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More "Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... story which is told us be true, namely that the Presbyter Laurentius has been groping for fatal riches among human corpses. An odious inversion of his functions, that he who should preach peace to the living has been robbing the dead, and that hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains, instead of distributing ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... axis and representing the midrib the funicle corresponding to the petiole. The outer tegument of the ovule, according to Griffith, is a leaf united along its margins, but always more or less open at its apex. No inversion can, therefore, really take place in anatropous ovules, but the blade of the leaf is bent back on the funicle, with which its ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... They first design the exterior, and then fit into it the interior of their building. The purpose of the building is thus regarded as a secondary consideration. In short, they utilise ornament instead of ornamenting utility—total inversion, as it appears to me, of the fundamental principle which ought to govern all classes of architectural structures. This is, unfortunately, too evident in most of our public buildings. See, for ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... struck out a line for himself; and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one. This the Archdeacon, being a good Conservative, disapproved. It worried him sadly, making him actually, if unconsciously, exceedingly jealous. And precisely on that account, by an ingenious inversion of reasoning, he felt he owed it to abstract justice—in other words to his much disgruntled self—to make all possible use of this offending, this renegade personage, when opportunity of so doing occurred. Now, learning on credible authority that Sir Charles's name was still one ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... he to his principle of contrast, that he cuts the melodious idyl short with a twang of the guitar-strings, and strikes up a tavern ballad on Lucrezia. The irony which ruled his art demanded this inversion of proprieties. Cynthia wooing Endymion shows us woman in her frailty; Lucrece violated by Tarquin is woman in her dignity. The ironical poet had to adorn the first story with his choicest flowers of style and feeling, to burlesque the second with his ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies most often to desire-and-fear dreams ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... bodies—"never found in inorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis." Orders and suborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, in assimilation. Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, some produce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation. These enzymes are at once the products and the agents of life. They must exert force, chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force into life force, or, to use Professor Moore's ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... in Chapter 5 of dip and strike, of the folding and inversion of strata, of anticlinal and synclinal flexures, and in Chapter 6 of denudation at different periods, whether subaerial or submarine, must be understood before the student can comprehend what may at first ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line. So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... gasp of dismay, Bobby set to work in the dogged analytical mood which difficulties already aroused in him. The remedy for the inversion was plain enough. Bobby changed the type end for end and turned the R and the E right side up, but he worked slower and slower and his brow ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... arena of musical London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor Pozzi." He was saved. By the simple inversion of the first two words, the substitution of z's for t's, without so fortunately making any difference in the sound, and the retention of that i, all London knew him now to be the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... answer is obtained by experiment, which perfectly explains this "odious feast," the excuse for which is simply maternity. The Philanthus knows, instinctively, without having learned it, that honey, which is her ordinary fare, is, by a very singular "inversion," a mortal poison ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... circuitous journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which looked like formal ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the possibility of another interpretation of the last line, though I think the one just given is correct, "I need the world of men; it is a natural law." Now it is just possible that we could interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and I must go to do my share." This would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. I have never quite ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. He had given ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... peace between the warring powers, and strong likelihood of peace in the world for all time to come. It also meant other things. It meant the complete inversion of the American policy and the welcoming of science as the servant of mankind's larger needs and not merely a flunky ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... sculpture, which fell into decline with the decay of literature. Music, rising into excellence and importance at a time when poetry was on the decline, acquired such superiority that verse, instead of being its mistress, became its handmaid. The first occasion of this inversion was in the year 1594, when Rinuccini, a Florentine poet, associated himself with three musicians to compose a mythological drama. This and several other pieces by the same author met with a brilliant reception. Poetry, written only in order ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... witnessed, but the chronic form, of which we more particularly speak, is more rare. We have seen three cases of the latter, and, no doubt, might have found many more if our opportunities of studying canine pathology were equal to those of the English writers. The inversion of the eyelids upon the globe is accompanied with pain and irritation, swelling and inflammation, both of the lids and eye, which ultimately renders the dog almost useless, if not ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... where I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, and to discover what the business might be in which he was ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... increasing ease, and the operation should be completed with the hand and arm extended the full length within the womb and moved from point to point so as to straighten out all parts of the organ and insure that no portion still remain inverted within another portion. Should any such partial inversion be left it will give rise to straining, under the force of which it will gradually increase until the whole mass will be protruded as before. The next step is to apply a truss as an effectual mechanical barrier to further escape of the womb through the vulva. The simplest is made with two 1-inch ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... other climes and elder states, What strange inversion all his works awaits! From age to age, on every peopled shore, Stalks the fell Demon of despotic power, Sweeps in his march the mounds of art away. Blots with his breath the trembling disk of day, Treads down whole nations ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... exhort, who am also an elder ... feed the flock of God.' He remembered that last command, which sounded ever in his spirit, 'Follow thou Me,' and discerning now, through all the years that lay between, the presumptuous folly and blind inversion of his own work and his Master's which had lain in his earlier question, 'Why cannot I follow Thee now? I will lay down my life for Thy sake'—he writes to all, 'Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of Christian Science, like the 113:27 method in mathematics, proves the rule by inversion. For example: There is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no 113:30 mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no mind in mat- ter; no matter in Life, and no life in matter; no matter in good, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... repose the grey man, for a man it was, looked far less substantial than the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... reasons: First, it may have the concaved surface uppermost, in which form it is called ogee recta—that is, right side up; or it may be inverted, as in Fig. 193, with the concaved surface below, and is then called ogee reversa. Contrast these two views and you will note what a difference the mere inversion of the strip makes in the appearance. Second, because the ogee has in it, in a combined form, the outlines of nearly all the other types. The only advantage there is in using the other types is because you may ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... into such English as he employed in his "Task," there would be no reason to complain; but in translating Homer he seems to have thought it necessary to use a different style from that of his original work. Almost every sentence is stiffened by some clumsy inversion; stately phrases are used when simpler ones were at hand, and would have rendered the meaning of the original better. The entire version has the appearance of being hammered out with great labor, and as a whole it is cold and constrained; scarce any thing seems ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... in