dragon." It was further ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... valuable a man to lose," said the Prime Minister. "We must hope that it is only a temporary aberration. I simply cannot spare ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... reader may find in any good French dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration of the mind. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... brought our family few smiles but many tears, and the death-angel passed close to our doors. My eldest brother, while at work in the hayfield, was smitten by the sun, causing a mental aberration which made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and finally led him to cut the thread of life with his own hand; my second brother was pulled by his coat entangled in a wheel, beneath a heavy load which crushed his thigh. This left the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... portrait in return for so much portraiture. I may exaggerate the charm and the importance of the modern illustrative form, may see in it a capacity of which it is not yet itself wholly conscious, but if I do so Mr. Reinhart is partly responsible for the aberration. Abundant, intelligent, interpretative work in black and white is, to the sense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of the time, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future. This idea, I confess, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... imagination. Not so the hope which rose in Lady Katrine's mind the moment she saw him here. "How fortunate!" Her ladyship had now come to that no particular age, when a remarkable metaphysical phenomenon occurs; on one particular subject hope increases as all probability of success decreases. This aberration of intellect is usually observed to be greatest in very clever women; while Mr. Churchill, the flattered object of her present hope, knew how to manage with great innocence and modesty, and draw her on to overt acts of ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... gained the quarter-deck before either spoke again. The direction first taken by the eyes of the latter was in quest of the neighbouring ship; nor was the look entirely without that unsettled and vague expression which seems to announce a momentary aberration of the faculties. But the vessel of the Rover was in view, in all the palpable and beautiful proportions of her admirable construction Instead of lying in a state of rest, as when he left her, her head-yards had been ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... give condone, data *Doceo, doctum teach document, doctor *Dominus lord dominion, danger *Domus house domicile, majordomo *Dormio sleep dormant, dormouse Duco lead traduce, deduction *Duo two dubious, duet Durus hard durable, obdurate Eo, itum go exit, initial Error, erratum wander erroneous, aberration Facio, feci, factum make, do manufacture, affect, sufficient, verify Fero, latum carry transfer, relate Fido trust, believe confide, perfidious Finis end confine, infinity Flecto, flexum bend reflection, inflexible Fluo, fluxum flow influence, reflux Fortis strong fortress, comfort ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... them. The history of nearly all religions is filled with such horrible abominations, massacres, and boundless wickednesses of every kind that at the mere recollection of them the heart of a philanthropist seems to stand still, and we turn with disgust and horror from a mental aberration which could produce such deeds. If it is urged in vindication of religion that it has advanced and elevated human civilization, even this merit appears very doubtful in presence of the facts of history, and at least as very rarely or isolatedly the case. In ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... sometimes, because they are ancient, especially doctrines in religion, because truth is before error, and falsehood is but an aberration from truth and therefore there is so much plea and contention among men, about antiquity, as if it were the sufficient rule of verity. But the abuse is, that men go not far enough backward in the steps of antiquity, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... had concluded, I think, that the mysterious telephone call was due to mental aberration on the part of Norris West, was gnawing at his mustache impatiently when his assistant returned. I administered the powerful restorative, and although, as later transpired, chloral was not responsible for West's ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... died, after an illness of 25 days. His complaint was a remittent fever, taken on our short journey into the interior. On the third day after our return, he took to his bed, from which he never rose again, excepting on the day previous to his death, when, under a state of mental aberration, he secretly took off his shirt, and threw himself from out of the port-hole near his bed into the sea; he was soon taken up, but his delirium continued until he expired. At five this afternoon he was buried in Paradise. ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... lenses. They should be achromatic, and the utmost transparency should be obtained; and under the closest inspection of the glass not the slightest wavy appearance, or dark spot should be detected; and a curvature which as much as possible prevents spherical aberration should be secured. The effect produced by this last defect is a convergence of perpendiculars, as for instance; two towers of any building, would be represented as leaning towards each other; and in a portrait the features would seem contracted, distorted ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... Christians could not deny the pagan miracles without throwing a doubt on their own, for miracles cannot be done away with at all except by a denial on principle; neither could they explain paganism—that gigantic, millennial aberration of humanity—by merely human causes, much less lay the blame on God alone. But ultimately all this rests on one and the same thing—the supernatural