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More "Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... nocturnal emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... writers who have endeavored to make an estimate of Sterne's character have ignored this part of Garrick's opinion, though his statement with reference to the degeneration of Sterne's moral ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... at least ahead of some of its "very proper" predecessors in that weddings do not have to be set for noon because a bridegroom's sobriety is not to be counted on later in the day! That young people of to-day prefer games to conversation scarcely proves degeneration. That they wear very few clothes is not a symptom of decline. There have always been recurring cycles of undress, followed by muffling from shoe-soles to chin. We have not yet reached the undress of Pauline Bonaparte, so the muffling period may ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... meet with no religious phenomena to which we cannot assign their place in the development. We must remember that ground is often lost as well as won in human history, and that in religions as in nations degeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not be too sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading through the immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices. Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Russian campaign, have been more than compensated by five years of peace, and by the horses that were left by the allied troops. An annual supply is also drawn from Mecklenburg and the adjacent countries. Importations of this kind are regarded as indispensable, to prevent a degeneration in the stock. A Frenchman can scarcely be brought to believe it possible; that we in England can preserve our fine breed of horses without having recourse to similar expedients; and if at last, by dint of repeated asseverations, you succeed in obtaining ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... helplessness, filled her heart. She had written many brave letters to her Eastern friends, but the vital contests, the important factors of her life, she had not mentioned. She had given no hint of her mother's physical and moral degeneration, and she had set down no word of her longing to return; but now that she was within sight of the railway the call of the East, the temptation to escape all her discomforts, was almost great enough to carry her away; but into her mind came the thought of the ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... did them. Neither did any one else." "Studying Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher (between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to myself or to others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration, item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got it—habits of imagination, and expression, headway of personality—are ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... found for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... she described herself whenever anyone asked her as to her status in life. To her more intimate friends she confided that she was not a "weed widder," but one of the "grass" variety. The story of how her husband, Madison, had never been "No 'count, even befo' de wah," and of his rapid degeneration thereafter, was ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... broke out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... is the conception of Deity as a means of final emancipation of the human soul from further transmigration, and of union with the Universal Spirit or World Soul. There is, however, perhaps no sadder chapter in the history of human thought than the story of the later degeneration of the Yoga system into one of bloody and cruel rites in India, and of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... shore. Nearly all of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few healthy men to ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of the general public I have explained. It was not really opposition. It was simply a part of the disease of the period; the dropsical, fatty degeneration of a people. But the mere fact that the reformers sent forth their cries and still laboured beside the public's crowded race-course; that such people as the lady I have mentioned existed—and there were many like her—should show that London as I found it was not all ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... she is not tragic: she is too rational. And in her career there is no progression, no decline or degeneration. Her condition is once and for always. There is and will ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... men who were talking in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them did not, indeed, originate with himself. It is entirely probable that he would never have thought of despising them as he did but for Mrs. Cinch. That excellent lady, with all her many virtues, could never forgive those legs. Their degeneration, as she regarded it, had not begun when she married Mr. Cinch. He was then a slight young man and his legs were unexceptionable in size and shape. They had become bowed and insufficient within comparatively recent years, and she had never felt quite able to accept Mr. Cinch's ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... and at what hour he dined, and whether he wrote with a quill or a J pen. Whether the quality of the pens he used was or was not intimately connected with the quality of his moral fibre, and whether his ethical degeneration could or could not be dated from his ceasing to make two fair copies of his manuscripts. We should also like to be informed whether his studs were gold or gilt, and, if they were gold, whether it was 18-carat gold, or only 15. If they were gilt, whether he wore them gilt on ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... 'The degeneration and depravity of the mongrels was so great that they deified the emperors. And many of the emperors were of a character so vile that their deification proves that the post-Roman soul must have been more depraved than that of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... question of a medusa ever having arisen suddenly and de novo from a polyp-bud, if only because both forms are adapted in their structure as a whole, and in every detail to the conditions of their life. A sudden origin, in a natural way, of numerous adaptations is inconceivable. Even the degeneration of a medusoid from a free-swimming animal to a mere brood-sac (gonophore) is not sudden and saltatory, but occurs by imperceptible modifications throughout hundreds of years, as we can learn from the numerous stages of the process of degeneration ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... peroneal element is of course somewhat the more exposed, as lying posterior; but it seems unreasonable to assume that so large a proportion of the injuries can implicate the posterior segment of the nerve as to make the startling difference in the incidence of degeneration explicable. In this relation we may bear in mind that the muscles supplied by this nerve suffer most in the degeneration subsequent to anterior polio-myelitis, and again that in cerebral hemiplegia or spinal-cord injuries they are the last to recover. Unfortunately ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... It causes a softening of the muscles of the heart, and a fatty degeneration, thus clogging the workings of this ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... was slow in seeing this degeneration. The Gracchi brothers tried to stem the tide, and they were slain, sacrificed by the nation they sought to save.[16] Cornelius Sulla was the man who completed, and at the same time made plain to all, the change that had been growing up. Having bitter grievances against his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... from external dangers. It may be observed in certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain unaffected by it, incapable of effort, unintelligent, slothful, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... process of natural selection in the human species. Overpopulation, at least until artificial selection arrives, is not an evil, but a good in human society. Without it there would not be sufficient elimination of the unfit in human society to prevent wholesale social degeneration. Even with artificial selection, however, some overpopulation would be necessary for the working of any scheme of selection. We must conclude, then, that Malthus's theory, either as an explanation of the growth of modern populations or as an implied practical ethical ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent strategic errors, which made ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... you are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience—a more lengthened observation—is wanting on the subject. But after what you have said, it is my duty to tell ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... this connection that in such cases the sure instinct with which these species were originally endowed has been distorted, but that is to admit some degree of variation; the hypothesis of degeneration is as gratuitous as the other, and if we go so far as to risk a hypothesis, it would be better to use it to explain facts ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... civilized world. As a result of the dissemination of this poison, children are born blind, or are born to die, or, if they live, they are compelled to carry all through their helpless lives the stigma of disease and degeneration. It would surely seem that the individual to whom God has given intelligence and a conscience cannot think of these, the saddest facts in human experience, without resentment and humility. Surely the time has arrived when every ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... to Europe. M. Fourcault has addressed a communication to the Academie on 'Remedies against the Physical and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species,' intended more especially for the working-classes. He would have schools of gymnastics and swimming established along the great rivers, and on the sea-shore; gymnastic dispensaries, and clinical gymnastic in towns; and agricultural and other hospitals, combining simple and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... tandems are all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration in our village." ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... social aspects, as if dancing the "Lancers," with its forward and back movements, gallop, etc., and have finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have but little to record for some six thousand years—either ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Nerano Newspaper reading, to be discouraged Nice Nietzsche, his blind spot Nightingales, too much of a good thing; cease from troubling Ninetta, an attractive maiden Nose, degeneration of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... again until the valley of the Vilia opened out. And here, almost within sight of Vilna, D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... goes up." Nephritis, also, may result from emotional stress, because of the strain put upon the kidneys by the unconsumed activating substances. The increased heart action and the presence of these activating secretions may cause myocarditis and heart degeneration. Claudication also may result from the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... horde of ignorant negro men when at that time there were nearly 4,000,000 intelligent white women keenly alive to the interests of their country to whom the ballot was denied." He sketched the steady degeneration of national and State politics and exposed the conditions in Louisiana. He showed how the reforms that had been accomplished had been largely ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... sometimes present. Dilatation and tortuosity of the anterior ciliary veins are due apparently to excessive flow of blood through them on account of the abnormally small amount carried off by the venae vorticosae. In the stage of degeneration, ectasae of the sclera occur most frequently near the equator of the globe. Spontaneous ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he makes a ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have been ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... laws of heredity, though as yet only partially determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution—not disintegration and degeneration—two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote and encourage parenthood on the part of the best and ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... must not hasten to conclude, with Professor Flournoy, that if there is a future life it is one of wretched degeneration, one more misery added to all the others which overwhelm us ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... the best thing that could have happened. I have been getting abominably lazy. If I had gone on living my present life for another year or two, why, dash it! I honestly believe I should have succumbed to some sort of senile decay. Positively I should have got fatty degeneration of the brain! This will ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... happened to races on other planets that complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... excess in a community, but it is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war and with Mammon, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... temporary degeneration of character had vanished since his walk to Dover. He was as alert as ever in his care of Maurice, as anxiously solicitous for Cecile's benefit, and had also developed a remarkable and valuable faculty for finding small towns and out-of- the-way villages, where Cecile's slender store ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... I burned with curiosity. Also, fatty degeneration of the heart prompted me to annoy Dierdre O'Farrell. To spite me, she had refused to talk of the doctor. I was determined to hear all about him to spite her. You see to what a low level I have ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... or a dictionary or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman in any, bookstore. But here I am running on as if business men had nothing to do but listen to women talk. You must pardon me, for I was not thinking.—And you must let me thank you again for helping me. I read a good ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of history have recognized the gravity of the population question, but they were mostly concerned with the tendency of the numbers in the State to increase beyond the means of subsistence, instead of the tendency to degeneration ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... legions were pressing down upon Egypt. The renegade Mark Antony was fighting for his life. For a time he was successful, but youth was no longer his, the spring had gone out of his veins, and pride and prosperity had pushed him toward fatty degeneration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... of genius as degeneration may be grouped with the naturalistic theories. His argument is in essence the following. Great mental efforts, and total absorption in one dominant thought, often produce physiological disorders or atrophy of important vital functions. Now these disorders ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... much more difficult than feminising of males because the testicular tissue was less resistent, and could not be grafted so easily. When it succeeded, however, degeneration of the seminal tubules took place, with increase of the interstitial or Leydig's cells. The vaginal opening in rats disappeared, partly or completely. The sexual instincts became male, the animals recognised a female in heat from one that was ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... delirium, convulsions, coma, and death. Usually there are remissions for two to three days, then jaundice comes on, with enlargement of the liver; haemorrhages from the mucous surfaces and under the skin; later, coma and convulsions. In chronic cases there is fatty degeneration of most of the organs and tissues of the body. The inhalation of the fumes of phosphorus, as in making vermin-killers, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... way challenged public opinion—society women with whom the public has no concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a powerful individuality has fallen—is the most significant foreboding of the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad, a fussy contempt and hatred for ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... though I think it the greatest possible mistake for legally married people to intentionally remain childless, for any reason other than mental or physical degeneration, I am strongly against the Lutheran doctrine of unlimited families. Times have changed since Luther's day, and the necessity for small families is fairly obvious in the twentieth century for all but very wealthy people. Where money is no object, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander down to ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only sentiment that lay hid ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. If it be a principle that we abandon, it does not matter what the principle is, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... fortress in which the defenders threw away their lives. There is little reason to doubt that they considered the frenzy and carelessness of death produced by the liquor as a form of divine possession. Opium has contributed much to the degeneration of the Rajputs, and their relapse to an idle, sensuous life when their energies were no longer maintained by the need of continuous fighting for the protection of their country. The following account by Forbes of a Rajput's daily life well illustrates the slothful effeminacy caused by ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to the mind trained in modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... would the absence of sharp competition within the group lead to racial degeneration? This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps a diminution of pugnacity and of the means to gratify this instinct would not be a misfortune. But it is certainly true that, if the operation of natural selection is suspended, rational ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes than that of statement. There ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation ANY HOW, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church. Which side is right here, who can say? Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... apparent detriment, but it is universally admitted that the animals selected for such inbreeding must be sound constitutionally, and free from disease. After a certain number of generations however, degeneration apparently sets in. The number of generations through which inbreeding may be carried varies with the species, and the purpose for which the animals are bred. Where they are bred primarily for their flesh, as for beef, ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed. Really happy people do not write stories—they accumulate adipose tissue and die at the top through fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. A certain disappointment in life, a dissatisfaction with environment, is necessary to stir the imagination to a creative point. If things are all to your taste you sit back and enjoy them. You forget the flight of time, the march of the seasons, your future life, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather, the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was typical: the course of cosmic life is ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... I had to cut it all out. 'Cut it out,' that certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have—Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson—this sounds like a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know the species; it is all too common. Meanwhile we must congratulate ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... flesh-and-blood natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. For although there have been retrogressions in the history of life, continued ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... capital of Neustria; or, if it ever had been more advanced there, which could have been only under the Roman sway, that it had retrograded into a barbarous state.—Moreover, the Gothic style, mentioned by Fridegode, was no other than a degeneration of the Roman, or, more properly, of the Lombardic architecture, distinguished by the circular arch, by insulated columns, by a paucity of ornaments, and by a general massiveness. It is by no means to be confounded with the style which has since passed under the same name, a style introduced about ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... Spain, particularly those north of the mountains which divide the two Castiles, may be seen gangs of fives and sixes of these people lolling or sleeping beneath the broiling sun on their gigantic and heavily laden mutes and mules, the boast of Spain, but dearly purchased by the debasement and degeneration of a once noble breed of horses. In a word, almost the entire commerce of nearly one half of Spain passes through the hands of the Maragatos, whose fidelity to their trust is such that no one accustomed to employ them would hesitate to entrust them with the transport ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... a cultivated intelligence, a college education, a skilled hand, an observant eye, valuable experience, great tact, all exchanged for rum, for a muddled brain, a bewildered intellect, a shattered nervous system, poisoned blood, a diseased body, for fatty degeneration of the heart, for Bright's disease, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of Ivanhoe; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as hear, how ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to whether any such message had been sent. The denial was made, and then the lie was given; and many to this day wonder exactly where the truth lay. At any rate, votes were lost and few gained, and many a worthy friend of good government lost heart and bemoaned the degeneration of the gentleman ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... means unpatriotic, people, like Peggy, at the beginning of the war thought trivial disappointments rotten nuisances. We had all waxed too fat during the opening years of the twentieth century, and, not having a spiritual ideal in God's universe, we were in danger of perishing from Fatty Degeneration of the Soul. As it was, it took a year or more of war ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... afterwards, who found the immediate cause to be heart-failure, held that such a supposition was unwarranted by facts. They asserted that a long day's journey, a hurried drive, and then an exhausting dance, were sufficient for such a result upon a heart enfeebled by fatty degeneration after the privations of a Crimean winter and other trying experiences, the coincidence of the sad event with any disclosure of hers ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... affected a rough-coated kind. Another instance has been given (11/146. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 5 pages 65 and 68. See also Prof. Hildebrand with a coloured figure in 'Bot. Zeitung' May 15, 1868 page 327. Puvis also has collected 'De La Degeneration' 1837 page 36) several other instances; but it is not in all cases possible to distinguish between the direct action of foreign pollen and bud-variations.) of two very different apple-trees growing close to each other, which bore fruit resembling ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia of mental and physical degeneration. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... must have been before the Phoenicians came to Britain, for they are certainly reputed to have brought the secret of clotted (or clouted) cream with them, and to have landed in Cornwall and Devon with their scald-pans with them, so that the degeneration of the Damnonii in the matter of delicacies ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Antef Nub-kheper-Ra, and his descendants, Antefs III and IV, were buried. In their time the pressure of foreign invasion seems to have been felt, for, to judge from their coffins, which show progressive degeneration of style and workmanship, poverty now afflicted Upper Egypt and art had fallen sadly from the high standard which it had reached in the days of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties. Probably the later Antefs and Sebekemsafs were vassals of the Hyksos. Their descendants ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... dead hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... subject, not only the variety, richness, and force which he had displayed in the Senate, but the capacity of presenting it in a way thoroughly adapted to the popular mind, and yet, at the same time, of preserving the impressive tone of a dignified statesman, without any degeneration into mere stump oratory. This wonderful series of speeches produced the greatest possible effect. They were heard by thousands and read by tens of thousands. They fell, of course, upon willing ears. The people, smarting under bankruptcy, poverty, and business depression, were wild for a change; ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fallen in his first sorrow, his hardy constitution had been shaken, if not weakened, by them. Physically his nerves were almost as good as ever, but morally he was not the same man. He felt the need of sympathy and confidence, which with such natures is the first sign of breaking down, and of the degeneration of pride. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... chief was on the way to be a man no more. There were stooped backs among them, a forward hang to arms, a sprouting of coarse, lank hair. Foreheads fell away, noses flattened coarsely, eyes grew small and shifty. Sadau informed Parr that such evidences of degeneration meant a residence of a year or so on the ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... Israel's moral degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water strengthens, another weakens; one makes beautiful, another ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... critical and unfriendly eye. He disliked this fatty degeneration excessively. Looking him up and down, he could find no point about him that gave him the least pleasure, with the single exception of the state of his hat, in the side of which he was rejoiced to perceive there was a large and ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... degeneration into the realm of pure foolery. It is a patent declaration: "This is only a play; laugh and we are content." Once more we venture to point a parallel on the modern stage, in the vaudeville comedian who interlards his dancing with comments such as: "I hate to do this, but it's the only way ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... and condemning the sins and follies of others and sublimely unconscious of our own until one day—ah, yes—one day we meet Ourselves face to face and see beneath all our pitiful shams and hypocrisies and know ourselves at last for what we really are—behold the decay of faculties, the degeneration of intellect bred of sloth and inanition and know ourselves at last—for