its whole revolution, and, accordingly, when off the Cape, I have observed it in every stage, from its triumphant erect position, between sixty and seventy degrees above the horizon, to that of complete inversion, with the top beneath, and almost touching the water. This position, by the way, always reminded me of the death of St. Peter, who is said to have deemed it too great an honour to be crucified with his head upwards. In short, I defy the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... an elaborate one. After the subject has been carried through the first time, the subject is introduced in a new form, in inversion (measure 43, alto), all ascending passages in the original being now imitated in downward directions and by the same interval. This taken as a new subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on the fugue ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... down his knife and fork, and was staring at his son in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... spermatheca, the seminal liquid where millions of germs are floating, which, until her last day, will issue one by one, as the eggs pass by, and in the obscurity of her body accomplish the mysterious union of the male and female element, whence the worker-bees are born. Through a curious inversion, it is she who furnishes the male principle, and the drone who provides the female. Two days after the union she lays her first eggs, and her people immediately surround her with the most particular care. From that ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wife, Terentia: "Si tu, et Tullia, lux nostra, valetix; ego, et suavissimus Cicero, valemus."—EPIST. AD FAM. Lib. xiv, Ep. v. That is, "If thou, and Tullia, our joy, are well; I, and the sweet lad Cicero, are likewise well." This literal translation is good English, and not to be amended by inversion; for a father is not expected to give precedence to his child. But, when I was a boy, the text and version of Dr. Adam puzzled me not a little; because I could not conceive how Cicero could ever have ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates separated from ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the future and confine it to the present state, as those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... part in it, it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Contrariety.— N. contrariety, contrast, foil, antithesis, oppositeness; contradiction; antagonism &c. (opposition) 708; clashing, repugnance. inversion &c. 218; the opposite, the reverse, the inverse, the converse, the antipodes, the antithesis, the other extreme. V. be contrary &c. adj.; contrast with, oppose; diller toto coelo[Lat]. invert, reverse, turn the tables; turn topsy-turvy, turn end for end, turn upside down, turn inside ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. It seems to me too that the language is freer—there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. It just strikes me so for the first impression. At any rate the interest grows and grows. You have a secret about Domizia, I guess—which will not be told till the last perhaps. And that poor, noble Luria, who will ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... run for shelter behind the bolder petticoats; particularly the stablemen. The footmen, being more accustomed to ladies' society, are less embarrassed by their own hands, and by the exigencies of chivalry. This inversion of the usual attitude of the sexes, will, no doubt, be set more than right when we have retired. The moment has arrived. I quit father's arm—for the first time in my life I am honestly sorry to drop it—and go ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... covered a large space of ground when they fell.[498] How miserable is such a phrase compared with the [Greek: keito megas megalosti] of Homer! And though there is less serious obscurity, nothing can be more awkward than the not infrequent inversion of the natural order of words that we find in phrases such as nec pereat ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Africa that we were most of all opposed and most of all distrusted, and by a singular inversion it is in South Africa that the most brilliant and memorable results have been achieved. Indeed, I think that the gift of the Transvaal and Orange River Constitutions and the great settlement resulting therefrom will be by itself as a single event sufficient to vindicate in the eyes of future generations ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... account of their passion for inverting the names of things. You must not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say, instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a gratuitous insult to a number ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, the ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... hardly separable, either from each other or from the nucleus, in this family, therefore, the direction of the embryo can only be judged of from the vessels of the testa.* And in Lemna I have found an apparent inversion of the embryo with relation to the apex of the nucleus. In this genus, however, such other peculiarities of structure and economy exist, that, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, I consider the exception rather as confirming than ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... The first bad inversion permitted, for "to combine bricks with cement." In my Swallow lecture I had no time to go into the question of her building materials; the point is, however, touched upon in the Appendix (pp. 110, 112, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... (Compare Goethe's first letter to Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... that 'if a man once indulges himself in murder, he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking; and from that to incivility and procrastination.' One laughs at this whimsical inversion; but I don't think one laughs very heartily; and certainly one does not find, as in really deep humour, that the paradox is pregnant with further meaning, and the laugh a prelude to a more melancholy smile. Many ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... any thing of brass, no, nor in their feet any thing of pure iron; but in their heads is iron mixed with clay, in their breasts is each mixed with brass, in their loins is also each mixed with silver, and in their feet is each mixed with gold: by this inversion they are changed from men (homines) into graven images of men, in which inwardly nothing coheres; for what was highest, is made lowest, thus what was the head is become the heel, and vice versa. They appear to us ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... title and pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at each ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... exceptions. Among higher numbers the inverse order is very rarely used; though even here an occasional exception is found. The Taensa Indians, for example, place the smaller numbers before the larger, no matter how far their scale may extend. To say 1881 they make a complete inversion of our own order, beginning with 1 and ending with 1000. Their full numeral for this is yeha av wabki mar-u-wab mar-u-haki, which means, literally, 1 80 100 x 8 100 x 10.[54] Such ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... as it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality. Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and hospitality, was held in high reputation, assuming, in these respects, the attitude of a royal court in the northern parts of the kingdom; and the family were regarded with such veneration and esteem that the following harmless inversion was familiar "as household words:"—"God save the Earl of Derby and the King;" the general feeling and opinion thereby apparent being love to their lord ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... doubt one author who copies another may often omit something stated by the first author. But, surely, he is not very likely to invert the order of the materials before him, especially when no obvious purpose can be served by such an inversion. Another instance of inversion is this: in Mark ix. 12, 13 the rejection of the Son of Man is mentioned by our Lord between two statements of His about Ehas, in Matt. xvii. 12 it is mentioned after both statements. Such ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... of study, by which memorizing precedes thinking, results, as we have seen, in crowding out thinking by leaving little time and energy for it. Memorizing thus becomes a substitute for thinking, and makes study an extremely dull task. This is an inversion, however, of the true order. If thinking is made to precede conscious attempts to memorize, the nourishing character of study is assured, and direct attempts at memorizing become largely unnecessary, because most of the ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... conclusion of the second stanza. A further step towards the provision of closer unity between the separate stanzas was the chanso redonda, which was composed of coblas estrampas, the rime order of the second stanza being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches its highest point in the sestina, which retained the characteristic of the chanso redonda, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should correspond ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... power of certain particles upon the nerves, that the stomach will be thrown into convulsions that almost threaten an inversion, by taking only four ounces of a wine in which so small a portion of glass of antimony as one scruple is infused in eight pounds of the former. And what is still more remarkable is, that the glass of antimony