and dualistic hypothesis. Consequently demonology is the kernel of the Christian conception ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... it is said, about two thousand pounds; and, as has been already observed, the money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this legacy, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... nearly similar have been observed repeatedly. Better nourished individuals have produced more deviating leaves on one plant, partly owing to the larger number of stems and branches, and poor or average specimens have mostly been without any aberration or with only one or two abnormal leaves. No further improvement could be attained. Quadrifoliolate leaves were always rare, never [360] attaining a number that would put its stamp on a whole bed. I have endeavored to get some six- and seven-bladed crimson clover leaves, but in vain; selection, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... spheres, and see the earth laid out like a chess-board below you; to feel the lithe creature beneath your body responding so freely to every call of its gallant young pilot; to be filled with the scream of the engines, as of an eagle at sport; to know that at the least aberration of the intrepid airman we should be dashed into a million pieces; all this is largely to experience an experience so unforgettable that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... light that had flashed across his brain in a recent circumstance was growing gradually fainter; it had ceased to fill his mind with the same convincing force. He conceived doubts; he accused himself at times on a veritable aberration; he charged the baroness with cruel and guilty prejudices; he thought, in a word, that, at all events, the wisest course was to avoid believing in the drama, and giving it life by taking a serious part in it. Unfortunately ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... prematurely fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice will help most ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... forgive him for thinking more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," as he called it, of Balzac's mind; in which judgment of her he was vastly mistaken, because she was the person who suffered the most through it, and by it. But this unwarranted suspicion made him antagonistic to her, ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... heart-rending sighs. Clemence watched the woman in undisguised amazement, as she arose and paced the room, wringing her hands in the most woe-begone manner imaginable. Her wild appearance immediately suggested the idea that she might be suffering from temporary aberration ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... says, "that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different degrees of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." (p. 222) Nevertheless he attempts to explain the process. "It is scarcely possible," he says, "to avoid comparing the eye with the telescope. We ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... under suspicion already, as a result of his freakish excess in the matter of B. Weil & Son's wares on the preceding day; but the relapse that now followed, as nearly everybody agreed, was even more pronounced, even more symptomatic than the earlier attack of aberration. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man of strong will, albeit, not improbably, with a touch (as was thought by several) of mental aberration, the result of his illness, he threw himself, with characteristic energy, into the work of religious proselytism, in support of the special views with which he was now inspired. He became a kind of religious clairvoyant, living an ecstatic existence in communion with angels and ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how you could have allowed her to come to that state of—of mental aberration, without doing anything." ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... made to me this morning when you assured me your daughter had left this house to return to her employment at Stading?" said Merrington, with a cruel smile. "That wasn't true, you know. How do you describe that untruth? As a temporary aberration of memory, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... from it that gravity does not travel like light, so as to take time on its journey from sun to planet; for, if it did, there would be a sort of aberration, and the force on its arrival could no longer be accurately directed to the centre of the sun. (See Nature, vol. xlvi., p. 497.) It is a matter for accuracy of observation, therefore, to decide whether the minutest trace of such deviation can be detected, i.e. within ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... behind her, and it would be so inconvenient—" The Prioress's thoughts faded away; for even to herself she did not like to admit that it would be inconvenient for Evelyn to confess to Father Daly the sins she had committed—if she had committed any. Perhaps it might be all an aberration, an illusion in the interval between her father's death and her return to the convent. "Her sins have been absolved, and for guidance she will not turn to Father Daly but to me." The Reverend Mother reflected that a man would not be ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... poor father was a hard-working general practitioner in Birmingham, where his name is still remembered and respected. About ten years ago he began to show signs of mental aberration, which we were inclined to put down to overwork and the effects of a sunstroke. Feeling my own incompetence to pronounce upon a case of such importance, I at once sought the highest advice in Birmingham and London. Among ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gnawing of some secret sin, Some aberration fraught with morbid gloom, A buried hope which ever burst its tomb, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... condition in some respects more similar to the first than to the second stage. The second stage of human