exactly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... could say as much for you or your imitation dog," retorted Jim. "There's just three things in Borealis that go around smellin' thick of perfume, and you and that little two-ounce package of dog-degeneration are maybe some ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... are still used in the English playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard to pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a real test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cutting their beards till they found ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... as degenerative, and places among the signs of degeneration, deviations from the average normal, whether physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... had been propagated, but had not yet been passed into law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes, while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia was still, in theory, a Power of the second ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... schools must be judged by the cogency of the evidence put forth by each. The appearance of a degenerate form of a noble idea may closely resemble that of a refined product of a coarse idea, and the only method of deciding between degeneration and evolution would be the examination, if possible, of intermediate and remote ancestors. The evidence brought forward by believers in the Wisdom is of this kind. They allege: that the Founders of religions, judged by the records of their teachings, were far above the level of average humanity; ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... cause of degeneration among animals, yet it is not the sole cause. It is evident that if for any other reason animals should become fixed, and live inactive lives, they would degenerate. There are not a few instances of degeneration due simply to a quiescent ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it, for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given the right of way? Then the Bureau of Children will see to it that such provision is made. It will not be the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... ease, but there would be room in the world for milliards of additional human beings. When compared with this splendid struggle, how puny seems the great war! What has that war to do with the real struggle for existence? It is a product of degeneration. War is justifiable. Not war between human beings. But creative war for man's mastery over natural forces, the young war of which hardly a millionth part has yet been waged. In this war we can foresee victories such as no human ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... and to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind. Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam hath not only fallen from his Creator, but we ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... specially interesting in modern English modes of present-giving. We may, however, perhaps see in the custom of Christmas boxes, inexorably demanded and not always willingly bestowed, a degeneration of what was once friendly entertainment given in return for the good wishes and the luck brought by wassailers. Instances of gifts to calling neighbours have already come before our notice at several pre-Christmas festivals, notably All Souls', ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... disarrangements which over-feeding produces in stock. He found the heart of a one-year old Southdown wether, fattened according to the high-pressure system, to be little more than a mass of fat. In several other young, but so-called "matured" sheep, he found more or less fatty degeneration of the heart, and extensively spread disease of the liver and of the lungs. A four-year old Devon heifer, exhibited by the late Prince Consort at a Smithfield show, was found to be in a highly diseased state. It was slaughtered, and of ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops. Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine kings to death, particularly the method ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... points out that our present standard of living has not changed for generations, and argues that degeneration must result. Of course, he is right in his fact but wrong in ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... assistance of her detachment from European quarrels to such an arrangement, Europe of herself may not prove capable of it. Second, that if Europe does not come to some such arrangement the resulting unrest, militarism, moral and material degeneration, for the reasons above indicated and for others to be indicated presently, will most unfavorably affect the development of America, and expose her to dangers internal and external much greater than those ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... ovaries of the child being estimated at over 70,000. In view of the unquestionably large number of follicles in very young ovaries, and the relatively small number of ova which reach maturity, the degeneration of many follicles after reaching a certain degree of ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... evolutionary processes, we have learned to talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be constrained to eradicate ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... primitive backboned ancestor. It may be an offshoot from the same group. The sea-squirt further illustrates the origin of the backbone, since it has a similar rod of cartilage in its youth, and loses it, by degeneration, in its maturity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destruction when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... deep chairs, with their knees higher than their heads. There were no such chairs in this library, just as there was no afternoon tea except for ladies. Sir John Meredith was distressed to observe a great many signs of the degeneration of manhood, which he attributed to the indulgence in afternoon tea. Sir John had lately noticed another degeneration, namely, in the quality of the London gas. So serious was this falling off that he had taken to a lamp in the evening, which lamp stood ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... what cases should it be performed?—1. For disease of the elbow-joint which has resisted ordinary remedies, and is wearing down the patient's strength, including caries, ulceration of cartilages, and gelatinous synovial degeneration. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Rev. Warren Burton was assigned to this special form of ministry, and to that of a systematic investigation of the condition of the poor. He gave much attention to the needs of children, and made inquiry as to intemperance, licentiousness, and other forms of social degeneration. He was a diligent and successful worker until his ministry came to an end in October, 1848. For about a year, in 1847, Rev. William Ware also devoted himself to the house-to-house ministry; but failing health compelled his withdrawal. In April, 1845, Rev. Andrew Bigelow ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... We are too far away from any real knowledge of heredity to advise for or against marriage in the most of cases on this basis, and certainly we must not repeat Lombroso and Nordau's errors and call all variations from stupidity degeneration. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Diarrhoea is another very common complication. We have frequent purging and, maybe, sickness and vomiting. Fits of a convulsive character are frequent concomitants of distemper. Epilepsy is sometimes seen, owing, no doubt, to degeneration of the nerve centres caused by blood-poisoning. There are many other complications, and skin complaints are common ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... accept the altering of the shapes of workers, the tinkering with the hereditary form of their children, the artificial grafting upon our race of revolting and unnecessary form changes. Your whole science is a degeneration of wisdom into evil, tampering with life itself. You are horrors, and you do not ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... species of the genus homo, but all the varieties of all the prognathous species are not equally black. Nor are the individuals of the same family or variety equally so. The lighter shades of color, when not derived from admixture with Mongolian or Caucasian blood, indicate degeneration in the prognathous species. The Hottentots, Bushmen and aborigines of Australia are inferior in mind and body to the typical African ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that occasion, and had in fact written to the "forward little girl's" parents. Could he have seen the rather amused reception of his letter, he would have realised with sorrow that an age of parental leniency, little short of degeneration, was in certain quarters unmistakably supplanting the stern age of which he was in a degree an anachronistic survival. That forward little girl's parents chanced to know James Mesurier enough by sight ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... those of three periods, the old, who are connected by the two chief writings, "Fama" and "Confessio," that