remains ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... the merest tyro in philology can now see, the great difficulty that Guichard encounters is in getting from the Hebrew to the Aryan group of languages. How he meets this difficulty may be imagined from his statement, as follows: "As for the derivation of words by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it is certain that this can and ought thus to be done, if we would find etymologies—a thing which becomes very credible when we consider that the Hebrews wrote from right to left and the Greeks and others from left to right. All the learned recognise such derivations as ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... faithless to her. I have studiously kept out of his way; have persistently refused to be a third in their interviews. Yet all to no purpose. Some fatality has seemed to rule, ever since he came to the house, that this disastrous inversion of things should arise. If I had only foreseen the possibility of it before he arrived, how gladly would I have departed on some visit or other to the meanest friend to hinder such an apparent treachery. But I blindly welcomed ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... she had reached the depths. This temptation capping the climax of her rejection—this monstrous inversion of the classic triangle! "What is she, then?" he asked himself, "and what am I?" For he caught hold of her as if he were going to crush her doubly perfidious, inexplicable heart, and fastened his lips to hers in a ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution having suppressed inequality, this has again arisen in an inverse sense. The populace, both of town ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... fragile clinging beauty, but the girl of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey to destruction and extermination when ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... loopin', stoopin' drunk? I'll tell you why, head-shrinker. Because I want to, that's why. Because I like it. I'm doing something I like because I like it. I'm not doing it because of the inversion of this concealed repression as expressed in the involuted feelings my childhood developed in my attitude toward the sex-life of beavers, see, couch-catechizer old boy? I like it ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... amazingly interesting to see how a jury will waver and speculate in a case like this—how curious and uncertain is the process by which it makes up its so-called mind. So-called truth is a nebulous thing at best; facts are capable of such curious inversion and interpretation, honest and otherwise. The jury had a strongly complicated problem before it, and it went over it and ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... been here. Her daughter seems to be an interesting case of self-surrender and inversion of reproductive instinct owing to repeated rebuffs. She is now at the self-immolating stage. Rather dangerous. Falls about. Her knees give way. Might cut her head open. Great struggle for supremacy apparently with flapper sister. Both ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, was far less criminal than he who married, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... The inversion of the organs shown by Vertebrates as compared with Invertebrates is due to the reversed position of the embryo relatively ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... Krafft-Ebing, published a Psychopathia Sexualis, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that sexual inversion is sometimes due to a congenital ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... necessary for it. In another, two or three burning glasses, wherewith he made both men and women sometimes mad, and in the church put them quite out of countenance; for he said that there was but an antistrophe, or little more difference than of a literal inversion, between a woman folle a la messe and molle a la fesse, that is, foolish at the mass and of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... they might make interesting discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not require ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... until now been looking at his figure reflected in her mirror, turned round and saluted him. She was beautiful, with that royal beauty which made all around her not only partisans of the throne, but adorers of the woman. She possessed the power of beauty; and, if we may make use of the inversion, the beauty of power. Philippe, seeing her smile, and feeling those limpid eyes, at once soft and proud, fixed upon him, turned pale, and could hardly ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... countries, the revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; and these are carried out of the country without producing anything to compensate so heavy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the five "correct" colors of the Chinese, while green is one of the "intermediate" colors that are less esteemed. Here we have the yellow used merely as a lining to the green, or employed in the lower, or less honorable, part of the dress;—an inversion of propriety, and intimating how a favorite had usurped the place of the rightful wife ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... According to this explanation, the sorrowful expression of Antinous must indicate the agony of death through which he passed into the company of the undying. Against this interpretation is the fact that we have no precise authority for the symbolism of the torches, except only the common inversion of the life-brand by ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... dress we take to be the following—utility in all cases, ornament when practicable. The first should ever precede, and serve as the basis to the second; and it is the inversion of their due positions that causes so many applications of the utile and the dulce to end in sheer absurdity. The usefulness of any article or system of dress depends entirely upon climate, modified ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... that the objects enumerated in the preceding number ought to be provided for by the State governments, under the direction of the Union. But this would be, in reality, an inversion of the primary principle of our political association, as it would in practice transfer the care of the common defense from the federal head to the individual members: a project oppressive to some States, dangerous to all, and baneful ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... is not all: the arrangement of all these monosyllables appears to be under no general rule; so that to know the language after having learnt the words, we must learn every particular phrase: the least inversion would make you unintelligible to three ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of a grand homme manque, of a man who would be a genius were it not for the excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus every glass he tossed off seemed to hint in a roundabout ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... N by E and S by W. | 59|The vessels in all parts of the horizon have an inverted image under them; | |this is very considerable, some having about one-third of the sail, others | |only the hull. | 60|Light wind from SE. Sky cloudy, somewhat hazy; but the horizon sharp and | |unbroken. | 61|The inversion of the vessels as conspicuous as before. Parts of the | |horizon observed ESE and WNW. | 62|A light breeze from the SE. Cloudy and close.—N.B. Instrument readjusted. | 63|Part of the horizon observed N and S. | 64|Part of the horizon observed ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the possession of ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... as those electors of Bevisham had just done, and impulsively she pleaded for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to defend herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story, though she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a singular inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it was her heart that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the 'gallant and handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her mind from the fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking of Nevil's father, whose ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as has been seen, with complete success. The calmer grew the mind of Mr. Winkleman, and the clearer his thoughts, the less satisfied did he feel with the part he had taken in the morning's drama. By an inversion of thought, not usual among men of his temperament, he had been presented with a vivid realization of his wife's side of the question. The consequence was, that, by dinner-time, he felt a good deal ashamed ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... selfishness and passion that drove us asunder. Thus it is, dear Rose, that my thoughts have been wandering about in the maze of life that entangles me. In my isolation I have time enough for mental inversion—for self-exploration—for idle fancies, if you will. And so I have lifted the veil for you; uncovered my inner life; taken you into the sanctuary over whose threshold no foot but my ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, powder, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... flattering to get the start of a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; spurious ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the same reason for inserting the comma in such cases as there is for inserting it after a long subject. Moreover, there is often need of some device to remove the ambiguities that are caused by inversion. In English, the meaning of words is so greatly determined by their position that, in altering the usual arrangement of a sentence, there is risk of being misunderstood. The danger of inserting the point in this case is that the object ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... liquid is so much the more necessary in that the saturated solution of sulphate of copper has a density of 1.166, and the sulphate of zinc one of 1.445, There would occur, then, a mixture through inversion of densities if the solution were allowed to reach a too great amount of saturation, did not the siphon prevent such a phenomenon by sucking up the liquid into the part where the mixture tends to take place. The chemical action that produces the current ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... individual is like an awakened dreamer—he lives in his dream. (Of this we might cite seemingly authentic examples: Shelly, Alfieri, etc.) Psychologically, this means that there is in him a double inversion of the normal state. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... cursing under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through 90 degrees into ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... all, that resemble Indra himself to attend to her comforts—even she, so chaste and exalted, hath now to attend to the comforts of others, that are to her far inferior in rank. Behold, O Pandava, my plight. It is what I do not deserve. You are alive, yet behold this inversion of order that time hath brought. She who had the whole Earth to the verge of the sea under her control, is now under the control of Sudeshna and living in fear of her. She who had dependants to walk both before and behind her, alas, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... respite was something in the nature of an inversion of the tempering of the wind. Perhaps a strange Providence was giving her a few moments in which to strengthen herself for the blow that was to follow so quickly. It is of small consequence, however. These things pass in a lifetime almost ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... animal soon completes its growth: for the stage which I have spoken of as transient for the higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development of these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... river go." Though time present, past, and future is readily expressed in signs (see page 366), it is done once for all in the connection to which it belongs, and once established is not repeated by any subsequent intimation, as is commonly the case in oral speech. Inversion, by which the object is placed before the action, is a striking feature of the language of deaf-mutes, and it appears to follow the natural method by which objects and actions enter into the mental conception. In striking ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... 62. The inversion of reference in these lines is an illustration of the rhetorical figure 'chiasmus.' Cp. the arrangement of the demonstrative pronouns in these sentences from 'Kenilworth':—'Your eyes contradict your tongue. That speaks of a protector, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... and especially upon the extreme top, are numerous white, wiry hairs, 6 in. or more long, and gathered sometimes into locks. To this character, the plant owes it name Old-Man Cactus; but, by a curious inversion of what obtains in the human kind, old plants are less conspicuous by their white hairs than the younger ones. Some years ago, there were three fine stems of this Cactus among the cultivated plants at Kew, the highest of which measured 181/2 ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... heated by a long series of petty annoyances to such a degree that at last they may have ended in rage and a sudden flinging loose of himself from the society. It is the impulsive man who frequently suffers what appears to be inversion, and Judas was impulsive exceedingly. Matthew, and Matthew only, says that Judas asked for money from the chief priests. "What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you?" According to Mark, whose account ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... inversion of interest. Truth of outward Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really imagine men,—that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... life for Thy sake.' What a strange inversion of parts is here! 'Lay down thy life for My sake'—with Calvary less than four-and-twenty hours off, when Christ laid down His life for Peter's sake. Peter was guilty of an anachronism in the words, for the time ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... there are the mysteries of suspension and inversion, by means of which even the second is received into favor in the bosom of harmony. A musician once explained all these things to me, but that was later. And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, as the fugue, counterpoint, the canon for two and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Broadway, while 23d Street will call up as definite a picture of shopping activity as Bond Street or Piccadilly. The chief trouble is the facility of confusing such an address as No. 44 East 45th Street with No. 45 East 44th Street; and so natural is an inversion of the kind that one is sometimes heedless enough to make it in writing one's ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... sense into sensations; but the change is one of name only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is our sensation only: for a day or two the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... looked far less substantial than the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... is said to have been created thus—his body of earth, his blood of the sea, his face of the sun, his breath of the wind, etc. This is also found in a Frisian tale (Vigfusson-Powell, Corpus Poet. Bor. i. 479), and both stories present an inversion of well-known myths about the creation of the universe from ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... different things, which are expressed by as many different characters. This is not all: the arrangement of all these monosyllables appears to be under no general rule; so that to know the language after having learnt the words, we must learn every particular phrase: the least inversion would make you unintelligible to three parts of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... men. At a distance of 4 to 16 meters the proportion of women to men who could hear was 34 to 17. The converse is true of children, for at a distance of 20 meters and more the percentage of boys was 49.9 and girls 43.2. The reason for this inversion of the relation lies in the harmful influences of manual labor and other noisy occupations of men. These comparisons may be of importance when the question is raised as to how much more a witness may have heard than ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... able to show similarities in mechanisms that had no apparent relation. He was first to recognize that the fixed link of a mechanism was kinematically the same as the movable links. This led him to the important notion of inversion of linkages, fixing successively the various links and thus changing the function of the mechanism. He devoted 40 pages to showing, with obvious delight, the kinematic identity of one design after another of rotary steam engines, demolishing for all time the fond hopes of ingenious ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... the most prolific sources of Corrupt Readings, is Transposition, or the arbitrary inversion of the order of the sacred words,—generally in the subordinate clauses of a sentence. The extent to which this prevails in Codexes of the type of B[Symbol: Aleph]CD passes belief. It is not merely the occasional writing of [Greek: tauta ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... first letter to Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... that asceticism is an absolute inversion of the Divine order, since it seeks life through death instead of finding death through life. No degree of mortification can ever bring us to sanctification. We are to "put off the old man with his deeds." But how? By "putting on the new man who is renewed ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... that rudiments have been created to complete the scheme of nature is here so far from holding good, that we have a complete inversion of the ordinary state of things in the family. We may reasonably suspect that the males originally bore horns and transferred them to the females in a rudimentary condition, as in so many other Lamellicorns. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the lesson which, before you were born and ever since, the women of the Earth have done their utmost to impress indelibly upon my mind—the lesson that woman is but a less lovable, more petulant, more deeply and incurably spoilt child. Your mother's reproach is an exact inversion of the truth. No one could have acted with more utter unselfishness, more devoted kindness, more exquisite delicacy than you have shown in this miserable matter. I could not have believed that even you could ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Glace in stone. It is a continent of rock, gullied by furious rivers; plateau on plateau of sandstone, with sluiceways through which lakes have escaped; the whole surface gigantically grotesque with the carvings of innumerable waters. What is remarkable in the scenery is, that its sublimity is an inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery. It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses. At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a plumb line six thousand feet before it will ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... out of me in a way that makes the thought of that bare place with its gilt book-backs and its three uncomfortable office-chairs and the ground-glass windows through which one read the inversion of the legend "Polehampton," all its gloom and its rigid lines and its pallid light, a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him and his phantasmal daughter—who wanted to make my acquaintance. It was like a command to a ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... in the making, and catch the only glimpse it is allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum? What strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever its bulk, is elementary, I hold that ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the title and pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at each ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... revolution itself must, of course, have taken place in an easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion—that is to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my person or ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sponge, such as an used for lighting gas-burners, were hung in tiny aluminum bells from a mica vane wheel which was turned constantly and rapidly in one direction by hot air from a gas flame to keep the platinum in a glow. The inversion and reversion did not take place, as one might suppose, at the will of the observer, but was compulsory and followed regular rules. If the observer watches the rotating objects from the side, or from above or from below, the inversion takes ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... as is capable of respectable expression. And we ask ourselves what good end Helvetius proposed to himself. Of what was he thinking when he perpetrated so singular a misconstruction of his own meaning as that inversion of beneficence into self-love of which we have spoken? We can only explain it in one way. In saying that it is impossible to love good for good's sake, Helvetius was thinking of the theologians. Their doctrine that man is predisposed to love evil for evil's sake, removes conduct from the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner group, did Lincoln consider it appropriate to introduce him. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... as the preparations were, they were not visible to the watchful diplomatic agents who maintained the relations of the Government with the tribesmen. So extraordinary is the inversion of ideas and motives among those people that it may be said that those who know them best, know them least, and the more logical the mind of the student the less he is able to understand of the subject. In any case among these able men who diligently ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... You have it, too; I have it; all really nice people have it. I have been refreshing myself with Irish Memories since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border—those were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... new transformation of the whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not require a great man to say calmly: ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the Stanza structure and the Antistrophic structure there are various modifications and elaborations—duplication, inversion, interruption, etc.: these it will be sufficient to explain in connection with the examples in which ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... is not aware that the image on the retina is reversed. In order to take account of this, we should require another eye to see this image. This answer appears particularly to the point. It will be found that it is absolutely correct if we reflect that this case of the unfelt inversion of the image on the retina is but one example of the anatomical ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... mild ales and stouts, as it gives a peculiarly sweet and full flavour to the beer, to which, no doubt, the popularity of this class of beverage is largely due. Invert sugar is prepared by the action either of acid or of yeast on cane sugar. The chemical equation representing the conversion (or inversion) of cane ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... criticisms on Murchison were to me, and I think would be to many, particularly acceptable. (562/2. In a paper "On the Geological Structure of the Alps, etc." ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume V., page 157, 1849) Murchison expressed his belief that the apparent inversion of certain Tertiary strata along the flanks of the Alps afforded "a clear demonstration of a sudden operation or catastrophe." It is this view of paroxysmal energy that Lyell criticises in the address.) Capital, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... This inversion sometimes creates ambiguity in poetry, e.g. "The son the father slew," and must be sparingly ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... too exclusively an instrument of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... of inversion is too simple to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies most often to desire-and-fear ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... columns (or the lines) of the determinant, and then taking for the factors the n elements in the dexter diagonal. And we thence derive the rule for the signs, viz. considering the primitive arrangement of the columns as positive, then an arrangement obtained therefrom by a single interchange (inversion, or derangement) of two columns is regarded as negative; and so in general an arrangement is positive or negative according as it is derived from the primitive arrangement by an even or an odd number of interchanges. [This implies ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... necessary, the wound should be purified by washing with saline solution or eusol, and the surrounding skin painted with iodine, after which the edges are approximated by sutures. The raw surfaces must be brought into accurate apposition, care being taken that no inversion of the cutaneous surface takes place. In extensive and deep wounds, to ensure more complete closure and to prevent subsequent stretching of the scar, it is advisable to unite the different structures—muscles, fasciae, and ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... priest, the slave, and the liberticide, trampled his country's pride, and mocked [it] with many a loathed rite of lust and blood. This of course refers to the condition of public affairs and of court-life in the reign of Charles II. The inversion in this passage is not a very serious one, although, for the sense, slightly embarrassing. Occasionally Shelley conceded to himself great latitude in inversion: as for instance in the Revolt of ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... removal of foreign bodies from the larynx. In such cases, while the same relative position of the head to the plane of the table is maintained, the whole table top is so inclined as to elevate the feet and lower the head, known as Jackson's position. This semi-inversion of the patient allows the foreign body to drop into the pharynx if it should be dislodged, or slip from ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... possibility of another interpretation of the last line, though I think the one just given is correct, "I need the world of men; it is a natural law." Now it is just possible that we could interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and I must go to do my share." This would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. I have never quite ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... seems to be an inversion of la Trenise, except that in nineteen cases out of twenty, the waistcoat, tip, camellia and wristbands, seem to undergo intense mental torture; for if there be such a thing as "poetry of motion," pastorale must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... cannot alter them. By opposing any natural law we place ourselves in an inverted position with regard to it, and therefore, viewed from this false standpoint, it appears as though the law itself were working against us with definite purpose. But the inversion proceeds entirely from ourselves, and not from any change in the action of the law. The law of Spirit, like all other natural laws, is in itself impersonal; but we carry into it, so to speak, the reflection of ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... came unto him, and stayed him, that he should not depart from them."