psychologic evolution is an aberration, a divorce, a parenthesis. With its culmination and dismissal the mind passes back into the simple state of union with the Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy: one-pointedness, singleness of mind.) And the consciousness of the Whole, and of things past and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, very little may have been said to her that would recall ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... times and seasons when we are engrossed in a train of deep and unconscious thought. Suddenly recalled to ourselves, we start from our mental aberration, and a clearer insight into the immediate purposes and machinery of our lives, is afforded us. We seem endowed with a more accurate knowledge of self; the inmost workings of our souls are abruptly revealed—feeling's ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... had pronounced the case peculiarly difficult and dangerous, and as the days wore on, bringing no debatement of cerebral excitement, he expressed the opinion that some terrible shock had produced the aberration that baffled his skill, and threatened to permanently ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... if elsewhere with undue enthusiasm I seem to magnify the principle at stake, the exaggeration—like the extreme amplification of the moon's disc when near the horizon—must be charged to that almost necessary aberration of light which distorts every new idea while it is yet ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Suydam had pronounced the case peculiarly difficult and dangerous, and as the days wore on, bringing no debatement of cerebral excitement, he expressed the opinion that some terrible shock had produced the aberration that baffled his skill, and threatened to permanently ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... present opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or interest. But we may rely with confidence on the judgment of successive generations on departed eminence; for it is detached from the chief cause of present aberration. So various are the prejudices, so contradictory the partialities and predilections of men, in different countries and ages of the world, that they never can concur through a course of centuries in one opinion, if it is not founded in truth and justice. The vox populi ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was under deep "religious impressions", and, in fact, with the exception of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... day; and after Katherine, on Hardy's part, had suggested sundry innovations, involving the condemnation of all the pictures and ornaments she could lay her hands on,—a piece of sacrilege which Mrs. Rogers regarded more in sorrow than in anger, as indicating a pitiable aberration of intellect,—the rooms ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a perfect knowledge of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but only ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... an exclamation of horror; the doctor soothed her with an assurance that there was no cause for alarm. "Incipient aberration" was of easy cure: the mischief lay in delay. "Miss Hardie," said he paternally, "during a long and busy professional career, it has been my painful province to witness the deplorable consequences of the non-recognition, by friends and relatives, of the precedent symptoms of those organic ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... design neither embraced nor required a single one of those details. Did you, Sir, vote against the previous question? On this point you are silent, and the minutes afford no information; but if you did, your vote was a most remarkable aberration from your proslavery course in Congress. After the previous question had been seconded, it was moved to lay the bill on the table. Had this motion been carried, you might have introduced another bill, omitting the "objectionable details," but you voted with the slaveholders. ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... in the presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar incident in a debauched and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... which provide | it with the rudiments of all | knowledge. Of course, Bacon argues, | we cannot get any information about | things except with the senses, and | skeptics are wrong when, questioning | them, they plunge the mind into | despair. "But by far the greatest | hindrance and aberration of the human | understanding proceeds from the | dulness, incompetency, and deceptions | of the senses" (IV, 58). On the one | hand, they are too dull and too | gross, and let the more subtle parts | of nature escape our observation: | their range is limited ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... in course of time. He was happy in his marriage and in his family, and such troubles and distresses as were inevitable he accepted calmly and quietly. In his death, as in his life, he was fortunate: he had no long or painful illness, and he was spared the calamity of aberration of intellect, the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... member of the House, is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament."[725] He was careful to observe himself the deference to parliamentary privilege which he exacted from others. It is no (p. 259) strange aberration from the general tenor of his rule that in 1512 by Strode's case[726] the freedom of speech of members of Parliament was established, and their freedom from arrest by Ferrers' case in 1543. In 1515 ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above knowledge we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind, from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises. So with the anti-slavery fanatics: their conclusions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are," said Perenna, producing the pocket-book which he had taken out of the cripple's jacket. "Here are letters and documents which the villain preserved, owing to a mental aberration common to all great criminals. Here, by good luck, is his correspondence with Hippolyte Fauville. Here is the original of the prospectus from which I learned that the house on the Place du Palais-Bourbon was for sale. Here is a memorandum of Jean Vernocq's journeys to ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... himself, in a reflective gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a controlling power is recognised by every church; and moral and mental aberration, such as no communion could tolerate, justified the interposition of authority. An exact conformity with the English custom required the legalisation of an ecclesiastical court; but the church act had subverted the dominant status of the English church. A court requires to subpoena witnesses, to ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... horse, that had neighed gleefully to see him, and rode away through the avenue and along the empty ways among the untenanted summer cottages, all the drearier and more forlorn because of the rain, he felt as if he had left an aberration, some hideous dream, behind, instead of the stark reality of the gaunt and ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a pile ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and glanced over the edge of the stone at Bastin's lantern which was sailing alongside of us, till presently we passed it. Bastin had lit it before we started, I think in a moment of aberration, and it burned for quite a long while, showing like a star when the shaft grew darker as it did by degrees, a circumstance that testifies to the excellence of the make, which is one advertised not to go out in any wind. Not that we felt wind, or even draught, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... such experienced officers necessarily are to death in all its phases, it was with no common emotion that the aged detective entered the presence of the dead girl and took his first look at this latest victim of mental or moral aberration. So young! so innocent! so fair! A schoolgirl, or little more, of a class certainly above the average, whether judged from the contour of her features or the niceties of her dress. With no evidences of great wealth about her, there was yet something in ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... I choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we may consider ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... might be interesting, but scarcely worth while, to attempt to penetrate to the just thought which misled M. Comte, for there is almost always a grain of truth in the errors of an original and powerful mind. There is another grave aberration in M. Comte's view of the method of positive science, which though not more unphilosophical than the last mentioned, is of greater practical importance. He rejects totally, as an invalid process, psychological observation ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, What has America done for mankind? let our answer be this:—America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the party drew him into the vortex of their intemperate career; separated him still farther from his real friends, and excited him to actions and expressions of dissatisfaction, which grieved them, but could not loosen their affections from him. They would not suffer the temporary aberration to weigh against the immeasurable merits of his life; and although they tumbled his seducers from their places, they preserved his memory embalmed in their hearts, with undiminished love and devotion; and there it for ever will remain embalmed, in entire oblivion of every ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the letter that Janetta read under the beech trees; and as she read it tears gathered in her eyes and fell upon the pages. But they were not tears of sadness—rather tears of joy and thankfulness. For Wyvis Brand's aberration of mind—so it had always appeared to her—had given her much pain and sorrow. And he seemed now to have placed his foot upon the road ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... are violently jealous are suffering from mental aberration. The jealous person loses, for he drives away the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... entirely at variance with the theory of the society in which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations. Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence. It is the old story of freedom and hardship being preferable to chains and luxury. The material environment ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... acknowledge that the practice of burying or destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain stages of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... have occurred to any other man but this; to him, however, it did not occur. The crying, shrieking need for money was the thing that stunned him and petrified him. Shattered and tossed to the brink of aberration, stretched at frightful mental tension for a fortnight, he finally succumbed, and told himself that ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... things, and that geniuses[10] and clever people are as common as rats. Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Although there are people who utterly deny any such thing, and say that no man in his right senses ever yet saw any supernatural phantom or apparition, but that children only, and silly women, or men disordered by sickness, in some aberration of the mind or distemperature of the body, have had empty and extravagant imaginations, whilst the real evil genius, superstition, was in themselves. Yet if Dion and Brutus, men of solid understanding, and philosophers, not to be easily deluded by fancy or discomposed by any ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... days she had united in herself a seductive grace of carriage, beauty of person, and dignity of rank, which made her the ornament of the French Court. She was almost the only one about the unfortunate Charles VI. who could influence him in his moments of mental aberration. Coming from the luxury of the most splendid court in Italy, she brought into France the most refined taste in matters connected with the arts. The inventory of her jewels at the time of her marriage includes three Books of Hours, three German MSS., and a volume called Mandavilla. Like her ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... the centre before he can trace the limits and imperfections. Once there, once identified with his object, he can observe its irregularities without being irritated or perturbed. As for that Rhadamanthine criticism which sits aloof from its object, and treats every aberration from a straight line as something abnormal and abominable, he leaves it to the immaculate. In truth, such criticism, with all its pretences to authority, is open to this fatal objection,—it tends to destroy our relish for literature; instead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of speech. They could now discuss an address to the sovereign, and give full publicity to their debates. Inquiry could now be made to some purpose, whether the Italian policy of Napoleon III. was sanctioned by France, whether that aberration were national which impelled to the violation of all right and law, in order to unify Italy, and pave the way, at the same time, for the unification of Germany. The revolutionary left of the French parliament, as a matter of course, favored the Emperor's revolutionary foreign ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will say that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of mysterious separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart—in the teeth of Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged Swift into such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous perplexity—in spite of the verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my experience and conversation go, generally take Vanessa's part in the controversy—in spite of the tears which Swift ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Scripture; if, on the other hand, you affirm absence of motive on its part, you must affirm absence of activity also.—Let us then assume that just as sometimes an intelligent person when in a state of frenzy proceeds, owing to his mental aberration, to action without a motive, so the highest Self also created this world without any motive.—That, we reply, would contradict the omniscience of the highest Self, which is vouched for by Scripture.—Hence ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... far. It was unworthy of the president of the Sylvan Silver Hollow Company, and he was not quite sure but that his confidences with Collinson might have imperiled even the interests of the company. To atone for this momentary aberration, and correct his dismal fancies, he resolved to attend to some business at Skinner's before returning, and branched off on a long detour that would intersect the traveled stage-road. But here a singular incident overtook him. As he wheeled into the turnpike, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... expresses itself by nothing more certainly than elegant wraps," she said, parodying another famous dictum; "and I should not like to be able to understand the state of mind a lady was in when she bought herself a blue woollen shawl; but I could believe she was suffering at the time from a temporary aberration of intellect—only, if she wore it afterwards the thing would be quite inexplicable." Claudia drew the wrap round her with dignity, and made no reply; then Ideala laughed and turned to me. "Certainly your friend," she said, alluding to a young sculptor ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... was, it is said, about two thousand pounds; and, as has been already observed, the money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct—of acts and omissions; there ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... secret sin, Some aberration fraught with morbid gloom, A buried hope which ever burst its ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... have been laughed at; and the lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... letters, and a photograph which he had presented to Holm. Ibsen brooded and brooded over the incident, and at last came to the conclusion that the young man had intended to return her letters and photograph to a young lady to whom he was known to be attached, and had in a fit of aberration mixed up the two objects of his worship. Some time after, Holm appeared at Ibsen's rooms. He talked quite rationally, but professed to have no knowledge whatever of the letter-incident, though he admitted the truth of Ibsen's conjecture that the "belle dame ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... must have been for a long time out of her wits; some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof had fallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmed that the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause of her mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time when this woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become a beggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in those days this old woman exercised a peculiar ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... was completed, they were led in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... he. The Compact had indeed set an indelible mark upon him—a mark which he was to carry to his grave, for during the forty-four years of life that remained to him he was never again the Robert Gourlay of old, and was subject to periodical seasons of mental aberration. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Aberration: a form that departs in some striking way from the normal type; either single or occurring rarely, ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... avez bien raison, Monsieur. Je suis evidemment dans mon tort. Ma visite a Varsovie etait une aberration. As to my stay, je suis deja tout ce qu'il y a de plus ennuye. I have seen enough of Warsaw to last for the rest of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... who looked after him, and of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, very little ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... aberration in which everything is pardonable. Whatever you do, you will be acquitted ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 'Blackwood,' do you see an article called 'Poetic Aberration'? It came into my head that it might be a stone thrown at me, and Robert went to Monaldini's to glance at it. Sure enough it is a stone. He says a violent attack. And let me do him justice. It was only the misstatement in the 'Athenaeum' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... bit too late—not by any means too late. What has happened can be hushed up—or at any rate can be explained away as a purely temporary, though regrettable, aberration. But—there is one step that it is absolutely ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... atrocious custom, a dearth of provisions, which is an evil counsellor; not so the Necrophori, for, thanks to my generosity, victuals are more than plentiful, both beneath the soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this slaughter. What we see is an aberration due to exhaustion, the morbid fury of a life on the point of extinction. As is generally the case, work bestows a peaceable disposition on the grave-digger, while inaction inspires him with perverted tastes. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... time we should be on our guard against so insidious a habit. Its reduction to absurdity may be found (alackaday!) in Fors Clavigera for June 1, 1874. With shame and sorrow I transcribe the passage, for the time has not yet come for it to be forgotten. If it were merely the aberration of an individual, however distinguished, it were better kept out of sight, out of mind; but it is, I repeat, the reckless exaggeration of a not ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... extremely lucid remark, our conversation on this particular subject ended; but I wondered, during a few uneasy moments, whether the temporary mental aberration which had once afflicted Helen's grandfather and mine was not reappearing in this, his youngest descendant. My wondering was cut short by Budge, who remarked, in a ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the regiment who would accept the theory that any one of the three had connived at the escape. As for the sergeant—he had served four enlistments in the —teenth, and without a flaw in his record beyond an occasional aberration in the now distant past, due to the potency of the poteen distilled by certain Hibernian experts not far from an old-time "plains fort," where the regiment had rested on its march 'cross continent. As for the officers—but who would suppose an officer guilty of anything of the kind—a ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... was a hard-working general practitioner in Birmingham, where his name is still remembered and respected. About ten years ago he began to show signs of mental aberration, which we were inclined to put down to overwork and the effects of a sunstroke. Feeling my own incompetence to pronounce upon a case of such importance, I at once sought the highest advice in Birmingham and London. Among ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... after she had turned away. Marishka sighed gently. Her companion's gaze left her and he peered straight before him, frowning. All this she knew by her woman's sixth sense without even looking at him. Even a thinking machine must have its moments of aberration. In a little while, the choice of roads having been decided, he turned to her again and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... parting her long, clustering hair over her shoulders. Notwithstanding the spectacle of horror presented in this living skeleton, there is something in her look and action which bespeaks more the abuse of long confinement than the result of natural aberration of mind. "She gets fierce now and then, and yells," says the unmoved Glentworthy, "but ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... are due to putrefaction; the colours always show best when the oyster has been a bad one. Hence they are considered a defect and are called chromatic aberration. ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... and again, in the belief that women easily forgive the ill-doing of which they are the cause, to that specious plea, and Marsa asked herself, in amazement, what aberration had possession of this man that he should even pretend to excuse his ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... lathe; he was a turner! As subsidiary to this pursuit, he took up a fancy for making collections. Philosophical doctors, devoted to the study of madness, regard this tendency towards collecting as a first degree of mental aberration when it is set on small things. The Baron de Watteville treasured shells and geological fragments of the neighborhood of Besancon. Some contradictory folk, especially women, would say of Monsieur de Watteville, "He has a noble soul! He ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... cruelty revolt and displease us in the literature of Newgate and the hulks. His crime does, in fact, belong to those startling paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and especially of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and examine. Whenever crime appears the aberration and monstrous product of a great intellect or of a nature ordinarily virtuous, it becomes not only the subject for genius, which deals with passions, to describe, but a problem for philosophy, which ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... highest authority. He merely nods his head, says a word now and then, or holds his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my own part, I had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabaeus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip-cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the meantime ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... her, and it would be so inconvenient—" The Prioress's thoughts faded away; for even to herself she did not like to admit that it would be inconvenient for Evelyn to confess to Father Daly the sins she had committed—if she had committed any. Perhaps it might be all an aberration, an illusion in the interval between her father's death and her return to the convent. "Her sins have been absolved, and for guidance she will not turn to Father Daly but to me." The Reverend Mother ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... this unexpected lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan was concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to Harley under the first rough shock of her mother's startling and what then had appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make up for it to the big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously in love. Also she was still all alone in the mental chaos into which everything that had happened last night ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... free and high of heart, or recurred to the din and crash of the battle-field, with the mad bounding of the war-horse, and the loud clang of the trumpet. Perhaps the acute pain of my swollen and suffering arm gave the character to my mental aberration; for I have more than once observed among the wounded in battle, that even when torn and mangled by grape from a howitzer, their ravings have partaken of a high feature of enthusiasm,—shouts of triumph and exclamations of pleasure, even songs have I heard, but never once the low muttering ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... run over me, my table, and my desk; others, more vigorous, fly, quite regardless of consequences, until they hit against something, upon which, half spreading their wings, they make their heads a pivot and spin round in a circle, in a manner which indicates a temporary aberration of the cockroach mind. It is these outbreaks alone which rouse us from our lassitude. Knocks are heard resounding on all sides, and each inhabitant of a cabin, armed with a slipper, is seen taking ample revenge upon the disturbers of his rest and the destroyers ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... had failed to notice a change in Mrs. Dinneford. She was not able to hide her troubled feelings. Edith was watching her far more closely than she imagined; and now that she was temporarily out of her mind, she did not let a word or look escape her. The first aspect of her temporary aberration was that of fear and deprecation. She was pursued by some one who filled her with terror, and she would lift her hands to keep him off, or hide her head in abject alarm. Then she would beg him to keep away. ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural. It is frequently a pathological aberration in an organic entity that allows us to see in physical appearance things that do not come outwardly to the fore in the more balanced condition of normal development, although they are equally part ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... recommended a curacy as the best means of clearing up Trinitarian difficulties, that "orders" are a sort of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he were strait, end by making him so. According to Carlyle, on the contrary, the real "aberration" of Sterling was his choice of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... majesty of the mountains, the great stretches of shining sand, the long peaceful nights, all tend to hallucinations. Sheepmen are in constant danger of mental aberration. Society is needed quite ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... her husband and her children. This is not right. Like man, woman is born and lives in society, and she can not and must not remain indifferent to social distress and suffering. To think otherwise would be selfishness and aberration and would leave society a prey to much suffering which only the blessed hand of woman can cure or relieve. Let woman be the glory and happiness of the home; but do not forget that she must extend her beneficent action beyond the confines of the household, that she must make the world outside the ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... misanthropists, would hardly dare to suggest, is accomplished as a matter of course by simple peasants in their devotion to whatever method of salvation they believe to be in accordance with God's will. Thus came into existence the self-mutilators, or skoptzi, victims, no doubt, of some mental aberration, some misdirected sense of duty, but yet ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... proposal." One has only to read our Ambassador's description of his interview with the German Chancellor after our decision was announced, "so evidently overcome by the news of our action," to see that through some extraordinary mental aberration the German rulers did actually believe that a vital treaty with Britain's signature upon it could be regarded by this country as a mere ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of chromatic, spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible—it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. I could ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... serene, smiling face showed no sign of any aberration of intellect, and Margery took Grace's hand, and hurried her through the crowd, resolved that she should not, for another instant, stand by and countenance such ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... I granted. He was a dealer in merchandise, in a small way, at St. Mary's, where he was known as a reputable, modest, and temperate man, who had been honorably discharged, with some small means, from the army. He visited Detroit in May to renew his stock. Symptoms of aberration there showed themselves, which became very decided after his return. Utter madness supervened. It was necessary to confine him in a separate building, and to chain him to a post, where he passed five months