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More "Aberration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... To turn the cold shoulder to Charles II., to reward with ingratitude the magnanimity which he displayed in ascending the throne—was not such conduct abominable? Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie had inflicted this vexation upon honest men. To sulk at his country's happiness, alack, what aberration! ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... And if elsewhere with undue enthusiasm I seem to magnify the principle at stake, the exaggeration—like the extreme amplification of the moon's disc when near the horizon—must be charged to that almost necessary aberration of light which distorts every new idea while it is yet ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... reflection: The intelligence, then, is threatened by dangers, like the spirit. It may be obscured, it may contain a contradiction, an "error," without perceiving it, and as a result of a single unnoticed error it may rush into a species of delirium, a mortal aberration. Like the spirit, then, it has its way of salvation, and it needs to be sustained lest it should perish. The support it requires is not that of the senses. Like the spirit, it needs a continual purification, which, like the fish of Tobias, heals the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... The aberration of mind of the unhappy Mr. Armstrong was at last with inevitable and steady step approaching its dreaded culminating point. To the outward eye he exhibited but little change. He was indeed, at times more restless, and his eyes would wander round as if in ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... may also see from it that gravity does not travel like light, so as to take time on its journey from sun to planet; for, if it did, there would be a sort of aberration, and the force on its arrival could no longer be accurately directed to the centre of the sun. (See Nature, vol. xlvi., p. 497.) It is a matter for accuracy of observation, therefore, to decide whether the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the British Prime Minister had described as "an infamous proposal." One has only to read our Ambassador's description of his interview with the German Chancellor after our decision was announced, "so evidently overcome by the news of our action," to see that through some extraordinary mental aberration the German rulers did actually believe that a vital treaty with Britain's signature upon it could be regarded by this country as a ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... though equally true of all, not exactly true of any one, must, actually, when extended to cases where the error would be appreciable (e.g. to lines of perceptible breadth), be corrected by the joining to them of new propositions about the aberration. The exact correspondence, then, between the facts and those first principles of geometry which are involved in the so-called definitions, is a fiction, and is merely supposed. Geometry has, indeed (what ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... eating forbidden food is thus described by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1816: "The chief part of the theory and practice of Hinduism, I am sorry to say," writes the Raja, "is made to consist in the adoption of a peculiar mode of diet; the least aberration from which (even though the conduct of the offender may in other respects be pure and blameless) is not only visited with the severest censure, but actually punished by exclusion from the society of his family and friends. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... trustworthy history of the Colony, gives no answer to this question; but among the oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut character. The legend ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... hunch he knows it already," he said slowly. "The ship is probably on a nonsense track and the automatic tracker is either trying to find out what the law of gravity is, or is exploring for clues to light aberration. One gets you ten he'll give me ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and animation—shaken, but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed them—suddenly rallied, and resuming somewhat of their accustomed balance, became awakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognise as resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive land-owner, previously related) now appeared before him in all ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... is a mental condition in some respects more similar to the first than to the second stage. The second stage of human psychologic evolution is an aberration, a divorce, a parenthesis. With its culmination and dismissal the mind passes back into the simple state of union with the Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy: one-pointedness, singleness ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the New Vetzlar Eye-pieces, as exhibited at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Lenses of these Eye-pieces are so constructed that the rays of light fall nearly perpendicular to the surface of the various lenses, by which the aberration is completely removed; and a telescope so fitted gives one-third more magnifying power and light than could be obtained by the old Eye-pieces. Prices of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing tone of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... were by no means devoid of articulation and sense. Take, for instance, this—I do not remember just now a propos of which composition, but it is very appropriate to those we are now discussing:—"The whole striving of the composer must be regarded as an aberration, based on decided talent, we admit, but nevertheless an aberration." You see the most hostile of Chopin's critics does not deny his talent; indeed, Rellstab sometimes, especially subsequently, speaks quite patronisingly about him. I shall take ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we may ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... it were possible for the theist to show that in certain cases the normal consequences of known forces did not transpire, and that the aberration could not be accounted for by the operation of any other conceivable force, it might be argued with some degree of plausibility that there exists a controlling power beyond which answers to God. That might afford a plausible case for "directivity." But to insist upon the prevalence of "natural ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... nothing but the glory and delight of her husband and her children. This is not right. Like man, woman is born and lives in society, and she can not and must not remain indifferent to social distress and suffering. To think otherwise would be selfishness and aberration and would leave society a prey to much suffering which only the blessed hand of woman can cure or relieve. Let woman be the glory and happiness of the home; but do not forget that she must extend her beneficent action beyond the confines of the household, that ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... Philip. He then remained silent and absorbed in thought, for now that the imminent danger was over, he was reflecting upon what Father Seysen had communicated to him, relative to Amine's having revealed the secret whilst in a state of mental aberration. The priest, perceiving that his mind was occupied, did not interrupt him. An hour had thus passed, when Father Seysen entered ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... all as an unfortunate aberration; and if you regret it, and change your mind, you will be free at any time you like to come back and nothing shall be ever said about it. But I'm not begging you to do so. I may be wrong; perhaps she's ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... surge up other faces than that cold pallid little face which had hovered before him all the afternoon like a tantalizing phantom; at the Chartreuse stage he began to wonder what hallucination, what aberration of sense had overcome him, that he should have been stirred to his depths and distressed so hugely. Warmer faces were these that swam before him, faces fuller of the joy of life. The devil take ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the head-spring of the Sorgues. When the critical moment arrived, the clouds were hanging over Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty themselves. The prick was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in following the aberration of the Rhone to think of playing tricks elsewhere. Accordingly, I started for the station in a spirit which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... remonstrating, but it was without effect. It was on a Sunday morning that Nemesis attended to Jim's case. Circumstances were propitious. An excursion train, crowded with passengers, pulled up at the station. Jim had a new suit of black broadcloth, due to a temporary aberration of our local Solomon who ran the clothing store. Because of this victory, Jim was in an extraordinarily expansive mood as ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the discovery that one of the maids at Elmhurst resembled the missing girl, and the detective's conclusion that Eliza Parsons was none other than Lucy Rogers, who was suffering from a peculiar mental aberration and had forgotten every ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... over and behind and beside the big broad goal stick of Bell Blackwood, the goal wonder of the League; and the single register for the Eagles had been netted by Fatty Findlay's own stick in a moment of aberration. During the week following the Black Eagle debacle the various Bank managers, Law Office managers and other financial magnates of the town were lenient with their clerks. Social functions were abandoned. The young gentlemen had one continuous permanent and unbreakable ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... companies, places and date of capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead Line, and giving the young brats ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled—in such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself. According to infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement at another's ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... pipe to make it perfectly delightful!" Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... members of our profession who have given the subject close and earnest attention. To the first query, the reply must be made that in one-half, or nearly one-half, of the cases of this variety of insanity there is traceable a hereditary tendency to aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Anna with a bitter smile, "yes, the virtuous Empress Anna blushed in the arms of her lover, Biron, at this aberration of her sold and coupled niece. She found it very revolting that the poor sixteen-year-old Anna Leopoldowna dared to have a heart of her own and to feel a real love. They must therefore rob her of the only happiness Heaven had vouchsafed her. Consequently, they wrote to Warsaw, asking, nay, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... "Now, don't take advantage of a moment's aberration, Alice; and for Heaven's sake don't fall in love wiv me" (he made a v of a th, like Jigger). "I couldn't go to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Nicolai quotes a number of almost incredible examples from the Germany of 1914 and 1915, and equally striking instances could be given in the case of every belligerent nation. There was no resistance to these suggestions. In the collective aberration, all differences of class, education, intellectual or moral value, are reduced to one level; all are equalised. The entire human race, from base to summit, is delivered over to the Furies. If the least sparkle of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... insisted that tics are not morbid entities but episodic syndromes of mental degeneration. Charcot referred to tic as a sort of hereditary aberration, which, I may add, is surely true when we view it from the phylogenetic standpoint, as representing a resurrection of what was at one time a normal tendency or reaction. Noir has called attention to the fact that the movements found in the tics ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the religion an' the goddess of the mules. This knowledge is common; if you-all is ever out to create a upheaval in the bosom of a mule the handiest, quickest lever is a old gray mare. The gov'ment takes advantage of this aberration of the mules. Thar's trains of pack mules freightin' to the gov'ment posts in the Rockies. They figgers on three hundred pounds to the mule an' the freight is packed in panniers. The gov'ment freighters not bein' equal to the manifold mysteries of a diamond-hitch, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... B"; he waved his hand toward the two objects. "I wanted you to see these in order to convince you that I have neither been dreaming, nor am I the victim of an aberration." ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... description of half-witted. In their case the same sort of dry Scotch humour came out under the cloak of mental disease. The first is of a Scottish nobleman of the last century who had been a soldier the greater part of his life, but was obliged to come home on account of aberration of mind, superinduced by hereditary propensity. Desirous of putting him under due restraint, and at the same time of engaging his mind in his favourite pursuit, his friends secured a Sergeant Briggs to be his ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... representative, and then upon her people. There was no extravagance of the ancient parliamentary debate, which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make, with so much of passion, I am glad to add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration. But the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure—with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution, or in stating the law, whether in the details of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the religious experience. Faith had been regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... has its martyrs, like religion. It is not only the savage heathen who run under Juggernaut every day. Diseased brains, corrupt hearts, and impossible desires go far to constitute aberration of intellect. Unreasoning love, and unlimited liquor, will make a man fool enough ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... this aberration of a people, decked with the showy title of "patriotism," proudly walks abroad, passing itself off as a highly moral influence. Thus it has spread its inflammatory contagion all over the world, proclaiming its ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual. Degeneracy in morals roots in a one-sided and wavering philosophy, doubly dangerous, because it blinds the beclouded intellect with an appearance ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... whatever insanity he may be occasionally afflicted with results more from an excessive indulgence in liquor than from any other cause. Be that, however, as it may, there is no question but that he is occasionally seized with fits of mental aberration. From what you tell me, and his exaggerated suspicions of a plot between you and Sir Thomas Gourlay, I think it most probable that he is your ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... eloquent if extravagant praise; he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence is to be believed—and how can it not—he was either a very bad rogue or a madman. Sheridan, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... sense. An aberration in which everything is pardonable. Whatever you do, you will ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... For my own part, I had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabaeus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip-cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the meantime I endeavored, but all in vain, to sound him ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... marked his later years. It might be interesting, but scarcely worth while, to attempt to penetrate to the just thought which misled M. Comte, for there is almost always a grain of truth in the errors of an original and powerful mind. There is another grave aberration in M. Comte's view of the method of positive science, which though not more unphilosophical than the last mentioned, is of greater practical importance. He rejects totally, as an invalid process, psychological observation properly so called, or in ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... it is the same tune as the one known by the names of Yellow Stockings and the Virgin Queen, the latter title seeming to connect it with Queen Elizabeth, as the name of Mad Moll does with the history of Mary, who was subject to mental aberration. The words of Mad Moll are not known to exist, but probably consisted of some fulsome panegyric on the virgin queen, at the expense of her unpopular sister. From the mention of Hence, Melancholy, and Mad Moll, it is presumed that they were both popular favourites when Arthur ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... horrors which simply outrage it by excess. Let us not, therefore, hear of the judgment displayed upon the Grecian stage, when even Sophocles, the chief master of dramatic economy and scenical propriety, could thus err by an aberration so far transcending the most memorable violation of stage decorum which has ever been charged ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... is clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself, and even for other people, though they might not agree with me perhaps.' In this last matter the autographs are rigidly respected, the rare intentional aberration being scrupulously noted. And so I have respected his indentation of the verse; but in the sonnets, while my indentation corresponds, as a rule, with some autograph, I have felt free to consider conveniences, following, however, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... watched the woman in undisguised amazement, as she arose and paced the room, wringing her hands in the most woe-begone manner imaginable. Her wild appearance immediately suggested the idea that she might be suffering from temporary aberration of mind. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... gnawing of some secret sin, Some aberration fraught with morbid gloom, A buried hope which ever burst its tomb, Despondency, disaster, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... of supernatural agency in this play, and the final aberration from the truth of history, have been considerably censured by the German critics: Schlegel, we recollect, calls Joanna's end a 'rosy death.' In this dramaturgic discussion, the mere reader need take no great interest. To require our belief in apparitions and miracles, things which we ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... doctor *Dominus lord dominion, danger *Domus house domicile, majordomo *Dormio sleep dormant, dormouse Duco lead traduce, deduction *Duo two dubious, duet Durus hard durable, obdurate Eo, itum go exit, initial Error, erratum wander erroneous, aberration Facio, feci, factum make, do manufacture, affect, sufficient, verify Fero, latum carry transfer, relate Fido trust, believe confide, perfidious Finis end confine, infinity Flecto, flexum bend reflection, inflexible Fluo, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... philosophical expositions of his theory lack the clearness which generally—not always—results from a course of strict preparatory training, and we have more than sufficient foundation for the reports of his mental aberration. On personal acquaintance he proves to be a remarkably earnest, thoroughly convinced, and winning man, although he does not deliberately do or say anything to attract one. His very ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... present opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or interest. But we may rely with confidence on the judgment of successive generations on departed eminence; for it is detached from the chief cause of present aberration. So various are the prejudices, so contradictory the partialities and predilections of men, in different countries and ages of the world, that they never can concur through a course of centuries in one opinion, if it is not founded in truth and justice. The vox populi ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... reduce by one-half the length of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this legacy, appears to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... and wayward depression increased every day, although his intellect was not wholly obscured; but at the times that it was clearest, he seemed to suffer more than during its hours of partial aberration. He gave way less than at first to fits of violent irritation; the terrible expressions he used to utter, and the murmurs and curses which rose to his lips with such frightful bitterness, were at an end. He even ceased to ask that fatal ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... brought our family few smiles but many tears, and the death-angel passed close to our doors. My eldest brother, while at work in the hayfield, was smitten by the sun, causing a mental aberration which made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and finally led him to cut the thread of life with his own hand; my second brother was pulled by his coat entangled in a wheel, beneath a heavy load which crushed his thigh. This left the rest of us to struggle as best we could with multitudinous ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... cannot afford to be ignorant of the 'chemistry of a candle' or the 'history of a piece of chalk,' nor the chemist of the laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made complaint of Comte's 'great aberration' in ignoring ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the doings had as yet penetrated to Caranay daisy fields; no untoward consequences had as yet ensued except that old Si Dinglebat's wife, after reading the remains of a New York paper found on the railroad track, had suddenly, and apparently in a fit of mental aberration, attacked Si with a mop, accompanying the onslaught with the reiterated inquiry: "Air ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... amused interest the startled glance General Mosby gave the Chief of Police. Mosby's greatest strength and greatest weakness, both in the field and garrison, was his complete refusal to accept or excuse aberration. ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... was a hard-working general practitioner in Birmingham, where his name is still remembered and respected. About ten years ago he began to show signs of mental aberration, which we were inclined to put down to overwork and the effects of a sunstroke. Feeling my own incompetence to pronounce upon a case of such importance, I at once sought the highest advice in Birmingham and London. Among others we consulted the eminent alienist, Mr. Fraser Brown, who pronounced ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beforehand on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening, he began to scrutinize Cosette's face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in which the expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to aberration. The little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... which the General Synod conceive to be taught in Scripture, and which they would recommend to the Church at large, is this, that we should view with charity, and treat with forbearance, those who have fallen into an aberration of non-fundamental importance either from the faith or the practise of the Bible and the Augsburg Confession; and on the other hand, that we are bound 'not to eat with a fornicator, or a covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... nine four- or five-bladed leaves. Proportions nearly similar have been observed repeatedly. Better nourished individuals have produced more deviating leaves on one plant, partly owing to the larger number of stems and branches, and poor or average specimens have mostly been without any aberration or with only one or two abnormal leaves. No further improvement could be attained. Quadrifoliolate leaves were always rare, never [360] attaining a number that would put its stamp on a whole bed. I have endeavored to get some six- and seven-bladed crimson clover leaves, but in vain; selection, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... in his announcement that he proposed to deal with the matter from the standpoint of psychic aberration. He mentioned dissociated personalities, group hypnosis, and so on. But he declared that he was open to conviction, and anxious to get any ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,—a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this an idea seized the doctor; ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... latter did it in so inefficient a manner that Michelangelo was obliged to dispense with his assistance, and construct the whole machinery himself. He had sent for some of his fellow-students from Florence, not, as Vasari, by some strange aberration, states, because he was ignorant of fresco-painting, since all the artists of the time understood it, and the pupil of Ghirlandajo had himself practised it, but because his fellow-students had had more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... sitting-room, and would go there often for half an hour when she was back from her hospital. That little black-walled room with its Japanese prints and its flowers, soothed him. And Leila soothed him, innocent as he was of any knowledge of her latest aberration, and perhaps conscious that she herself was not too happy. To watch her arranging flowers, singing her little French songs, or to find her beside him, listening to his confidences, was the only real pleasure he knew in these days. And Leila, in turn, would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to commence operations, some one announced, that, if eggs are inverted during the process of incubation, the chickens from them will be crazy. Appalled at the thought of a brood of chickens laboring under an aberration of mind, yet fired with the love of scientific investigation, I inverted one by way of experiment, and placed it in another nest. The next morning, when I entered the barn, Biddy stretched out her neck, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... physician of eminence has told us of the melancholy termination of the life of a gentleman who in a state of mental aberration cut his throat; the loss of blood restored his mind to a healthy condition; but ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... velocity of light, founded upon his study of "the aberration of light," is even less ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... charge of his against Lennox was a trifling aberration that's now over. I hope you are right, ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their drink in such extravagant quantities. Camels, who, I am informed, are a very well-behaved and moral race leading rigorous and chaste lives in a desert, do drink deeply, but their excess is more apparent than real, for Providence in an aberration endowed these folk with more stomachs than the average person possesses, and the necessity for filling these additional cisterns accounts for and justifies their liberal use of moisture. Worms, on the other hand, are a folk for whom I have very ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... been able to endure the suffering of such scenes. Alas! monsieur, those distressing scenes are becoming worse. All the natural functions are perverted; the Faculty alone can explain the strange aberration of the organs. She was in this state when I brought her from the provinces to Paris in 1829, because the two or three distinguished doctors to whom I wrote, Desplein, Bianchon, and Haudry, thought from my letters that I was telling them fables. Magnetism was then energetically denied ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... into her hands a letter in the form of a petition. In this paper he told the Queen that he was happy to see her "in possession of the finest diamonds known in Europe," and entreated her not to forget him. The Queen read Boehmer's address to her aloud, and saw nothing in it but a proof of mental aberration; she lighted the paper at a wax taper standing near her, as she had some letters to seal, saying, "It is not worth keeping." She afterwards much regretted the loss of this enigmatical memorial. After having burnt the paper, her Majesty said ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Merrifield, Standfuss, and Fischer, on seasonal dimorphism and the aberration of colour in butterflies have so often been discussed in biological literature that a short reference to them will suffice. By seasonal dimorphism is meant the fact that species may appear at different seasons of the year in a somewhat different form or colour. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... you must be very careful not to confound monomania with eccentricity. The distinction is as important as it is real. Eccentricity is a conscious aberration from the common course of life; it consists in peculiarities in reasoning, words, and actions, which are wilfully indulged, in defiance of popular sentiment. The eccentric man knows that he is eccentric; he is willing to be so, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring. So far was Edward Waverley from expecting general sympathy with ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... identified themselves heart and soul with Ireland. Of course, they are far above being turned for a moment from their course by any such comments, but it must be a pain to them nevertheless. It almost seems aberration of mind in Mr. Parnell to be deaf to Mr. Gladstone's words of true patriotism, echoed as they are throughout England and Scotland, and I cannot but believe in thousands of Irish hearts besides. Surely this must have gone far to convince his friends ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... men, and is sometimes well marked in women, usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient. "The mirror," remarks Bloch (Beitraege 1, p. 201), "plays an important part in the genesis of sexual aberration.... It cannot be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual excitement at the sight of their own ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... forlasi. Abase humiligi. [Error in book: humilgi] Abash hontigi. Abate (lower) mallevi. Abate (speed) malakceli. Abbey abatejo. Abbot abato. Abbreviate mallongigi. Abdicate demeti la regxecon. Abdomen ventro. Abduct forrabi. Abduction forrabo. Abed lite. Aberration spiritvagado. Abet kunhelpi. Abhor malamegi. Abhorrence malamego. Abide logxi (resti). Ability lerteco. Ability talento. Abject humilega. Abjure malkonfesi, forjxuri. Ablative ablativo. Able, to be povi. Able (skilful) lerta. Abnegation memforgeso. Aboard en ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the frightful light that had flashed across his brain in a recent circumstance was growing gradually fainter; it had ceased to fill his mind with the same convincing force. He conceived doubts; he accused himself at times on a veritable aberration; he charged the baroness with cruel and guilty prejudices; he thought, in a word, that, at all events, the wisest course was to avoid believing in the drama, and giving it life by taking a serious part in it. Unfortunately Julia's disposition, full of surprises and unforeseen ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... so far as to pick quarrels with members of the rival class, in hopes of a fight. But in this they were not successful. The Sixth chose to look upon this display of feeling among their juniors as a temporary aberration of mind, and were by no means to be tempted into hostilities. They asserted their authority wherever they could enforce it, and sacrificed it whenever it seemed more discreet to do so. Only one thing evoked a temporary display of vexation ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... but all the details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. For genius is exposed to heavier ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... he answered his partner. "That temporary aberration of judgment, due to oxygen-stimulus, will have no results. Herzog won't dare fill out the check, anyhow, because he knows he'd get into trouble if he did; and even though he should, he can collect nothing. I'll have payment stopped, at once, on that ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... millions of civilized men and women in all nations and all degrees of culture. It signifies not whether the conversion be sudden or gradual, though, as a psychological phenomenon, it is more remarkable when sudden and there is no symptom of mental aberration otherwise. But even as a gradual growth in mature age, its evidential value is not ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... for A—— W——; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about this time, the "Alice W——" of the later "Dream Children," and other of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... prophetic inspiration grew clearer. The poets of the sixth century were haunted more insistently than the Homeridai by the possibilities of disaster inherent in success of every kind—in personal prosperity, in military victory, and in the social triumph of civilization. They traced the mischief to an aberration of the human spirit under the shock of sudden, unexpected attainment, and they realized that both the accumulated achievement of generations and the greater promise of the future might be lost irretrievably by failure at this critical moment. 'Surfeit (κορος {koros}) breeds ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... something happened to him, and time meant nothing. Night and day were the same. He did not eat. When he lay back upon his bed he became irrational, yet seemed to be conscious of it. When he sat up his senses slowly righted. But he preferred the spells of aberration. Sometimes he was possessed by hideous nightmares, out of which he awoke with the terror of a child. Then he would have to sit up in the dark, in a cold sweat, and wait, and wait, until he dared ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... every phase of human life and in the development of human character, and has been able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, What has America done for mankind? let ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... because, like David in Browning's poem Saul, they dread lest they should worst the Giver by inventing better gifts than his? That we do not know, is the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has made possible to us. If then we go wrong, it will be in the direction of the right, and with such aberration as will be easier to correct than what must come of refusing to imagine, and leaving the dullest traditional prepossessions to rule our hearts and minds, with no claim but the poverty of their expectation from the paternal riches. Those that hope little cannot ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... him still were the grim flowing robes of the Black Terror. As though he were some old-fashioned tragedian, he was pacing up and down, hands behind his back, head bowed, eyes on the floor. More, he was mumbling to himself. It was evident, however, that it was neither a pose nor mental aberration. Shirley was searching for something, out in the open, without attempt at concealment, swearing softly ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... began to enjoy, to a certain extent, liberty of speech. They could now discuss an address to the sovereign, and give full publicity to their debates. Inquiry could now be made to some purpose, whether the Italian policy of Napoleon III. was sanctioned by France, whether that aberration were national which impelled to the violation of all right and law, in order to unify Italy, and pave the way, at the same time, for the unification of Germany. The revolutionary left of the French ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... of Thomas Jeffcourt; but it being pointed out by the undertaker that it might involve some uncertainty in the settlement of his bill, together with some reasonable doubt of the thorough resignation of Corbin, whose