—Luke, iv, 42. Here, to prove that to be a pronoun, the disciples of Tooke and Webster must resort to more than one imaginary ellipsis, and to such inversion as will scarcely leave the sense ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is rather an elaborate one. After the subject has been carried through the first time, the subject is introduced in a new form, in inversion (measure 43, alto), all ascending passages in the original being now imitated in downward directions and by the same interval. This taken as a new subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on the fugue becomes very complicated and ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... difference. The crystalline lens in the higher cuttle-fish consists of two parts, placed one behind the other like two lenses, both having a very different structure and disposition to what occurs in the vertebrata. The retina is wholly different, with an actual inversion of the elemental parts, and with a large nervous ganglion included within the membranes of the eye. The relations of the muscles are as different as it is possible to conceive, and so in other points. Hence it is not a little difficult to decide how far even the same terms ought to be employed ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... bankruptcies." Could any man have doubted, in that case, that the meaning was, that the States should not pass laws discharging debts without payment, but that Congress might establish uniform bankrupt acts? And yet this inversion of the order of the clauses does not alter their sense. We contend, that Congress alone possesses the power of establishing bankrupt laws; and although we are aware that, in Sturges v. Crowninshield, the court decided that such an exclusive power could not be ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... distinguish men and women in all races, and for those which distinguish them in each race, or each society. An interesting subordinate inquiry may be, how far such mental differences are inverted in cases where there is inversion of social and domestic relations; as among those Khasi Hill-tribes, whose women have so far the upper hand that they turn off their husbands in a summary way ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... that he and she had reached the depths. This temptation capping the climax of her rejection—this monstrous inversion of the classic triangle! "What is she, then?" he asked himself, "and what am I?" For he caught hold of her as if he were going to crush her doubly perfidious, inexplicable heart, and fastened his lips to hers in a kiss ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... grand homme manque, of a man who would be a genius were it not for the excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus every glass he tossed off seemed to hint in a roundabout way at the glorious ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... or "Saskatchewan." To require pupils to say, "The British officer killed at Queenston Heights was General Brock," or "The province west of Manitoba is Saskatchewan," would be to make the recitation unnatural and formal. When answers are a mere echo of the question, with some slight inversion or addition, they become exceedingly mechanical, and useless from the point of view of language training. While it is desirable to avoid, as far as possible, questions that admit of answers of a single word or short phrase, such questions are sometimes necessary and are not objectionable. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... are actually in"). The dream exhibits my friend as behaving like a general paralytic, and thus riots in absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically. "Of course he is a madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands all about it. But shouldn't it be the other way round?" This inversion obviously took place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whilst any one, however young, can to-day easily attack ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... our rulers. But to suppose that this great revolution can be accomplished by a temporary army, that this army will be subsisted by State supplies and that taxation alone is adequate to our wants is in my opinion absurd, and as unreasonable as to expect an inversion of the order of nature to accommodate itself to our views. If it were necessary it could be easily proved to any person of a moderate understanding that an annual army or any army raised on the spur of the occasion besides being unqualified ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the intention by "Sleep done, I river go." Though time present, past, and future is readily expressed in signs (see page 366), it is done once for all in the connection to which it belongs, and once established is not repeated by any subsequent intimation, as is commonly the case in oral speech. Inversion, by which the object is placed before the action, is a striking feature of the language of deaf-mutes, and it appears to follow the natural method by which objects and actions enter into the mental conception. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... gravity battery into whose centre a globular flask, B, is inverted, which is filled before inversion with copper sulphate, of which 2 lbs. are used, and water, so as to remain full. This acts as a reservoir of copper sulphate, which it constantly supplies. The glass jar is closed with a perforated ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... as one of the class to whom he speaks—'The elders I exhort, who am also an elder ... feed the flock of God.' He remembered that last command, which sounded ever in his spirit, 'Follow thou Me,' and discerning now, through all the years that lay between, the presumptuous folly and blind inversion of his own work and his Master's which had lain in his earlier question, 'Why cannot I follow Thee now? I will lay down my life for Thy sake'—he writes to all, 'Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... say that drinking is always wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... imagining that he was a wolf, attack'd, and even killed several persons in the fields; and when at length he was taken, he persevered in declaring himself a real wolf, and that the only difference consisted in the inversion of his ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... mostly of the killing back of the lower limbs and twigs with some varieties being killed outright. Killing of the lower limbs as compared with the tops of the trees is probably related to lower temperatures near the ground due to temperature inversion and possibly to the fact that the lower branches were somewhat weaker in their growth. This sort of injury ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... thrown last, they will run thus, that even those cannot but approve the steadiness and intrepidity, with which you pursue them, who would misrepresent your generous designs for the public good. Here the sense is much obscured by the inversion of the relative them, which ought to refer to something that went before, and not to the words generous designs, which in this situation of the members are placed after it. WARD'S Rhetoric. Vol. 1, p. 338, 339.] the beauty of it would then be mangled and destroyed. Suppose, for ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... "Oh, it's only an inversion of the old problem, If the ton of coal cost ten dollars, what will the cord of wood come to? Now, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... so grievously deceived in this Society, were to enrol upon the latest page of its history its highest claim to public approbation, and by signing its dissolution, offer the only atonement in their power to the insulted science of their country. As with a singular inversion of principle, the society contrived to render EXPULSION* the highest HONOUR it could confer; so it remains for it to exemplify, in suicide, the sublimest virtue of which it is capable. [* They expelled from amongst them ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... objection, that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal force and perspicuity. It must, indeed, be allowed, that the structure of his sentences is expanded, and often has somewhat of the inversion of Latin; and that he delighted to express familiar thoughts in philosophical language; being in this the reverse of Socrates, who, it was said, reduced philosophy to the simplicity of common life. But let us attend to what ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... than physic. She was to keep her bed, to be allowed no modern literature of any kind, unless Milton and Swift may be admitted as moderns, and even these authors and their predecessors were to be admitted in very sparing quantities. If any signs of inversion, archaism, or neologistic tendencies appeared he was to be summoned at once; but of these (he added) he had little fear. He did not doubt that in a few weeks we should have her up and about again, but he warned me against letting her ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... "Given an inversion of their relative positions, I feel like Faust befriended by Mephistopheles. I felt it when he stood by my side on the hilltop, seven years ago. I felt it when he thrust that money into my hand, and bade me go and see what I could make of life, bade me go, without ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... philosopher appears to be very differently estimated by late critics and opponents and by himself, whether we consider the extent of his influence, or the relations of his doctrines to his nation and time; and there is a most singular inversion in these estimates of what we should naturally expect from friend and foe—an estimate of Mill's position and influence by his opponents, which, compared to his own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... familiar words proceed from them—for instance, the word Patrie. Some few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the greater part remained. They have excluded from French—as some think to the impoverishment of that language—most elements of the Gothic—the inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative, the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the Englishman than is the new—all these ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... it, In Compositae its coats seem to be imperforated, and hardly separable, either from each other or from the nucleus, in this family, therefore, the direction of the embryo can only be judged of from the vessels of the testa.