as an appalling spectacle of a human being, without ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... me this morning when you assured me your daughter had left this house to return to her employment at Stading?" said Merrington, with a cruel smile. "That wasn't true, you know. How do you describe that untruth? As a temporary aberration of memory, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of Xenia, states, that on one occasion, while Tecumseh was quite young, he saw him intoxicated. This is the only aberration of the kind, which we ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... no question here about the genuineness of his lying as a symptom of mental aberration; i.e., the fabrication as manifested by this individual is something over which he has no more control than the dementia praecox patient has over his delusions. In both instances the symptoms ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... conclusion was at last forced upon me that he had been endeavoring to commit suicide by a slow course of starvation and exposure. Either as the cause or the result of this attempt, I read, in the final notes, signs of an aberration of mind. This also explained the singular demeanor of the man when found, and his refusal to take medicine or nourishment. He had selected a long way to accomplish his purpose, but had reached the end ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Serene Republic that the books of magic found by their apparitors in his possession—"The Clavicula of Solomon," the "Zecor-ben," and other kindred works—had been collected by him as curious instances of human aberration. But the Inquisitors of State would not have believed him, for the Inquisitors were among those who took magic seriously. And, anyhow, they had never asked him to explain, but had left him as if forgotten in that abominable ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... said, "that I may be forgiven my temporary fit of aberration. I cannot thank you sufficiently, Duchess, for ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... certain of my colleagues have marred the exposition of their most valuable discoveries. But why should a work planned so sanely have met with so fantastic a fate? By what freak of destiny should it have proved the cause of the monstrous aberration of my mind? But let me not anticipate events nor confuse dates. My dissertation was intended to be read at a public sitting of the five academies, a distinction all the more precious, as it rarely falls to the lot of works ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... must be very careful not to confound monomania with eccentricity. The distinction is as important as it is real. Eccentricity is a conscious aberration from the common course of life; it consists in peculiarities in reasoning, words, and actions, which are wilfully indulged, in defiance of popular sentiment. The eccentric man knows that he is eccentric; he is willing ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... call Divinity, is only the product of their phantasy, of a psychological aberration. It is not Divinity that has created man, but man who creates Divinity in his own image. In God man only adores his own being. God is only a fiction, but a very harmful fiction. The Christian God is ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... not to hint," he said; "hinting is not in my line. I dare to say it out. I dare to say that in one of those moments of aberration, of deviation, whatever you choose to call it, that sometimes descend upon the most unlikely people, you pulled that paper out, from idle curiosity, I daresay, and finding out what it was you sent it to ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Rev. Dr. John M. Krebbs, of New York, states through this clairvoyant that the cause of his mental aberration while on earth was a misinterpretation by him of a spiritual vision which he was permitted to receive. Thus misunderstanding the aim of his spiritual visitants, he became haunted with a fallacy which ultimated in his ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... struck a bargain, and Sir Charles was to be shifted to Burdoch's asylum, and nobody allowed to see him there, etc., etc.; the old system, in short, than which no better has as yet been devised for perpetuating, or even causing, mental aberration. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... and misfortune, until they forgot their regiments, companies, places and date of capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead Line, and giving the young brats of guards the coveted ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and that the Theatre-Francais had made very flattering offers to the poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will be ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the "sphere's aberration," Mention the "leathery globe," Say he got "free transportation"— Though that try the patience of Job. But if you're wise you'll discard en- Cumbrances such as we thwack— Especially "sinister garden" And ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... money, the disgrace falls upon me, and not upon the man who is robbed, according to the world's rule of honor; but if I rob him of his wife, it is not I, but the robbed man who is disgraced. What does it mean? Is it a mere aberration of the moral sense, or is it that between stealing a man's purse and stealing his wife, there is such a vast difference that the two cases cannot be even compared? I have often thought over this, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Her Majesty in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the dead and restored to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... ABERRATION. An apparent change of place, or alteration of their mean position, in the fixed stars, caused by the earth's orbital movement.—Aberration of a planet signifies its progressive geocentric motion, or the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
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