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More "Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books



... ensure his destruction when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ceased to ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues, affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushed to the front unless the degeneration of the race—an inevitable result of the present educational method—is to be ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... by which it was established? How shall this government, instituted by the whole people, agreed to by the whole people, supported by the contributions of the whole people, be confined to the accomplishment of those purposes alone, which the whole people desire? How shall it be preserved from degeneration into a mere government for the benefit of a part only of those who established, and who support it? How shall it be prevented from even injuring a part of its own members, for the aggrandizement of the rest? Its laws must be, (or ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... note of a waning period—that just as the excessive desire to be like all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive desire to be unlike everything else is the note of Romantic degeneration. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... degeneration in the family of Moses may be accounted for by the fact that Moses had married the daughter of a priest who ministered to idols. Yet, the grandson of Moses was not an idolater of ordinary calibre. His sinful conduct was not without a semblance of morality. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... hair seems pretty happy. You are the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants cutting then, not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... humor, call it "tenant-house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which follow physical degeneration." ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... us all, doesn't it?" said Griffin apprehensively. "I'm not so sure about myself, now you mention it. Doris Leighton may be one ahead of me in this business. Fatty degeneration of the soul is a new ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther

... such a woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac

... Morley's is absolutely useless—mere rot. It has already cost me not only its price but also two candles for an all-night seance and an entire degeneration of my most sad and sober resolutions. Money I needed for shoes, solemnity I needed for my reputation—all have gone to the winds in this nightmare of love, laughter, boyishness, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... of the degeneration which came to the Indians about a fort through their association with the soldiers. That such degeneration did result is true, but it came about in spite of the efforts of the officers. On the other hand, ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen

... all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration in our village." ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller

... for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from those of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... which have adopted a sessile life. In the shell-fish, on the other hand, the principle of armour-plating has its greatest development. It is assuredly a long and obscure way that leads from the ancestral type of animal we have been describing to the headless and shapeless mussel or oyster. Such a degeneration is, however, precisely what we should expect to find in the circumstances. Indeed, the larva, of many of the headless Molluscs have a mouth and eyes, and there is a very common type of larva—the trochosphere—in the Mollusc world ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... campaign, have been more than compensated by five years of peace, and by the horses that were left by the allied troops. An annual supply is also drawn from Mecklenburg and the adjacent countries. Importations of this kind are regarded as indispensable, to prevent a degeneration in the stock. A Frenchman can scarcely be brought to believe it possible; that we in England can preserve our fine breed of horses without having recourse to similar expedients; and if at last, by dint of repeated asseverations, you succeed ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... the common and into a tree-shaded lane. Emily tried to believe that this at length was really the country; there were no houses in view, meadows lay on either hand, the leafage was thick. But it was not mere prejudice which saw in every object a struggle with hard conditions, a degeneration into coarseness, a blight. The quality of the earth was probably poor to begin with; the herbage seemed of gross fibre; one would not risk dipping a finger in the stream which trickled by the roadside, it suggested an impure source. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... in which the "Man in the Moon" was supposed to fly, genie-like, with Punch over the land which at one time he ruled with his wit; and the "Dreary Hunchback," as he was apostrophised, was caustically besought to awake and stem the tide of his supposed degeneration. It is hardly surprising that this poem, clever as it is, was not reprinted in the posthumous collection of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... can see at present into the as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported; and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... agree with you, sir," said Erskine, "and I think Lennard will too. There has never been an instance in history in which democracy did not spell degeneration. It's a pity, but I suppose it's inevitable. As far as my reading has taken me, it seems to be the dry-rot of nations. Halloa, what's that? Torpedo gunboat, I think! Ah, there's the moon. Now, sir, if you'll just ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith

... of studying probabilities are great helps against such attackers; but, on the other hand, the man who drinks a glass of wine when he feels low will beat the hypnotist, who will doubtless harm him by causing degeneration. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... closest resemblance to the attacks of paralytics, are affected in general paralysis. He thinks, moreover, that as destruction of these cortical spots causes disturbance of motion, resembling the symptoms pathognomonic of grey degeneration of the posterior columns observed in general paralysis, there is an added reason for ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... memory behind him when he disappeared from England, perhaps just in time before complete degeneration set in as in France and Germany, Italy and Spain. Shakespeare, whenever he introduces him, does so in a kindly spirit, and represents him as a consoler of the afflicted and a refuge to the troubled spirit. By Spenser also he ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... the whole of "Degeneration" was made clear to me. How could any man as sane, as normal, as superbly health-loving and health-bestowing keep from writing such a book! I never met any one who so impressed me with his knowledge. Not pedantry, ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... look forward to reading with much pleasure. I have, however, read the first, and am much disappointed with it. It seems to me the weakest and most inconclusive thing he has yet written. At p. 17 he states his theory as to degeneration of eyes, and again, on p. 18, of anthers and filaments; but in both cases he fails to prove it, and apparently does not see that his panmixia, or "cessation of selection," cannot possibly produce continuous degeneration culminating ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... are normal in appearance, but many show signs of degeneration. This is common in the insane, but less frequent and pronounced in neurasthenics. An abnormal shape of the head or curvature of the skull, a high, arched palate, peculiarly-shaped ears, unusually large hands and feet, irregular teeth from narrow ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... contrariness, her want of dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of Ivanhoe; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as hear, how much ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... the want of exercise, the excessive consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the digestive functions. It cannot be superseded ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called—I ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... average, after about thirty years of age, the elasticity of the body to rise to the strain of emergency diminishes, and, when forty years is reached, a man, medically speaking, reaches his acme. After that, degeneration of the fabric of the body slowly and maybe imperceptibly sets in. As the difficulties of exploration in cold regions approximate to the limit of human endurance and often enough exceed it, it is obvious that the above ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... rapidly gain entrance to the blood stream and multiply freely in it, and by means of their toxins cause symptoms of general poisoning. A widespread toxic action is indicated by the lesions found—cloudy swelling, which may be followed by fatty degeneration, in internal organs, capillary haemorrhages, &c. In septicaemia in the human subject, often due to streptococci, the process is similar, but the organisms are found especially in the capillaries of the internal organs ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... English playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... possess a special vulnerability. The peroneal element is of course somewhat the more exposed, as lying posterior; but it seems unreasonable to assume that so large a proportion of the injuries can implicate the posterior segment of the nerve as to make the startling difference in the incidence of degeneration explicable. In this relation we may bear in mind that the muscles supplied by this nerve suffer most in the degeneration subsequent to anterior polio-myelitis, and again that in cerebral hemiplegia or spinal-cord injuries they are ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... hard to please, but she was not thinking of herself as she sat by her front window in the chilly November twilight. Instead, she was musing on the degeneration of hired men, and reflecting that it was high time the wheat was thrashed, the house banked, and sundry ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... as degenerative, and places among the signs of degeneration, deviations from the average normal, whether physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such inclusive use of the term degenerate, than the fact that ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.