* And in Lemna I have found an apparent inversion of the embryo with relation to the apex of the nucleus. In this genus, however, such other peculiarities of structure and economy exist, that, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, I consider the exception rather as confirming than lessening ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... is used like a noun as the subject of has been proved. The conjunction that [Footnote: "That was originally the neuter demonstrative pronoun, used to point to the fact stated in an independent sentence; as, It was good; he saw that. By an inversion of the order this became, He saw that (namely) it was good, and so passed into the form He saw that it was good, where that has been transferred to the accessory clause, and has become a mere sign of grammatical subordination."—C. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... ever be adequate for the gigantic crimes of kings. Napoleon himself had been the champion of democracy and freedom, until he became an emperor and his head swelled so much with success that he thought of God and himself together, just as the Kaiser was now thinking. It was a curious inversion that the French who were fighting then to dominate Europe were fighting now to prevent such a domination. But it was now a great French republican nation remade and reinvigorated, as any one ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Group. Background of yellow-red, lighter vase in yellow-green, and darker vase of green, with slight addition of black. Vary by inversion of the colors in ground and ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... eminence of the work he does. Moreover, who does not see that the difference between the two loves is like that between what is principal and what is instrumental? One who ascribes to himself personally the eminence of a position appears in the spiritual world, when this inversion is pictured, as himself inverted, feet ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... this, precisely, was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term. Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the astuteness of the girl's policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in Dick's future depended on his ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... here observed parallels that of many other cases in which the left-right direction is reversed. These commoner cases take on an added interest when considered in connection with a case of double space inversion. Such a case is on record.[1] The double inversion consists in writing all verbal symbols and digits up side down and backward. In this case the boy had perfect pseudoscopic vision at the beginning of his school work. Stratton, by a system of lenses, artificially produces the same distortions and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... better illustrates this willingness to listen to suggested improvements than the inversion of the order of studies in the biological course which he inaugurated in 1872, namely, the substitution of the anatomy of a vertebrate for the microscopic examination of a unicellular organism as the opening study. This was entirely Parker's doing. "As one privileged at the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... upper ones very rudimentary. Every stage of evolution is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the replacing of a riper egg by another in an ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... rumour, his circuitous journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... parallel direction; p 206 and fields covered with different kinds of plants found to be displaced in the great earthquake of Riobamba, in the province of Quito, on the 4th of February, 1797, and in that of Calabria, between the 5th of February and the 28th of March, 1782. The phenomenon of the inversion or displacement of fields and pieces of land, by which one is made to occupy the place of another, is connected with a translatory motion or penetration of separate terrestrial strata. When I made the plan ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... but the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when the clouds ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... question. On the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, to the very locus ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... understood the Grand Lunar to ask why had I come to the moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious to pursue the details of this mad inversion ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... occupies. If only part of the anterior lobe is taken away, there occurs a remarkable degeneration of the individual. The degeneration is not a mucinous infiltration of the skin and the internal organs which occurs with thyroid deprivation, but a fatty degeneration, with a tendency to inversion of sex. A singular somnolence, a dry skin, loss of hair, a dull mentality, sometimes epilepsy, and a noticeable craving for and tolerance of sweets appear. These are but a few of the observations obtained in experimental sub-pituitarism, that ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the Saxon aenmereeal, and from the French aumer, appear all fanciful. It is extensively received that the Sicilians first adopted it from emir, the sea, of their Saracen masters; but it presents a kind of unusual etymological inversion. The term is most frequent in old Romance; but the style and title was not used by us until 1286; and in 1294, William de Leybourne was designated "Amiral de la Mer du Roy d'Angleterre;" six years afterwards Viscount Narbonne was constituted Admiral of France; ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... operation should be completed with the hand and arm extended the full length within the womb and moved from point to point so as to straighten out all parts of the organ and insure that no portion still remain inverted within another portion. Should any such partial inversion be left it will give rise to straining, under the force of which it will gradually increase until the whole mass will be protruded as before. The next step is to apply a truss as an effectual mechanical barrier to further escape of the womb through the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... linguistic similarity, to say that there is no United States literature as distinguished from English literature? After all, is it not national life, as much as national language, that makes literature? And by an inversion of Verissimo's standard may we not come face to face with a state of affairs in which different literatures exist within the same tongue? Indeed, is not such a conception as the "great American novel" rendered quite futile ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... thirty degrees from the south pole, is seen in its whole revolution, and, accordingly, when off the Cape, I have observed it in every stage, from its triumphant erect position, between sixty and seventy degrees above the horizon, to that of complete inversion, with the top beneath, and almost touching the water. This position, by the way, always reminded me of the death of St. Peter, who is said to have deemed it too great an honour to be crucified with his head upwards. In short, I defy the stupidest ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the subject of inversion of the uterus, Soranus points out that this condition may be caused by traction on the cord. It is noteworthy that he recognized the method of embryotomy as necessary when ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed to go to ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... surface uppermost, in which form it is called ogee recta—that is, right side up; or it may be inverted, as in Fig. 193, with the concaved surface below, and is then called ogee reversa. Contrast these two views and you will note what a difference the mere inversion of the strip makes in the appearance. Second, because the ogee has in it, in a combined form, the outlines of nearly all the other types. The only advantage there is in using the other types is because you ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... and the crocodile are difficult to understand, the more so as the tale breaks off in the midst of that part. It appears also as if there had been some inversion of the paragraphs; for, first, we read that the wife would not let the prince go alone, and one goes with him toward Egypt, and the crocodile of the Nile (apparently) is mentioned; then he is said to be sitting in his house with his wife; then he goes in the fields of his domain and meets the crocodile. ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to a work of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... neither to verse nor prose, but is a sort of amphibious native of both,—neither gliding gracefully through the former element, nor walking steadily on the other. In order to give pomp to the language, inversion is substituted for metre; and one of the worst faults of poetry, a superfluity of epithet, is adopted, without that harmony which alone makes ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... five shillings a bottle, champagne (nee gooseberry) at five pounds, Cape smoke at two shillings per two fingers,—and, at a given signal, there was an inarticulate roar from dusty throats, an inversion of tumblers over thirsty mouths, and a second inversion over the ground to show that all the contents ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... uncertain origin; perhaps an inversion of bel cece, "beautiful chick (pea)," or from Fr. chiche beau, with same meaning), the term in Italy from the 17th century onwards for a dangler about women. The cicisbeo was the professed gallant of a married woman, who attended ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Personality. The secondary fact is Society,—secondary, but reciprocal, and full of import. And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his pages to many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... vaguely and occasionally that I must, for my special purpose, use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first line with its conventional archaism—'Arise and go'—nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it was Gothic,—'It is not very good,' Morris had said, 'but it is better than any thing else they have got and so they hate it.'