previous momentary aberration in that respect they were celebrating, the project was postponed until AFTER THE FUNERAL. And here ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... old man apostrophizing her in the presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar incident in a ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... suffering and agony, that she recovered, if that could be called recovery, which gave back a deformed and hapless lunatic, bereft of intellect and of beauty, in place of the once gay and fascinating Rosalie. The dread aberration of intellect was attributed by her medical attendants to the fatal and sudden shock which she had sustained, and to its effect on a mind weakened by previous anxiety and sorrow; while they feared her malady was of a nature, which admitted no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... saw three of my fixed points, however, by which, with my pocket sextant, I could ascertain our true position, which proved to be very wide of my intended course. It was, like many other accidental frustrations of my plans in this journey, an aberration that did us good, for we had thereby avoided the bad scrub formerly passed through, and also a rocky part of the range. We next descended into a valley in which, after following down a dry watercourse two miles, we found a fine pond of water, exactly as ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... lieutenant, had gained the quarter-deck before either spoke again. The direction first taken by the eyes of the latter was in quest of the neighbouring ship; nor was the look entirely without that unsettled and vague expression which seems to announce a momentary aberration of the faculties. But the vessel of the Rover was in view, in all the palpable and beautiful proportions of her admirable construction Instead of lying in a state of rest, as when he left her, her head-yards had been swung, and, as the sails filled with the breeze, the stately ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... demonstrate fully the value of system. The danger of centralization is bureaucracy; but in institute work, if the management fails to provide for local needs, and to furnish acceptable speakers, vigorous protests soon correct the aberration. ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... silent, apprehensive that his wits were at present too bewildered for her purpose, being always subject to aberration under any peculiar excitement of either ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... offers to the poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that very time Governor of Paris. The Emperor, informed of this scandal, sent for him, and demanded of him (he was still very angry), if he had sworn to live and die mad. This might have been, from the sequel, taken as a prediction; for the unfortunate general died at last in a fit of mental aberration. He replied in such improper terms to the reprimands of the Emperor that he was sent, perhaps in order that he might have time to calm himself, to the army of England. It was not only in gaming-houses, however, that the governor thus compromised ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and depression, of which she would have died had you not come, she reacted first into mental lethargy, and now into almost complete mental inactivity. I cannot discover that any disturbed physical functions have been an element in her mental aberration, for more perfect physical life and loveliness I have never seen. Her white hair, which might have made her look old, is a foil to a beauty ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... to some trifling extent, but the taste for study had never taken him. The silly mode of culture which he had undergone availed nothing against the instincts of his race. His grandfather was a sort of living aberration—a queer variety such as Nature will sometimes interpolate amid the most steady of strains; but young Ellington's moods, and tendencies, and capabilities reverted to the old line. Yet, despite his restless energy, despite ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... because they are ancient, especially doctrines in religion, because truth is before error, and falsehood is but an aberration from truth and therefore there is so much plea and contention among men, about antiquity, as if it were the sufficient rule of verity. But the abuse is, that men go not far enough backward in the steps of antiquity, that is, to the most ancient rule, and profession, and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... a number of most interesting cases and an elaborate argument by the writer to show that Betty Blackwell was a victim of this psychological aberration, that she was, in ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... fit was now quite over, but pale cheeks and a trembling exhausted frame told eloquently of her recent sufferings. Mr Hazlit's limbs were also shaky, and his face cadaverous, showing that his temporary aberration of reason ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... mental aberration which is called religion, and a survey of the present state of the world, from the fetish worshipper of central Africa to the super-subtle Theist of educated Europe, furnish us with countless illustrations of the truth ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... in all, Paul, the newcomer making the tenth. They were all advanced in years, except one young woman, who was prevented by mental aberration from supporting herself outside the walls ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... destiny as a god," part of which was to be killed and to rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad—for instance, Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we can have no difficulty in simply eliminating as a morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the sincere milk of the word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to place his philosophy under divine patronage is not so serious as Mr. Wells's; for ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... would be nothing to conjecture and nothing to select. To put it briefly, I will end by using the language of psychiatry: if one denies that creative work involves problems and purposes, one must admit that an artist creates without premeditation or intention, in a state of aberration; therefore, if an author boasted to me of having written a novel without a preconceived design, under a sudden inspiration, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Majesty in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the dead and restored to life. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... do so as yet; for I felt myself, as I lay, under the influence of a pleasure quite new to me; and listened, in a kind of peaceful aberration, to the gentle murmurs of the summer wind, as it breathed on me through the closed window-blinds above me. Then I fancied I heard a voice that spoke to me from the end of the sacristy: it whispered so low that I could not ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lucid remark, our conversation on this particular subject ended; but I wondered, during a few uneasy moments, whether the temporary mental aberration which had once afflicted Helen's grandfather and mine was not reappearing in this, his youngest descendant. My wondering was cut short by Budge, who ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... famous dictum; "and I should not like to be able to understand the state of mind a lady was in when she bought herself a blue woollen shawl; but I could believe she was suffering at the time from a temporary aberration of intellect—only, if she wore it afterwards the thing would be quite inexplicable." Claudia drew the wrap round her with dignity, and made no reply; then Ideala laughed and turned to me. "Certainly your friend," ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... presented to Holm. Ibsen brooded and brooded over the incident, and at last came to the conclusion that the young man had intended to return her letters and photograph to a young lady to whom he was known to be attached, and had in a fit of aberration mixed up the two objects of his worship. Some time after, Holm appeared at Ibsen's rooms. He talked quite rationally, but professed to have no knowledge whatever of the letter-incident, though he admitted the truth of Ibsen's conjecture that ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... poem. Remarking upon the fact that Browning removed the original title, "Madhouse Cells," which headed this poem, and "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," Mrs. Orr says: "Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... me, but on comparing his notes with those of his companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had made some most preposterous statements. Of course I shall explain it away as being the result of a moment of aberration, but I feel only too sure that it will be the first of a series. It is but a month now to the end of the session, and I pray that I may be able to hold out ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the investigations of the law would reach him now; everything conspired to confirm him in his scrutiny. That which he arranged so laboriously had succeeded according to his wish, and the only imprudence that he had committed, in a moment of aberration, seemed not to have been observed; no one had noticed his presence in the cafe opposite Caffie's house, and no one was astonished at his pertinacity in remaining there at ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... brain of the person operated on, and such variations of the blood supply of the brain as are adequate to produce sleep in the natural state, or artificial slumber, either by total deprivation or by excessive increase or local aberration in the quantity or quality of blood. In a like manner it is possible to produce coma and prolonged insensibility by pressure of the thumbs on the carotid; or hallucination, dreams and visions by drugs, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... friends, who saw the effect but never dreamed the cause. Even those who knew I was an opium-eater, not being aware of the effect which the habitual use of it produced, attributed my mad conduct to either want of principle or aberration of intellect, and I thus lost several of my best friends and temporarily alienated many others. After a month or two passed in this employment I regained a portion of strength sufficient to enable me to obtain a livelihood by reporting, on my own account, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... he question his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The struggle, the self-denial, the pain, and the victory, are of the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary "practical" man, with his contempt for "theories," and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; let us, however, see what is implied in this particular speculative theory. From the primary assumption of this philosophy ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... with reluctance, that crying voice still echoing in his ears. With difficulty he found his rifle and the homeward trail. The concentration necessary to follow the badly blazed trees, and a biting hunger that gnawed, helped to keep his mind steady. Otherwise, he admits, the temporary aberration he had suffered might have been prolonged to the point of positive disaster. Gradually the ballast shifted back again, and he regained something that ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... instruments are much more liable than smaller ones to what is termed 'chromatic' and 'spherical' aberration; and this also is detrimental to definition. No very large refractor is entirely free ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... simple enough to go and get them from Billy Jones. Meantime I had no desire to speak to Macartney of them or the scrawled, torn-off flap from Thompson's envelope: he was sick enough already about old Thompson's aberration, without any more proofs of it. It hurt even me to remember I had always laughed at the poor devil and his forlorn cards. I had no heart to burn the scrap of his envelope