appeared at the beginning of the 17th century; the middle, which apparently represents a degeneration of the original idealistic league, and finally, the gold crossers and rose crossers, who for a time during the 18th century developed greater power. The last Rosicrucians broke into freemasonry for a while (in the second half of the eighteenth century) in a manner almost ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... not commit suicide as you were told. He lived, in Paris, a life of continual and painful degeneration. Your mother died of a broken heart. There was another woman, of course, whose influence over your father was unbounded, and at whose instigation he committed this disgraceful act. This woman ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you a life ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... brain indicates a full development, we say of such a temperament that it is VITAL, because the functions of its nerve-centers are favorable to evolution. As degeneration observes conditions, so endurance and development conform to certain laws, and it is the duty of all truthful inquirers, who believe not only in the progress of human intelligence, but in physical improvement from generation to generation, to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably hear His call ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... since it has been shown in Germany that under the influence of a continuous high bodily temperature, not intense enough at any time to compromise life, all the muscular tissues of the body undergo a peculiar granular degeneration. Many a typhoid-fever patient has undoubtedly died from the heart-muscle having undergone this change, when, if by artificial cooling the temperature of the body had been kept down, the alteration of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... high estate. The old house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its inmates—to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... them. Neither did any one else." "Studying Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher (between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to myself or to others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration, item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got it—habits of imagination, and expression, headway ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... pretty nearly hits us all, doesn't it?" said Griffin apprehensively. "I'm not so sure about myself, now you mention it. Doris Leighton may be one ahead of me in this business. Fatty degeneration of the soul is a new ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... semi-primitive. Physical degeneration was not found. Indeed their bodily perfection was extraordinary. In mind, they were like children; happy and friendly, joyful to teach all they knew—joyful to show all they had. The days rang with clean, childish laughter; but there ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... two, when the nations of Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men necessarily into ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... wife.[1254] Seneca said that the women reckoned the years by their husbands, not by the consuls.[1255] The women got equality by leveling downwards. "The new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband's."[1256] These cases belong to the degeneration of the mores at the period. As they are astonishing, we are in danger of giving them too much force in the notion we form of the mores of that time. All the writers repeat them. "In the Agricola, and in Seneca's letters to Marcia and Helvia, we can see that, even at the darkest hour, there ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... THE ELBOW-JOINT—In what cases should it be performed?—1. For disease of the elbow-joint which has resisted ordinary remedies, and is wearing down the patient's strength, including caries, ulceration of cartilages, and gelatinous synovial degeneration. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... beyond a right angle must have been impossible; the anterior fossa of the humerus for the reception of the coronoid process being also filled up with a similar bony growth. At the same time, the olecranon is curved strongly downwards. As the bone presents no sign of rachitic degeneration, it may be supposed that an injury sustained during life was the cause of the anchylosis. When the left ulna is compared with the right radius, it might at first sight be concluded that the bones respectively ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley
... Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its function ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... at present into the as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported; and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... partitions cost very little, and one to shut off the furnace (provided there be one) from the rest of the room is absolutely necessary, since the heat which it generates must not be allowed to spread and so spoil the cellar for cold-storage purposes, for warm, damp air hastens the degeneration of vegetables and meats. Unless some other provision is made in the cellar plan for the coal, a strong bin, with one section movable, should be built for it in the furnace room. To the posts of this bin hang the shovels—one ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... laying aside the last remnants of their private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... would be transformed into the same class of sodden wretches their jockers now were, who had trained them into the ways of the road, and that they in turn during their life time would spoil the futures of scores of sons of respectable parents, which proves that degeneration breeds degeneration. ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... Theobald's Road. They were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration. It is almost as difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very rich man; and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates, a man cannot be. It is a great people that ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... I. "If a missing man is known to have suffered from some affection, such as heart disease, aneurism, or arterial degeneration, likely to produce sudden death, that fact will surely be highly material to the question as to whether he is probably ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... established is characterized by degeneration of the kidneys. Submitted to examination, after death by this disease, these organs present various appearances. Hence, the degeneration that characterizes the disease has been designated as waxy degeneration. Some pathologists contend that the disease consists ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... France. The sure foundations of states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... want cutting? My hair seems pretty happy. You are the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants cutting ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... essential element of that teaching, so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and development as is the privilege of ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... ones. Their naivete is nothing but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... each other's fruit; and in another case a smooth apple affected a rough-coated kind. Another instance has been given (11/146. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 5 pages 65 and 68. See also Prof. Hildebrand with a coloured figure in 'Bot. Zeitung' May 15, 1868 page 327. Puvis also has collected 'De La Degeneration' 1837 page 36) several other instances; but it is not in all cases possible to distinguish between the direct action of foreign pollen and bud-variations.) of two very different apple-trees growing close to each other, which bore fruit resembling each other, but only on the adjoining branches. It ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... in their own estimation belonged wholly and exclusively to their own city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be deemed a narrow one—Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the denizen of so many foreign homes—could speak of the degeneration of the pure Florentine blood by the admixture of that of foreigners whose native place was some five or ten miles outside the walls of Florence it may be estimated how smaller minds and narrower natures would feel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... from the Creator as a penal statute, for disobedience which forfeited Eden, how merciful and how marvellous is the delicacy of an adjustment, whereby all growth of body, mind and soul being conditioned by work, humanity converts punishment into benediction; escapes degeneration, attains development solely in accordance with the provisions of the primeval curse, man's heritage of labor? Amid the wreck of sacerdotal systems, the destruction of national gods, the periodical tidal waves of scepticism, the gospel of work maintains triumphantly ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind. Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam hath not only fallen ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... But, since weakenings and degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people may be better than the later expressions ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... many who pride themselves on their high education and liberal sentiments. They bring to the support of their national or racial pride such modern sociological theories as lend themselves to this view. Evolution and the survival of the fittest, degeneration and the arrest of development, are appealed to as justifying the arrogance and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... fatty degeneration of the chivalrous spirit. It is merely the old doctrine of Non-intervention speaking ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... historic times, since the abrogation of the tabu system and the loosening of the old polytheistic ideas, there has been in the hula a lowering of former standards, in some respects a degeneration. The old gods, however, were not entirely dethroned; the people of the hula still continued to maintain the form of divine service and still appealed to them for good luck; but the soul of worship had exhaled; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... whether the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues, affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushed to the front unless the degeneration of the race—an inevitable result of the present educational ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... even to-day do not understand. They do not understand that the labor problem is a human and a moral as well as an economic problem; that a fall in wages, an increase in hours, a deterioration of labor conditions mean wholesale moral as well as economic degeneration, and the needless sacrifice of human lives and human happiness, while a rise of wages, a lessening of hours, a bettering of conditions, mean an intellectual, moral and social uplift of millions of American men and women. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... worked like a slave (having counted about nine thousand seeds) on Melastoma, on the meaning of the two sets of very different stamens, and as yet have been shamefully beaten, and I now cry for aid. I could suggest what I believe a very good scheme (at least, Dr. Hooker thought so) for systematic degeneration of culinary plants, and so find out their origin; but this would be laborious and the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... is transfigured, and Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at the end ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... seems singularly prone to the infirmity, for without apparent cause it abandons habitual ways and clothes its trunk and branches with huge rosettes of small, slight, and ineffective leaves, evidence, probably, of vital degeneration. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... place, would the absence of sharp competition within the group lead to racial degeneration? This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps a diminution of pugnacity and of the means to gratify this instinct would not be a misfortune. But it is certainly true that, if the operation of natural selection is suspended, rational selection must take its place. Failing ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... suppress individual liberty in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he makes a ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... sand-hill people, and it shows in a lack of self-consciousness which makes one feel that they would meet a prince or an emperor without embarrassment. Yet there's nothing of forwardness, nothing of impertinence. It is a drawing-room manner, preserved in spite of generations of illiteracy and degeneration. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... bound together and reciprocally labelled: cessation of labor, reduction of wages, over-production, obstruction of the market, alteration and adulteration of products, failures, displacement of laborers, degeneration of the race, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... happen that the mtayer, with all his labour—carried sometimes to an extreme that degrades the man physically and mentally—and all his frugality, which so often entails constitutional enfeeblement and degeneration, because the nutrition is not sufficient to correct the exhaustion of toil, obtains really less value for his work than an English farm labourer, and is not so well housed; but, on the other hand, he enjoys a large amount of liberty and independence, and has the hope, if he is ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... a natural necessity, that many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... was a raft builded, and the major and Mr. T., with bare feet, were loading their frail craft with huge trout, and, alas! securing for themselves a painful attack of sunburn. I found all these large trout to have fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, but no worms. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... The Rashtra-pala-paripriccha (Ed. Finot, pp. ix-xi, 28-33) inveighs against the moral degeneration of the Buddhist clergy. This work was translated into Chinese between 589 and 618, so that demoralisation must have begun in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Buddhas, countless as the sands of Ganges, guide into a sure trust in the Holy Name those sinful creatures and evil-hearted that wander in the darkness of this wicked world bearing the five signs of degeneration upon it. ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one that ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... possibilities of apoplexy as a legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue: "Now by virtue of a possible ancestral weakness of your brain arteries this may happen: the arterial walls, because of habitual food in excess, may undergo a fatty, limy degeneration that will make a rupture possible, with death or paralysis of one-half or more of the body as the direct result; or the small arteries may have their walls so thickened as not to permit enough blood ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... instituted by the whole people, agreed to by the whole people, supported by the contributions of the whole people, be confined to the accomplishment of those purposes alone, which the whole people desire? How shall it be preserved from degeneration into a mere government for the benefit of a part only of those who established, and who support it? How shall it be prevented from even injuring a part of its own members, for the aggrandizement of the rest? Its laws must be, (or at least now are,) passed, and most ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... contact with the soil they flourished. With the advance of civilization the peoples change their mode of life from simplicity to luxuriousness and complexity. Thus individuals decay and in the end there is enough individual decay to result in national degeneration. When this process has advanced far enough these people are unable to hold their own. In the severe competitition of nations the strain is too great and they perish. There is a point of refinement beyond which people can not go ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... hypothesis the doctrine that man's gain of KNOWLEDGE was the cause of a temporary but long-enduring moral deterioration as indicated by the many foul customs, especially as to marriage, of savage tribes. What does the Jewish tradition of the moral degeneration of man through his snatching at a knowledge forbidden him by his highest instinct assert beyond this?") as to lead them regularly to destroy their own offspring, or to be quite devoid of jealousy. There would have been no ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... form of primal perfection to appear among men, might not its divine originality repel an ordinary observer, used to consider beautiful such abortions of the Creator's design as sin and degeneration have produced? Not easily can one imagine what a real man or woman would look like. Painting nor sculpture can teach us; we must learn, if at all, from living, electric flesh ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Graafian follicles are the most numerous; the entire number contained within the ovaries of the child being estimated at over 70,000. In view of the unquestionably large number of follicles in very young ovaries, and the relatively small number of ova which reach maturity, the degeneration of many follicles after reaching a certain ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... its impulse. The condition of his health, though at that time not very obviously failing, a good deal arrested my attention, as I thought I could perceive in the occurrence of the haemoptysis, and in the cardiac hypertrophy, the early beginnings of vascular degeneration. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... difference. The effect of its mysterious powers of movement and upheaval is in the end salutary. It works upon the lump just as the catfish, that demon of the deep, preserves the lumpish cod from the apathy and degeneration of comfort, and as Mephisto, that demon of the world, acts upon the lethargy of mankind working within him, stimulating, driving to production as ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... to the tyranny of bad masters, and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces—there you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration. And just as in the former case the upward tendency will be constant if it is not interrupted by external power, so in the latter case the demoralisation will continue in a squalid welter for periods which are quite indefinite ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... natural selection in the human species. Overpopulation, at least until artificial selection arrives, is not an evil, but a good in human society. Without it there would not be sufficient elimination of the unfit in human society to prevent wholesale social degeneration. Even with artificial selection, however, some overpopulation would be necessary for the working of any scheme of selection. We must conclude, then, that Malthus's theory, either as an explanation of the growth of modern populations or as an implied practical ethical doctrine, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but perfectly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Tory, as becoming rather the wrong kind of Socialist. He is a man with a history. It is a sad history, for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of Degeneration. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... architecture was then in its infancy in the capital of Neustria; or, if it ever had been more advanced there, which could have been only under the Roman sway, that it had retrograded into a barbarous state.—Moreover, the Gothic style, mentioned by Fridegode, was no other than a degeneration of the Roman, or, more properly, of the Lombardic architecture, distinguished by the circular arch, by insulated columns, by a paucity of ornaments, and by a general massiveness. It is by no means to be confounded with the style which has since passed under ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact arrested,—arrested so effectually that the counter process of degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... work, indubitably one of the best German novels of the last decades, is entitled The Buddenbrooks, the Degeneration of a Family (1901). The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is working for the amusement ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... To those who imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor. But to those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity and faith. The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice and ambition. In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden imposed upon ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... wars will continue on the earth. War may be a biological necessity in the development of the human race—God's housecleaning, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox calls it. War may be a great soul stimulant meant to purge mankind of evils greater than itself, evils of baseness and world degeneration. We know there are blighted forests that must be swept clean by fire. Let us not scoff at such a theory until we understand the immeasurable mysteries of life and death. We know that, through the ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... high blood pressure slows the pulse rate; that low blood pressure generally increases the pulse rate, and that arteriosclerosis, or the gradual aging of the arteries, slows the pulse, except when the cardiac degeneration of old age makes the heart again more irritable and more rapid. The rapid heart in hyperthyroidism is also well understood. It is not so frequently noted that hypersecretion of the thyroid may cause a rapid heart without ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... a place of furtive, obscene whisperings, but he had found there not only vice. There was the chance of an education. He had accepted it at first because he dared not let himself be idle in his spare time. That way lay degeneration and the loss of his manhood. He had studied under competent instructors English, mathematics, the Spanish grammar, and mechanical drawing, as well as surveying and stationary engineering. He had read some of the world's best literature. He had waded through a good many ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... of theology; or Tupper or a dictionary or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman in any, bookstore. But here I am running on as if business men had nothing to do but listen to women talk. You must pardon me, for I was not thinking.—And ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... impunity. These laws affect him in the air he breathes, the food he eats, the clothes he wears, and (in) every circumstance surrounding his habilitation. In the wholesale violation of these laws after the war, as previously stated, was laid the foundation of the degeneration of the physical and mental condition of the Negro. Licentiousness left its slimy trail of sometimes ineradicable disease upon his physical being, and neglected bronchitis, pneumonia, and pleurisy lent their helping ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... sometimes been asked to "think imperially." Mystics are asked to think celestially; and this, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, but when dealing with the concrete accidents, the evil and sadness, the cruelty, failure, and degeneration of life. ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Essays,[20] which I look forward to reading with much pleasure. I have, however, read the first, and am much disappointed with it. It seems to me the weakest and most inconclusive thing he has yet written. At p. 17 he states his theory as to degeneration of eyes, and again, on p. 18, of anthers and filaments; but in both cases he fails to prove it, and apparently does not see that his panmixia, or "cessation of selection," cannot possibly produce continuous degeneration culminating in the total ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... highways. It is, therefore superfluous for me to add that they are now correspondingly demoralized. It is a most humiliating fact that just in proportion as the paleface advances into lands hitherto given up to the Indian so those races sink. This degeneration showed itself strikingly among the Guatos in their inordinate desire for cachaca, or "firewater." Although extremely cautious and wary in their exchanges to us, refusing to barter a bow and arrows for a shirt, yet, for a bottle of cachaca, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... in the Senate, but the capacity of presenting it in a way thoroughly adapted to the popular mind, and yet, at the same time, of preserving the impressive tone of a dignified statesman, without any degeneration into mere stump oratory. This wonderful series of speeches produced the greatest possible effect. They were heard by thousands and read by tens of thousands. They fell, of course, upon willing ears. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... constant check of the example and admonitions of a mate of opposite tendencies, would be, by constant example, hastened onward in his sinful ways. Thus, to all but a very small proportion of humanity, the married state would be one of infelicity and degeneration. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... and her husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by greed, the man's ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... them greet one or the other of my boys whom they have met when visiting at the shore. Nearly all of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few healthy men to ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... stentorian shout. It was a meritorious and surprising performance, for he was fat and scant of breath. The sedentary duties of hall-porter at the —— Club, after twenty-one years' service in the Army, had produced a fatty degeneration which no studious arrangement of an Army ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... species were simultaneously created. On the other hand, a physiological difficulty occurs, in viewing a race as descended from a single pair, from the fact universally recognised in the later periods of history, viz. the degeneration, and, in the end, destruction or indefinite deterioration of both physical and mental faculties, by continual intermarriage. The houses of Braganza and Hapsburg are notorious instances of this; and, as far as we are aware, there are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier was himself a Tory and a High Churchman, as was William ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... north, these south. There the bush is fetid, and the clammy air gives a sense of deadly depression; here the atmosphere is pure, the land is open, and there is enjoyment in the mere sense of life. The effete matter in the blood and the fatty degeneration of the muscles, the results of inactivity, imperfect respiration, and F. Po, were soon consumed by the pure oxygen of the highland air. I can attribute this superiority of the Congo region only to the labours of an old civilization ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... without steadily directing more and more of our industry from the production of those forms of wealth which merely support life to those which evoke it, from the increase of the fundamental necessities of animal life to that of the highest appliances of human culture, degeneration must go on."