—I grew suddenly oppressed by the great weight ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... The reconverter, a reduced inversion of the apparatus used in making liquid air, was made ready. When the muffled explosions and the heat of the tubes told the boys that the reconverter was working perfectly and pumping new and needed gas into the shrunken Cibola's long bag, the lashings ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... and elder states, What strange inversion all his works awaits! From age to age, on every peopled shore, Stalks the fell Demon of despotic power, Sweeps in his march the mounds of art away. Blots with his breath the trembling disk of day, Treads down ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the incident of a genuine poetic inspiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its sufficient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on this inversion will not be wanting. But the difficulty of unlocking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... word is obscure. According to the Vocab. della Crusca, "cicisbeo" is an inversion of "bel cece," beautiful chick (pea). Pasqualino, cited by Diez, says it is derived from the French chiche beau.—N. Eng. Dict., ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... aptly illustrates the difference, which in a military service cannot be too carefully kept in mind, between individual expressions of opinion, which may be biassed, and professional reputation, which, like public sentiment, usually settles at last not far from the truth. Despite this curious inversion of the facts by Lord Hood, there probably was no one among the naval forces, nor among the soldiery, who did not thoroughly, if perchance somewhat vaguely, appreciate that Nelson was the moving spirit of the whole operation, even beyond Hood himself. As the Greek commanders after ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... but by the degree in which it lives up to or falls short of that standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely better to regulate it than to affect to be oblivious ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... luxuriance of the forests, and the crystal clearness of the water. Villages and farms are seen at occasional intervals in the distance, and sloops, with their sails hanging idly against their masts, float upon the placid surface of the lake as upon a mirror. Indeed, so perfect is the inversion, that the eye can scarcely determine how much is real and how much the result of optical illusion. Passing in sight of the town of Linkoping, which lies to the left, we soon reached the entrance of the West Gotha Canal, which here makes ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... having their backs turned away from the axis, the raphe being next to the axis and representing the midrib the funicle corresponding to the petiole. The outer tegument of the ovule, according to Griffith, is a leaf united along its margins, but always more or less open at its apex. No inversion can, therefore, really take place in anatropous ovules, but the blade of the leaf is bent back on the funicle, with which its ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... 'also.' They are but the golden dust that may be filed off from the great ingot and solid block. They are but the outward tokens of His far deeper and true preciousness. They are secondary; He is the primary. What an inversion of our notions of good! Do you degrade all the world's wealth, pleasantness, ease, prosperity, into an 'also?' Are you content to put it in the secondary place, as a result, if it please Him, of Christ? Do you live as if you did? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certain popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... as it can be shown by weeping, howling, beating the breasts and cheeks, and tearing the hair, which was laid, as a last tribute of affection, on the breast of the deceased, to be consumed with him. To shave the head was also a sign of mourning. It is a curious inversion of the ordinary customs of life, that the sons of the deceased mourned with the head covered, the daughters with ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of the second stanza. A further step towards the provision of closer unity between the separate stanzas was the chanso redonda, which was composed of coblas estrampas, the rime order of the second stanza being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches its highest point in the sestina, which retained the characteristic of the chanso redonda, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should correspond with the first rime of the ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... during the embargo year, 1808, thirty thousand barrels of potash had been brought into Quebec.[245] "While our gunboats and cutters are watching the harbors and sounds of the Atlantic," said a senator from his place, "a strange inversion of business ensues, and by a retrograde motion of all the interior machinery of the country, potash and lumber are launched upon the lakes, and Ontario and Champlain feel the bustle of illicit traffic.... Violators ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... engage. Ambition to serve is always noble. Desire for the honors and emoluments of public office, however, may crowd out the desire to render public service. Such a substitution of selfish for patriotic considerations, such an inversion of the proper order of interests in a man's mind, is the vice of political ambition. The ambitious politician seeks office, not because he seeks to promote measures which he believes to be for the public good; not because ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... dances of the tribe. Accordingly, there seem to be indications showing an original association of some of these usages with the lower world; such may be the significance of the backward movement, or the inversion of garments, occasionally recommended. In order to put one's self in connection with the world of darkness, it is essential to reverse the procedure which is proper for the realm of light. This principle, appearing in mediaeval magic, could also be illustrated from ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... for pardon. It was their first quarrel. She ended by throwing herself on her bed and bursting into a fit of sobbing that not only horrified but astounded little Jim. To see his mother sobbing wildly while he was quiet and grave was a complete inversion of all his former experiences. As if to carry out the spirit of the situation, he proceeded to act the part of comforter by stroking his mother's brown hair with his fat little hand until the burst of ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... be verified by collation with the concrete phenomena, or, if possible, with their empirical laws; and then the only effect of an increase in the complication of the subject will be a tendency to a disturbance, and sometimes even to an inversion (which, indeed, M. Comte thinks inseparable from all Sociological enquiries) in the order of the two processes, obliging us, first, to conjecture the conclusions by specific experience, and then verify them by a priori reasonings showing their connection with the principles ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... we more particularly speak, is more rare. We have seen three cases of the latter, and, no doubt, might have found many more if our opportunities of studying canine pathology were equal to those of the English writers. The inversion of the eyelids upon the globe is accompanied with pain and irritation, swelling and inflammation, both of the lids and eye, which ultimately renders the dog almost ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, and to discover what the business might be in which he was now employed. Without caring whether he ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... is the perception of a globe rolling round in the abdomen, and ascending to the stomach and throat, and there inducing strangulation. It consists of an ineffectual inversion of the motions of the oesophagus, and other parts of the alimentary canal; nothing being ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... is told us be true, namely that the Presbyter Laurentius has been groping for fatal riches among human corpses. An odious inversion of his functions, that he who should preach peace to the living has been robbing the dead, and that hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains, instead of distributing his own honestly acquired substance to the poor. ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... circumstances of families, whose parents, in the first settlement of the country, had to work very hard for their general maintenance, may be the cause of this inversion of moral duties, and the parents not being considered properly on an equality with their better dressed and better educated offspring; but from whatever cause it springs, the effect it produces on the mind of a stranger is very painful. It is difficult to feel much ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... which I have spoken of as transient for the higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... his story simply and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, the colonel chuckled. ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less God."—Zion's Herald, August ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
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