either, while old Thompson lay unburied. I put it away in my letter ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... be so base!" she cried. "For more than forty-eight hours I have closed my eyes to reason; deluded myself that you acted from temporary mental aberration—that Sinclair Spencer's death was unpremeditated. My impulse was to help—to save. Ah, you wooed me well this winter." Her voice broke and she drew a long quivering breath. "It is a pitiful thing to kill a woman's love. Some day, perhaps, I shall ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... Major James Galloway, of Xenia, states, that on one occasion, while Tecumseh was quite young, he saw him intoxicated. This is the only aberration of the kind, which we have heard charged ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... I may be forgiven my temporary fit of aberration. I cannot thank you sufficiently, Duchess, ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to the whole ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... been on the point of going into hysterics, recovered herself, and overcame the still lingering impulse: she felt as if she had awaked from a momentary aberration of the intellect. Mr. Arnold proceeded to light the candles, saying, in ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... libraries, and had travelled all the world over, frequenting cafes and salons, monasteries and prayer-cells, prisons and hospitals and asylums—wherever one might get new glimpses of the extraordinarily intricate phenomena of the aberration called "Genius". He had several thousand cases of it at his finger-tips—he had measured its reaction-times and calculated its cephalic index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, auto-suggestion and telepathic hallucination, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... hold down her head, while parting her long, clustering hair over her shoulders. Notwithstanding the spectacle of horror presented in this living skeleton, there is something in her look and action which bespeaks more the abuse of long confinement than the result of natural aberration of mind. "She gets fierce now and then, and yells," says the unmoved Glentworthy, "but ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Statesman, and, at certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in so ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... produce them. The history of nearly all religions is filled with such horrible abominations, massacres, and boundless wickednesses of every kind that at the mere recollection of them the heart of a philanthropist seems to stand still, and we turn with disgust and horror from a mental aberration which could produce such deeds. If it is urged in vindication of religion that it has advanced and elevated human civilization, even this merit appears very doubtful in presence of the facts of history, and at least as very rarely ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... education as merely another weapon to use in making society contribute more to purse and pleasure. And on the firing line, formed by these noisy agitators, mistaken by many as educational leaders, these were the things striven for. But this aberration was only temporary. The real educational leaders, in trying to realize the goal of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and to do it having to combat this movement of wildcat educational speculation, gradually ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... century the reflecting telescope had been so much improved as nearly to crowd out its refracting rival, but, just as its success seemed to be assured, Dollond, working along lines partially followed up by Hall, found a combination of lenses by which the chromatic aberration of the refractor could be very perfectly corrected. While Dollond's invention was of immense value, it remained that flint object glasses larger than two and one-half inches in diameter could not, for some years, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... her hands to assist him up the bank, and as soon as he stood on dry land, dripping like a Triton in trousers, she exclaimed in such a tone as he had never before heard, 'Oh! my dear lord!' Then, as if conscious of her momentary aberration, she blushed with a deeper blush than that of the artificial rose which he had once thought might improve her complexion. She attempted to withdraw her hands, but he squeezed them both ardently, and exclaimed in his turn, like a ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... from a height would fall back of a point immediately below its point of starting. This is used by Fromundus with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, second ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reparative functions." He adds, "Chemical experiments have demonstrated that the action of alcohol on the digestive fluid is to destroy its active principle, the pepsin, thus confirming the observations of physiologists, that its use gives rise to serious disorders of the stomach and malignant aberration of the whole economy." ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Rev. Dr. John M. Krebbs, of New York, states through this clairvoyant that the cause of his mental aberration while on earth was a misinterpretation by him of a spiritual vision which he was permitted to receive. Thus misunderstanding the aim of his spiritual visitants, he became haunted with a fallacy which ultimated in ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... carriage, beauty of person, and dignity of rank, which made her the ornament of the French Court. She was almost the only one about the unfortunate Charles VI. who could influence him in his moments of mental aberration. Coming from the luxury of the most splendid court in Italy, she brought into France the most refined taste in matters connected with the arts. The inventory of her jewels at the time of her marriage includes three Books of Hours, three German MSS., and a ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... all this upon Mrs. Hammond has been painful in the extreme. We can only dimly imagine the terrible suffering through which she has passed. Her present aberration was first visible after a long period of sleeplessness, occasioned by distress of mind. During the whole of two weeks, I am told, she did not close her eyes; the most of that time walking the floor of her chamber, and weeping. Powerful anodynes, ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... so as yet; for I felt myself, as I lay, under the influence of a pleasure quite new to me; and listened, in a kind of peaceful aberration, to the gentle murmurs of the summer wind, as it breathed on me through the closed window-blinds above me. Then I fancied I heard a voice that spoke to me from the end of the sacristy: it whispered so low that I could not catch the words. I remained ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about for other ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... But criticism of this aberration cannot hurt the wondrous inspired work directed by Morris, and which it were well for a beauty-loving world to have often repeated. Unhappily, the Merton Abbey works are bound not to repeat the superb series of the Grail. The entire set has been woven twice, and three pieces of it ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the paper-money aberration than Rhode Island. Under pressure from the radical elements the legislature passed an act for the emission of bills of credit which were to be issued to any freeholder who would offer as security real estate of any sort to double the ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the confusion of tongues at Babel, that it was only a labial failure, so that the people could not articulate. It was not an aberration in words or language, but a failure and incapacity in labial utterance. Epiphanius says that Babel, or Babylon, was the first city built ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... generalisations about these natural objects, which being, though equally true of all, not exactly true of any one, must, actually, when extended to cases where the error would be appreciable (e.g. to lines of perceptible breadth), be corrected by the joining to them of new propositions about the aberration. The exact correspondence, then, between the facts and those first principles of geometry which are involved in the so-called definitions, is a fiction, and is merely supposed. Geometry has, indeed (what Dugald Stewart did not ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... minds to the present, to the real, to actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such, consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often not only overlook the contradiction ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the dead and restored ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... against a crime so un-English as that of assassination from revenge, yet when the national prejudices of the prisoner had been explained, which made him consider himself as stained with indelible dishonour, the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard his crime as the aberration of a false idea of honour, rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or habitually vicious. I shall never forget the charge of the venerable judge to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... invisible force, a Satanic impulse, urged him to strangle with his own hands the woman he had loved so dearly, had at one time adored on his knees. The count rushed out of the room with gestures of desperation, muttering incoherent words; and as he shewed plain signs of mental aberration, his father, Charles of Artois, took him away, and they went that same evening to their palace of St. Agatha, and there prepared a defence in case they should ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Marishka sighed gently. Her companion's gaze left her and he peered straight before him, frowning. All this she knew by her woman's sixth sense without even looking at him. Even a thinking machine must have its moments of aberration. In a little while, the choice of roads having been decided, he turned to her again and Marishka's eyes ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... thousand pounds; and, as has been already observed, the money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this legacy, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... followed her pen as she sat in the little library that opened from the big, cheery hall. Her thoughts were with all that had betided in the past and what might have been. She canvassed anew, as often heretofore, her strange infatuation, like a veritable aberration, so soon she had ceased to love her husband, to make the signal and significant discovery that he was naught to love. She had always had a sort of enthusiasm for the truth in the abstract—not so much as a moral endowment, but a supreme fixity, the one immutable ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... began: "Free speech being permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing tone ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... misdeeds in order to strengthen his argument. He had clearly proved that the theft of the two ducks came from the same mental condition as the eight knife-wounds in the body of Maramlot. He had cunningly analyzed all the phases of this transitory condition of mental aberration, which could, doubtless, be cured by a few months' treatment in a reputable sanatorium. He had spoken in enthusiastic terms of the continued devotion of this faithful servant, of the care with which he had surrounded his master, wounded ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... well marked in women, usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient. "The mirror," remarks Bloch (Beitraege 1, p. 201), "plays an important part in the genesis of sexual aberration.... It cannot be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual excitement at the sight of their own bodies in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... an unfriendly purpose. His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him. Some such thoughts were in my mind