[293] ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... cattle, and of vegetation is believed to depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops. Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine kings to death, particularly ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... them. It is like watching a game from the grand stand, instead of playing it; betting on a race instead of running it. The transition hither is hard to make. Retired athletes, we know, suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart; retired men of affairs decay. I have walked lately at five miles an hour with the Widgers, and I do not relish dawdling at the rate of two with these people here. Better risk hell for heaven than lounge about ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... book means, as a rule, either juvenility or it means relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul—the focussing and fusing power in a man. I have sometimes wondered if even Christ, if He had not died in His thirty-third year, made His great dare for the world on the cross early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently in other people ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... began to fall. Ogallala had been chemically "stepped down" into the most primitive element, combined with the oxygen above and was condensing back to earth again as a few globules of H{2}O. That day was a sort of crisis; the enemy had discovered and turned upon us the power of atomic degeneration! And I, as assistant chief chemist of the American Army, felt my heart become heavy within me as I soared back ...
— The Sword and the Atopen • Taylor H. Greenfield
... his fortune before the gold hunters arrived. Bringing his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and then—but ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... peace would, if they attained their goal, not merely lead to general degeneration, but would have a damaging and unnerving effect. ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous system—glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as the only mode of escaping from or ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying. Their canon of morality there is that ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. If it be a principle ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent strategic errors, which made a portion only of the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... the coalition of European powers against France, Wordsworth experienced a great shock—the first, he tells us, that his moral nature had ever suffered—at seeing his own country arrayed with corrupt despotisms against what seemed to him the cause of humanity. The complete degeneration of the Revolution into anarchy and tyranny further served to plunge him into a chaos of moral bewilderment, from which he was gradually rescued partly by renewed communion with Nature and partly by the influence of his ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... turned over our plates, and reached for the dishes. Now some tables, or sections of tables, still maintain this lofty standard of good breeding, by the sheer fact that the most of the men are well bred and the rest are ashamed not to be. But where the proportion is reversed degeneration is rapid. The men furtively hang up their hats and turn over their plates before the order, and if a bunch of them take to doing this, there appears to be no remedy for it. "It's up to you," said a sergeant to us on the first ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... and away from art. Now the essence of realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called—I could ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Persia is the country that our stock came from. It is quite possible, and if so we are indeed to be congratulated upon having morally improved so much since, or the Persians to be condoled with on their sad degeneration. The better classes, however, are very different, as ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... another example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more, were its victims. As to the tradition, first mentioned long after his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout, it is absurd ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... opposed schools must be judged by the cogency of the evidence put forth by each. The appearance of a degenerate form of a noble idea may closely resemble that of a refined product of a coarse idea, and the only method of deciding between degeneration and evolution would be the examination, if possible, of intermediate and remote ancestors. The evidence brought forward by believers in the Wisdom is of this kind. They allege: that the Founders of religions, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... intoxicants. According to some of the foremost authorities on social science, and according to some of the most prominent medical men, drink is chiefly responsible for poverty, underfeeding, ill-health, and racial degeneration. Nevertheless, the British Socialists, instead of condemning drunkenness, rather encourage, or at least excuse, this terrible vice; and again, the universally discredited Iron Law of Wages is solemnly brought forth to prove "scientifically" that ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... genius as degenerative, and places among the signs of degeneration, deviations from the average normal, whether physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such inclusive use of the term degenerate, than the fact that Lombroso ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came first, fanciful legend was attached after. I am inclined to surmise that this has always been the case, and, in the pages on the legend of Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of mythical accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in action. That "the feeling of religious devotion" attests "high faculties" in early man (such as are often denied to men who "cannot count up to seven"), and that "the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... the purist fad as against the holiness fake. Like a plague of army worms or epidemic of epizootic, it must run its course. Preternicety of expression, an affectation of euphemism, has in every age and clime evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay. When people emasculate their minds, they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus, for nature preserves the equipoise. Every writer of virility is now voted obscene, every man ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Cullingworth this evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the Creator with a young Jewish Philosopher. I tried to show him that this is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish Philosopher at least represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely higher plane than the sensual divinities of the ancients. His own views of the Creator seem to me to be a more evident degeneration. He declares that ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... foundations. Take London or any metropolis of modern Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in more ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... age wherein so bold a motion hath been, amongst others, admitted to the light. What will all the Christian Churches through the world, to whose notice these lines shall come, think of our woeful degeneration, &c."? [Footnote: Hall's Works (edit. 1837), VII. 467.] Hall, it will be seen, had noted the literary ability of the pamphlet, while amazed ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... to, What can the swallow, ant, or spider do? Yet I will speak, I can but be rejected, Sometimes great things by small means are effected. Hark, then, though man is noble by creation, He's lapsed now to such degeneration, Is so besotted and so careless grown, As not to grieve though he has overthrown Himself, and brought to bondage everything Created, from the spider to the king. This we poor sensitives do feel and see; For subject to the curse you made us be. Tread not upon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... descending scale as does their totality. In India the conception of the four ages or Yuga, by developing itself and producing its natural consequences, engenders that of the Manvantara. According to this new theory the world, after having accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes dissolution (pralaya), things having reached such a pitch of corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs up a new universe, with a new humanity—doomed to the same cycle of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
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