as I watched the man from the shadow of my hat, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Navy, the all-white Marine Corps seemed to consider the wartime enlistment of over 19,000 Negroes a temporary aberration. Forced by the Navy's nondiscrimination policy to retain Negroes after the war, Marine Corps officials at first decided on a black representation of some 2,200 men, roughly the same proportion as during the war. But the old tradition of racial exclusion remained strong, and this figure ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and again, in the belief that women easily forgive the ill-doing of which they are the cause, to that specious plea, and Marsa asked herself, in amazement, what aberration had possession of this man that he should even pretend to excuse ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... name of their god is a rebuke to the Christian men who with faltering steps and many an aberration are seeking to walk in the name of the Lord their God. If He is in any real and deep sense 'our God,' we shall see in Him the realised ideal of all excellence, the fountain of all our blessedness, the supreme good for our seeking ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... advertised 'Blackwood,' do you see an article called 'Poetic Aberration'? It came into my head that it might be a stone thrown at me, and Robert went to Monaldini's to glance at it. Sure enough it is a stone. He says a violent attack. And let me do him justice. It was only the misstatement in the 'Athenaeum' which overset ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... dry Scotch humour came out under the cloak of mental disease. The first is of a Scottish nobleman of the last century who had been a soldier the greater part of his life, but was obliged to come home on account of aberration of mind, superinduced by hereditary propensity. Desirous of putting him under due restraint, and at the same time of engaging his mind in his favourite pursuit, his friends secured a Sergeant Briggs to be his companion, and, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... misunderstood me, but on comparing his notes with those of his companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had made some most preposterous statements. Of course I shall explain it away as being the result of a moment of aberration, but I feel only too sure that it will be the first of a series. It is but a month now to the end of the session, and I pray that I may be able to hold ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... body of Say. Her hands shook like aspen leaves. "Is he there?" she gasped. "Then he is coming after me. Is he not a Koshare?" Her eyes glistened with that peculiar glare which betokens aberration ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... accidentally true; but next week we shall show, as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, that this great statesman's detractors would probably not derive any benefits from a residence in the same institution, their mental aberration being ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... for the theist to show that in certain cases the normal consequences of known forces did not transpire, and that the aberration could not be accounted for by the operation of any other conceivable force, it might be argued with some degree of plausibility that there exists a controlling power beyond which answers to God. That might afford a plausible case for "directivity." But to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabaeus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip- cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjurer, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the mean time I endeavored, but all in vain, to sound ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... mind, madness, lunacy, craziness, derangement, frenzy, delirium, mania, hallucination, aberration of mind, bedlamism; paranoia, monomania. Antonyms: sanity, rationality, lucidity. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Daily News, and twenty other highly respectable newspapers scouted Mr. Fogg's project as madness; the Daily Telegraph alone hesitatingly supported him. People in general thought him a lunatic, and blamed his Reform Club friends for having accepted a wager which betrayed the mental aberration of its proposer. ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... chapter where Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him? Well, still more important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration? There is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there. It was the old impetus, we are told, that was as yet too strong for the new control; the old instinct, too dark for the new light ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g. sex deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian Mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive functions, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist?" Or, seeing that the Bible is full of the language ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... nattiness: not a crease was where it had no business to be, not a bit of her linen professed whiteness without fulfilling its profession; the very pins on her pincushion were stuck in after a pattern from which she was careful to allow no aberration; and as for her own person, it gave the same idea of perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird. It is true that her light-brown hair was cropped behind like a boy's, and was dressed in front in a number of flat rings, that lay quite away from her ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Scheibner, as for the purpose in hand, an excellent observer, neglecting entirely to note that one was partly blind and that the other could not see well, might readily overlook the fact of a not very pronounced mental aberration on the part of a third person. And as to Professor Weber's opinion of the phenomena, it is well to note that Professor Weber was seventy-four years old at the time, had had no previous experience in investigations of this kind and was quite ignorant ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... proposal." One has only to read our Ambassador's description of his interview with the German Chancellor after our decision was announced, "so evidently overcome by the news of our action," to see that through some extraordinary mental aberration the German rulers did actually believe that a vital treaty with Britain's signature upon it could be regarded by this country as a mere ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... gravitating or attractive influences upon the surrounding Aether, in the same way that they do upon their own atmospheres. So that in their cases also, the surrounding Aether is carried along by them through space. Professor Stokes has suggested that this is so, in order to account for the aberration of light, as we shall ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... more certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private letter—long since addressed to the present commentator by the most ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... remarked one day, with some eloquence, how little the most minute study of the brain aided us to understand thought. He was thus answering Auguste Comte, who, in a moment of aberration, claimed that psychology, in order to become a science, ought to reject the testimony of the consciousness, and to use exclusively as its means of study the histology of the nerve centres and the measurement of the cranium. Our histologist, who had passed part of his life examining, under the microscope, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... as an unfortunate aberration; and if you regret it, and change your mind, you will be free at any time you like to come back and nothing shall be ever said about it. But I'm not begging you to do so. I may be wrong; perhaps she's the woman ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... threat is, of course, a most obvious aspect of the difficulty in defining the future defense posture of the nation. The United States has long resisted maintaining a large standing military and the Cold War years could prove an aberration to that history. Extending this historical observation of small standing forces, it is clear that there is no adversary on the horizon even remotely approaching the military power of the former USSR. While we might ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. For genius is exposed to heavier strains than ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... of action must first have occurred to any other man but this; to him, however, it did not occur. The crying, shrieking need for money was the thing that stunned him and petrified him. Shattered and tossed to the brink of aberration, stretched at frightful mental tension for a fortnight, he finally succumbed, and told himself that ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... critical faculty, his judgment. He no longer perceives the defects of his work—does not know that it is mediocre or bad. That is the horror of it! The artist who has fallen from his original high estate is no more conscious of his failings than the lunatic is aware of his mental aberration. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... knowledge of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... gloss on Ps. 30:1, "In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded," says in explaining the title [*Unto the end, a psalm for David, in an ecstasy]: "Ekstasis in Greek signifies in Latin excessus mentis, an aberration of the mind. This happens in two ways, either through dread of earthly things or through the mind being rapt in heavenly things and forgetful of this lower world." Now dread of earthly things pertains to the appetite. Therefore rapture of the mind in heavenly things, being placed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and necessary limits. And if elsewhere with undue enthusiasm I seem to magnify the principle at stake, the exaggeration—like the extreme amplification of the moon's disc when near the horizon—must be charged to that almost necessary aberration of light which distorts every new idea while it is yet slowly climbing to ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... it would last only so long as the semblance, which had given it aliment, exists; and when man is awakened to the sense of realities and facts calculated to destroy the delusion, he would be seen to withdraw from the meshes of his error, and his reason triumphant would confess the former aberration of the mind; yet it happens not so. In the moment we are struck by some grave calamity, when we see fond hopes, long cherished, vanish in an instant, or when we are on the point of losing what is dearest to us, why is faith in God and in His providence not then weakened in the religious man? Why, ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... funeral, as a propitiatory sacrifice to the manes of Thomas Jeffcourt; but it being pointed out by the undertaker that it might involve some uncertainty in the settlement of his bill, together with some reasonable doubt of the thorough resignation of Corbin, whose previous momentary aberration in that respect they were celebrating, the project was postponed until AFTER THE FUNERAL. And here an ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... glanced over the edge of the stone at Bastin's lantern which was sailing alongside of us, till presently we passed it. Bastin had lit it before we started, I think in a moment of aberration, and it burned for quite a long while, showing like a star when the shaft grew darker as it did by degrees, a circumstance that testifies to the excellence of the make, which is one advertised not to go out in any wind. Not that we felt wind, or even draught, perhaps because we were ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... driving up the road with a friend. He was one of the pleasantest and most honest men that nature ever moulded. His death was most extraordinary: of a nervous temperament, ill health ended in aberration of intellect. At that time Lord Castlereagh had ended his life of over-excitement by suicide; the details in the newspapers were read by him, and he fancied that he was Lord Castlereagh. Acting precisely by the accounts recorded ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring. So far was Edward Waverley from expecting general sympathy with his ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... perpetrated, committed, and done, voluntary, willing, and of himself, destruction, suicide, and drowning, while in a mood of mental aberration, superinduced, brought about, and effected, by long indulgence in and continued habits of inhaling, drinking, and swallowing, to inebriation and drunkenness, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... life." If, in respect of the high estimation of prophecy, our age were to follow in the steps of Jesus, it would also most readily agree with Him as regards the subject of the prophecy before us. This alone is the cause of the aberration from Him, that people confined and shut up the prophet within the horizon of his time, and then imagined that he could not know anything of the suffering of Christ. It was altogether different in the [Pg 249] ancient Christian Church. In it, the Messianic interpretation prevailed ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... Mahometanism. As for the religion of the Druses, I cannot agree with Gibbon that it does not "deserve" to be better known; and am grateful to M. de Sacy, notwithstanding the prolixity and occasional repetition in his two large volumes, for the full examination of the most extraordinary religious aberration which ever extensively affected the mind of man. The worship of a mad tyrant is the basis of a subtle metaphysical creed, and of a severe, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... N. E. N. I saw three of my fixed points, however, by which, with my pocket sextant, I could ascertain our true position, which proved to be very wide of my intended course. It was, like many other accidental frustrations of my plans in this journey, an aberration that did us good, for we had thereby avoided the bad scrub formerly passed through, and also a rocky part of the range. We next descended into a valley in which, after following down a dry watercourse two miles, we found a fine pond of water, exactly ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... said, "that I may be forgiven my temporary fit of aberration. I cannot thank you sufficiently, Duchess, for your ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from malice; and this may easily be observed in certain famous but not supreme works of art. It must also be understood that the impulse to sensuality or lust is not always the direct simple animal instinct to which I have referred. What has come to be called "Sadism" is an instance of this aberration of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... bold hills of the far west as I trod them in my boyhood, free and high of heart, or recurred to the din and crash of the battle-field, with the mad bounding of the war-horse, and the loud clang of the trumpet. Perhaps the acute pain of my swollen and suffering arm gave the character to my mental aberration; for I have more than once observed among the wounded in battle, that even when torn and mangled by grape from a howitzer, their ravings have partaken of a high feature of enthusiasm,—shouts of triumph and exclamations of pleasure, even songs have I heard, but never once the low muttering ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... of whom Mrs. Frothingham spoke so lightly. A man such as Bennet Frothingham must become familiar with many forms of 'craziness', must himself be responsible for a good deal of folly such as leads to downright aberration. Recalling Mrs. Frothingham's innocent curiosity concerning his own life, Harvey wished, in turn, that it were possible for him to watch and comprehend the business of a great finance-gambler through one whole day. What monstrous ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... descend upon Avignon I would repair to the head-spring of the Sorgues. When the critical moment arrived, the clouds were hanging over Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty themselves. The prick was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in following the aberration of the Rhone to think of playing tricks elsewhere. Accordingly, I started for the station in a spirit which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of sentiment, was ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... before doctors had proven that they were in the forefront in the promotion of humanitarian activities. Medicine has always carried on its banners an inscription to the Brotherhood of Man. It is worthy of note that when Pinel and Tuke had begun to regard mental aberration as a disease and to provide scientific hospital treatment therefor, American physicians, prepared by study and experimentation, were ready to accept ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... us in the regular way of development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural. It is frequently a pathological aberration in an organic entity that allows us to see in physical appearance things that do not come outwardly to the fore in the more balanced condition of normal development, although they are equally part of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... lecturing to their disciples on the Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... from or away, errare, to wander), a deviation or wandering, especially used in the figurative sense: as in ethics, a deviation from the truth; in pathology, a mental derangement; in zoology and botany, abnormal development or structure. In optics, the word has two special applications: (1) Aberration of Light, and (2) Aberration in Optical Systems. These subjects receive ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The struggle, the self-denial, the pain, and the victory, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... what men call Divinity, is only the product of their phantasy, of a psychological aberration. It is not Divinity that has created man, but man who creates Divinity in his own image. In God man only adores his own being. God is only a fiction, but a very harmful fiction. The Christian God is supposed to be all love, all pity ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... demands, and such as the thinker easily describes, although as yet he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled—in such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself. According to infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement at another's ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... burden slung over his shoulder. But his imagination did not run riot, like Roy's: and no qualms of conscience perturbed his soul. He had avenged, tenfold, Aruna's injury. He had expiated, in drastic fashion, his own aberration from sanity. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... many like it in France during the first year of war when I was there. But I will say that he must have been both physically and mentally above the average before he went to fight. My examination extended through periods of his unconsciousness and aberration. Once, for a little time, he came to, apparently sane. The nurse said he had noticed several periods of this rationality during the last forty-eight hours. But these, and the prolonged vitality, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... appeared as a mere aberration. His overwhelming eagerness for life, for new faces, scenes, sensations, had whirled him from the true path of his happiness. Thank God, it was not too late! Joy alone was his true mate, his true love, the real need ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... is incredible. Of all men, this was the last who could be suspected of mental aberration. The mental diagnosis decreed him healthy. He was a man to grace society, do credit to religion, and leave a fair ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... Ptah-Seker-Osiris. Thus we learn that he belonged neither to the animal worshippers, the believers in Seker, nor to the Osiride race, but to a fourth people. The compound god Ptah-Seker is shown as a bandy-legged dwarf, with wide flat head, a known aberration of growth. It seems as if we should connect this with the pataikoi who were worshipped by Phoenician sailors as dwarf figures, the name being similar. This points to a connection of the Phoenician race with the dynastic Egyptians. Ptah was worshipped ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... senses, which provide | it with the rudiments of all | knowledge. Of course, Bacon argues, | we cannot get any information about | things except with the senses, and | skeptics are wrong when, questioning | them, they plunge the mind into | despair. "But by far the greatest | hindrance and aberration of the human | understanding proceeds from the | dulness, incompetency, and deceptions | of the senses" (IV, 58). On the one | hand, they are too dull and too | gross, and let the more subtle parts | of nature escape our observation: | their range is limited to the most | conspicuous ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... found in each case to mean a very different thing. The difference between these men, however, will seem almost unanimity, if we compare them with others who, so far as logic and authority go, have just as good a claim on our attention. There is hardly any conceivable aberration of moral licence that has not, in some quarter or other, embodied itself into a rule of life, and claimed to be the proper outcome of Protestant Christianity. Nor is this true only of the wilder and more eccentric ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... must ascribe my culpable silence to 'aberration.' I am out of my orbit, rather, and you must have patience till I come in again. The book is out to-day, and I am going to Captain Washington to see about copies to yourself, the Governor, the Bishop, Fairbairn, Thompson, Rutherfoord, and Saul Solomon[51]. Ten thousand ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... a bitter smile, "yes, the virtuous Empress Anna blushed in the arms of her lover, Biron, at this aberration of her sold and coupled niece. She found it very revolting that the poor sixteen-year-old Anna Leopoldowna dared to have a heart of her own and to feel a real love. They must therefore rob her of the only happiness Heaven had vouchsafed her. Consequently, they ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... treated acute sickness in all its forms, and you have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached, you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or mental abnormality or weakness; rather you have always found at this ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... degree implicated. Before her death the Nun made a confession of elaborate imposture, but too much weight should not be attached to confessions made under such conditions. Given a certain degree of mental aberration, the case is not without parallels pointing to an absence of conscious fraud. But whether in her case it was fraud or mania, the important fact remains that there were numbers of people who attributed her utterances neither to the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... overwhelmed. All the scaffolding of his joys, so rapidly run up, fell. This strange fact had occurred, in the impulse of joy he had felt since daybreak he had wholly forgotten that he had to confess. He had a moment of aberration. "But I am forgiven," he thought; "the proof is that state of happiness, such as I have never known, that truly wonderful expansion of soul which I experienced in the chapel and ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... intervals, astronomical and other. It was thus when the discovery that the refraction and dispersion of light did not follow the same law of variation, affected both astronomy and physiology by giving us achromatic telescopes and microscopes. It was thus when Bradley's discovery of the aberration of light enabled him to make the first step towards ascertaining the motions of the stars. It was thus when Cavendish's torsion-balance experiment determined the specific gravity of the earth, and so gave a datum for calculating the specific ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... pencils which form parts of the image, and partly to what is termed spherical aberration. The first cause cannot be modified by the optician's skill, and is not important when the field of view is small. Spherical aberration causes those parts of a pencil which fall near the boundary of a convex lens to converge to a nearer (i.e. shorter) focus than those which fall near the centre. This may be corrected by a proper selection of the forms ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... fastened upon him. Thus he still spelled traffick, almanack, frolick, havock, and it was quite possible for his critics to follow him through a long list of words of this class and detect his frequent aberration from a uniform rule. Yet, instead of receding from his position, the latest edition advances; a nicer discrimination is made in the etymological origin of the variation, but in point of practice a much more general conformity to the rule is recorded. There can ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... sign of his open-mindedness that he would listen to their opinions and even consult them, although he knew that they entirely rejected his Progressivism. General Luke E. Wright, who remained a devoted friend but did not become a Progressive, used to explain what the others called the Colonel's aberration, as being really a very subtle piece of wisdom. Experienced ranchmen, he would say, when their herds stampede in a sudden alarm, spur their horses through the rushing cattle, fire their revolvers into the air, and gradually, by making the herds suppose that men and beasts are all together ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Vetzlar Eye-pieces, as exhibited at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Lenses of these Eye-pieces are so constructed that the rays of light fall nearly perpendicular to the surface of the various lenses, by which the aberration is completely removed; and a telescope so fitted gives one-third more magnifying power and light than could be obtained by the old Eye-pieces. Prices of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of chromatic, spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible—it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. I could not even copy them in less than a month, and I never could ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... assist him up the bank, and as soon as he stood on dry land, dripping like a Triton in trousers, she exclaimed in such a tone as he had never before heard, 'Oh! my dear lord!' Then, as if conscious of her momentary aberration, she blushed with a deeper blush than that of the artificial rose which he had once thought might improve her complexion. She attempted to withdraw her hands, but he squeezed them both ardently, and exclaimed in his turn, like a ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... then, or holds his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... opinion of those members of our profession who have given the subject close and earnest attention. To the first query, the reply must be made that in one-half, or nearly one-half, of the cases of this variety of insanity there is traceable a hereditary tendency to aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... enjoy, to a certain extent, liberty of speech. They could now discuss an address to the sovereign, and give full publicity to their debates. Inquiry could now be made to some purpose, whether the Italian policy of Napoleon III. was sanctioned by France, whether that aberration were national which impelled to the violation of all right and law, in order to unify Italy, and pave the way, at the same time, for the unification of Germany. The revolutionary left of the French parliament, as a matter of course, favored ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... its quality, which had apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were an aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to use in making society contribute more to purse and pleasure. And on the firing line, formed by these noisy agitators, mistaken by many as educational leaders, these were the things striven for. But this aberration was only temporary. The real educational leaders, in trying to realize the goal of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and to do it having to combat this movement of wildcat educational speculation, gradually came to see a more important truth even than the one they were seeking. As on many ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... procession to the altar, where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the Dancing Mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition a cure was expected, which was beyond ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... he produced during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... in which the error would be appreciable—to lines of perceptible breadth or thickness, parallels which deviate sensibly from equidistance, and the like—we correct our conclusions, by combining with them a fresh set of propositions relating to the aberration; just as we also take in propositions relating to the physical or chemical properties of the material, if those properties happen to introduce any modification into the result; which they easily may, even with respect to figure and magnitude, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... cases of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... we do; in spite of every aberration of the individual. And so, when we saw it was impossible that my brother and his wife should live together, we simply transferred our allegiance to the child—we constituted him ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... before he had become used to the work, he told me of a singular experience he once had with a particular gentleman whom he was intending to report as having perfectly recovered from any mental aberration with which he might have been afflicted. Sam wondered how it was possible that a gentleman of such culture and understanding should be considered a fit subject for confinement, for he had several pleasant and intellectual conversations with him, ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... could have settled a large sum on the people who looked after him, and of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... bring themselves to forgive him for thinking more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," as he called it, of Balzac's mind; in which judgment of her he was vastly mistaken, because she was the person who suffered the most through it, and by it. But this unwarranted suspicion made him antagonistic ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... confirmed somnambulist. Excuse me," continued the Senor, with a soft, deprecating gesture; "you are, of course, unaware of it—most victims of that singular complaint are, or at least fail to recognize the extent of their aberration. In your case it has only been indicated by a profound melancholy and natural shunning of society. In a paroxysm of your disorder, you rise in the night, fully dress yourself, and glide as unconsciously along the deck in pursuance of some vague fancy. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... generous actions produce in us, the indignation stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of a school. I open again the Revue des Deux Mondes, and there I encounter the theory of which M. Taine has made the application: "We no longer know anything of morals, but of manners; of principles, but ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... for a moment, is encountered with great acrimony by less gentle friends. They who are not bound to me by blood or intimacy—and some who are—deride, insult, and revile me in every way for my subjection to a mental aberration which is rapidly consuming a pretty property, more than average ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... been previously done to reduce by one-half the length of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic and the small ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... mention of insanity in the domesticated animals in any of our modern authors, whether treating on agriculture, horsemanship, or veterinary medicine, and yet there are some singular and very interesting cases of aberration of intellect. The inferior animals are, to a certain extent, endowed with the same faculties as ourselves. They are even susceptible of the same moral qualities. Hatred, love, fear, hope, joy, distress, courage, timidity, jealousy, and many varied passions influence and agitate them, as they ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I frankly confess absurd in the highest degree." (Italics ours). After admitting that it "seems absurd in the highest degree," he proceeds, as if it were certainly true. Darwin has been admired for his candor, but not for his consistency. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... a kind of lunatic, certainly. My own opinion is, that, whatever insanity he may be occasionally afflicted with results more from an excessive indulgence in liquor than from any other cause. Be that, however, as it may, there is no question but that he is occasionally seized with fits of mental aberration. From what you tell me, and his exaggerated suspicions of a plot between you and Sir Thomas Gourlay, I think it most probable that he is ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... raison, Monsieur. Je suis evidemment dans mon tort. Ma visite a Varsovie etait une aberration. As to my stay, je suis deja tout ce qu'il y a de plus ennuye. I have seen enough of Warsaw to last for the rest ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... you affirm absence of motive on its part, you must affirm absence of activity also.—Let us then assume that just as sometimes an intelligent person when in a state of frenzy proceeds, owing to his mental aberration, to action without a motive, so the highest Self also created this world without any motive.—That, we reply, would contradict the omniscience of the highest Self, which is vouched for by Scripture.—Hence the doctrine ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... her throne; and it was not till after months of suffering and agony, that she recovered, if that could be called recovery, which gave back a deformed and hapless lunatic, bereft of intellect and of beauty, in place of the once gay and fascinating Rosalie. The dread aberration of intellect was attributed by her medical attendants to the fatal and sudden shock which she had sustained, and to its effect on a mind weakened by previous anxiety and sorrow; while they feared her malady was of a nature, which admitted no hope of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... unity. The idea of one God, of a creative, productive, governing unity, resided in the earliest exertion of thought: and this monotheism of the primitive ages, makes every succeeding epoch, unless it be the present appear only as a stage in the progress of degeneracy and aberration Everywhere in the old faiths we find the idea of a supreme or presiding Deity. Amun or Osiris presides among the many gods of Egypt; Pan, with the music of his pipe, directs the chorus of the constellations, as Zeus leads the solemn ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... flogged; the credulity of the parents would have been laughed at; and the lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... like David in Browning's poem Saul, they dread lest they should worst the Giver by inventing better gifts than his? That we do not know, is the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has made possible to us. If then we go wrong, it will be in the direction of the right, and with such aberration as will be easier to correct than what must come of refusing to imagine, and leaving the dullest traditional prepossessions to rule our hearts and minds, with no claim but the poverty of their expectation from the paternal riches. Those that hope little cannot ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
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