... the degeneration and disappearance of the glandular tissues of the uterus, and secondarily to similar changes in the ovaries and other glands. This is followed by an atrophy of all ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard, nothing is held in solution, all ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... headiness, our worldliness, threaten to eat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and our passion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was our literature threatened with the artistic degeneration,—running all to art and not at all to power? were our communities invaded by a dry rot of culture? were we fast becoming a delicate, indoor, genteel race? were our women sinking deeper and deeper into the "incredible sloughs of fashion and all kinds of dyspeptic depletion,"—the antidote ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... years, been detected in the most contemptible tricks. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, but if the Court of Arches were to give up its secrets, it would be found that tippling and moral degeneration were by no means confined to psychics. At the same time, a psychic is so peculiarly sensitive that I think he or she would always be well advised to be a life ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to the mind trained in modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... another case a smooth apple affected a rough-coated kind. Another instance has been given (11/146. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 5 pages 65 and 68. See also Prof. Hildebrand with a coloured figure in 'Bot. Zeitung' May 15, 1868 page 327. Puvis also has collected 'De La Degeneration' 1837 page 36) several other instances; but it is not in all cases possible to distinguish between the direct action of foreign pollen and bud-variations.) of two very different apple-trees growing close to each other, which bore fruit resembling each other, but only ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... 'I'm Mrs. Harnish, who are you?' And I'll say, 'I'm Elam Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... the planet. The mythos is no doubt a parallel to that of Aeneas. Rome was founded when the Sun in his orbit had entered the sign Aries, and Mars was the god most honored by the Romans. In time, with the degeneration of human races and their worship, to the rural mind, the subjects of the mythos became actual personalities, endowed with every human passion and godlike attribute, the former characterizing the discordant influence of the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... be a Philistine, and to say what everybody thinks is to be a genius. Every healthy eye sees Purkinje's Figures when the conditions are present; but only a rare eye perceives them consciously. That is the eye of genius, but the Philistines cry, "Disease! Degeneration!" ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... spirit. Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born anew" (John 3: 7, R. V.). By no process of evolution, however prolonged, can the natural man be developed into the spiritual man; by no process of degeneration can the spiritual man deteriorate into the natural man. These two are from a totally different stock and origin; the one is from beneath, the other is from above. There is but one way through which ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... and, were it not that the practical good sense which never totally deserts the people of the United States is said to be producing a reaction, likely in no long time to lead to the retraction of the error, it might with reason be regarded as the first great downward step in the degeneration of ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... easy to see that, sooner or later, the Bolshevik degeneration over, Russia will be recomposed; Germany, in spite of all the attempts to break her up and crush her unity, within thirty or forty years will be the most formidable ethnical nucleus of Continental Europe. What will then happen to a Poland which pretends ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... a great deal of injury being done by the use of alcohol in what is supposed by the consumer to be a most moderate quantity, to persons who are not in the least intemperate, and to people supposed to be fairly well. It leads to degeneration of the tissues; it damages the health; it injures the intellect. Short of drunkenness, that is, in those effects of it which stop short of drunkenness, I should say from my experience that alcohol ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... the country that our stock came from. It is quite possible, and if so we are indeed to be congratulated upon having morally improved so much since, or the Persians to be condoled with on their sad degeneration. The better classes, however, are very different, as ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... most deadly uninteresting person, and the one who has the greatest temptation not to think at all, is the comfortable and happily married woman—the woman who has a good man between her and the world, who has not the saving privilege of having to work. A sort of fatty degeneration of the conscience sets in that is disastrous to the development ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... assistance of her detachment from European quarrels to such an arrangement, Europe of herself may not prove capable of it. Second, that if Europe does not come to some such arrangement the resulting unrest, militarism, moral and material degeneration, for the reasons above indicated and for others to be indicated presently, will most unfavorably affect the development of America, and expose her to dangers internal and external much greater than those which she would incur by intervention. Third, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... "were once gained, that among animals and vegetables there had been, I do not say several species, but even a single one, which had been produced in the course of direct descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three times as many as suffered in Salem during ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... They are the deep ones. Their naivete is nothing but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know the species; it is all too common. Meanwhile we must congratulate ourselves on having ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... replaced by a fibrous cicatrix. It would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its function ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't think they were being observed, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... behalf of a deep and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the unamiable form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... But, since weakenings and degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people may be better than the later expressions ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss

... which of us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell

... my idiocies. But you think over what I say, just the same. I'm right. We're rotten cotton stuff now in these isles. We've got fatty degeneration of the heart, and in all the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Mutual Friend" the reader is led for a long time to suppose that the character of Mr. Boffin is changing for the worse; and his interest is stimulated keenly when he discovers ultimately that the apparent degeneration ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... decidedly present is that comprising many due to syphilis; that in which degenerative changes follow upon haemorrhagic softening, and another in which they succeed to occlusion of vessels and its immediate results. In another, degeneration and atrophy follow, the brain state conditioning acute insanity; and in another they are secondary to brain injury, not to ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... as though I was dancing on a volcano and daring it to explode. The more twistings and turnings there were to the labyrinth, the greater glory it was to get out. Maggie darlin', you have before you a mournful spectacle—the degeneration of Nancy Olden. It isn't that she's lost courage. It's only that she used to be able to think of only one thing, and now—What do you suppose it is, Mag? If you know, don't you dare ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... functions developed and of acquiring more strength (as, for example, the muscles of boxers, the breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view that they are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... Eighteenth-century ideals were proverbially low. England, then, had not recovered from the frivolities inaugurated after the Restoration. The slackness and unbelief among the clergy, and the looseness of morals in society were notorious, but this degeneration could not have been universal. There are always a few Noahs and their families left to repeople the world with righteousness after a deluge of degeneracy, and Browning is quite right in his portrayal of an ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... heredity, though as yet only partially determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution—not disintegration and degeneration—two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews

... the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... so vividly the coming degeneration of her dear little house that it hurt her as severely as if it had already been an accomplished fact. She sat down on the stairs and had a long, bitter cry. Susan found her there and enquired with much concern ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... been propagated, but had not yet been passed into law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes, while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia was still, in theory, a Power of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... handsome men, the elder representing a fine type of Anglo-Saxon, as the term is used in speaking of our composite white population; while the mulatto's erect form, broad shoulders, clear eyes, fine teeth, and pleasingly moulded features showed nowhere any sign of that degeneration which the pessimist so sadly maintains is the inevitable ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the master. But we civilised men have crucified ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... to avenge an outrage committed against their sister. Polygamy and concubinage wove a thread of disaster and complications throughout the whole lives of families and its dire effects are directly traceable in the feuds and degeneration of their descendants. The chief lesson taught by history is danger of violating, physically, mentally, or spiritually the personal integrity of woman. Customs of the country and the cupidity of Laban, forced polygamy ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... to a more natural life, after centuries of physical degeneration and suppression of all feeling for nature, could not be understood, nor even taken seriously, in surroundings in which air, sunlight, the very right to live, had been refused or measured out penuriously. The drama remained in manuscript, and did not become known ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... talking in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he could not swoop into a parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow-creatures,—a melancholy, lean degeneration of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... intensity of reaction of neurasthenia is a condition of genius. We are too far away from any real knowledge of heredity to advise for or against marriage in the most of cases on this basis, and certainly we must not repeat Lombroso and Nordau's errors and call all variations from stupidity degeneration. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... heretical opinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... centuries of civilization, education, and self-government, all with equal rights in our Senate and representation according to population in our House, with an equal voice in shaping our national destinies—that would, at least in this stage of the world, be humanitarianism run mad, a degeneration and degradation of the homogeneous, continental Republic of our pride too preposterous for the contemplation of serious and intelligent men. Quite as well might Great Britain now invite the swarming ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... divergence between his broad and sweeping generalization and particular instances which do not quite accord with it. So it was with Boyle's law that the volume of a gas varies in inverse ratio to the pressure to which it is exposed; so it is with the Darwinian theory, inasmuch as deterioration and degeneration play a part which was, perhaps, at first overlooked; and similar instances may be found ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... and yet made an essential element of that teaching, so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and development as is the privilege ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... it all out. 'Cut it out,' that certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have—Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson—this sounds like a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond

... There is the attitude of condescension, the arrogant tolerance of the proselyte and the parvenu: "So our forefathers used to do, for they were ignorant folk." At times, however, it is with precisely opposite view, mourning the present degeneration from earlier days, "when men were yet skilful rowers in 'kayaks,' or when this or that might still be done ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown

... hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut away ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... tried it, madame," said the same speaker, who had mourned over the degeneration of finish among the workwomen. "It was the siege that compelled it in the beginning, and then there was no complaining, since it was the will of the good God for all. But there came a time when sickness had been with me long, and I found no work ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell

... in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from certain famous artists of history, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame. In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great man was like; ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... hyperplastic-degeneration exists in some cases and the subjects are in time rendered unserviceable because of the burden of getting about encumbered by the affected extremity. In other animals hyperplasia progresses for a time—until the parts become greatly enlarged and conditions apparently attain ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... to bear windmills must be regarded as the reduced vestiges of masts originally constructed to carry sails; and their adaptive evolution, like that of countless structures in animals, has been accomplished by degeneration. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... follies that his poor distorted wits conceived from hour to hour. His judgment was gone, his mind unbalanced. All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge. The process of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... Buddhas, countless as the sands of Ganges, guide into a sure trust in the Holy Name those sinful creatures and evil-hearted that wander in the darkness of this wicked world bearing the five signs of degeneration upon it. ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin

... servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... of Italy, as already hinted, there was a progressive tendency to degeneration. The strain of tyranny sustained by force and craft for generations, the abuse of power and pleasure, the isolation and the dread in which the despots lived habitually, bred a kind of hereditary madness.[1] In the case of Giovanni ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... and degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people may be better than the later expressions of their ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss

... but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... any metropolis of modern Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... happened to races on other planets that complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of the worker's ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... accused in whispers of having been on the very verge of committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there were some that believed—Why, what was this but an instance of the total obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it be owing, but to an innate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... what cases should it be performed?—1. For disease of the elbow-joint which has resisted ordinary remedies, and is wearing down the patient's strength, including caries, ulceration of cartilages, and gelatinous synovial degeneration. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... distorted wits conceived from hour to hour. His judgment was gone, his mind unbalanced. All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge. The process of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush headlong to ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... if only because both forms are adapted in their structure as a whole, and in every detail to the conditions of their life. A sudden origin, in a natural way, of numerous adaptations is inconceivable. Even the degeneration of a medusoid from a free-swimming animal to a mere brood-sac (gonophore) is not sudden and saltatory, but occurs by imperceptible modifications throughout hundreds of years, as we can learn from the numerous stages of the process ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism; for the rigid a priori morality of which he was the somewhat muddled defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential to the general ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... call the leaven a good or evil thing makes little difference. The effect of its mysterious powers of movement and upheaval is in the end salutary. It works upon the lump just as the catfish, that demon of the deep, preserves the lumpish cod from the apathy and degeneration of comfort, and as Mephisto, that demon of the world, acts upon the lethargy of mankind working within him, stimulating, driving to ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... his doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that decadence and degeneration which is now rampant in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his spiritual death, exhorting us to abjure Wagner the musician and ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... a pleasant memory behind him when he disappeared from England, perhaps just in time before complete degeneration set in as in France and Germany, Italy and Spain. Shakespeare, whenever he introduces him, does so in a kindly spirit, and represents him as a consoler of the afflicted and a refuge to the troubled spirit. By Spenser also he is ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... along its back, and corresponds very closely with the ideal I have sketched of our primitive backboned ancestor. It may be an offshoot from the same group. The sea-squirt further illustrates the origin of the backbone, since it has a similar rod of cartilage in its youth, and loses it, by degeneration, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... take what you can;" and he was living up to it, playing up to it before an audience as no other man I ever saw could or would. He didn't seem to care what we thought of him, now that he was gaining his point. But when fatty degeneration of the soul sets in, there is room for little real pride in a ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... and October, 1847, Volume XIII.), in which the "Man in the Moon" was supposed to fly, genie-like, with Punch over the land which at one time he ruled with his wit; and the "Dreary Hunchback," as he was apostrophised, was caustically besought to awake and stem the tide of his supposed degeneration. It is hardly surprising that this poem, clever as it is, was not reprinted in the posthumous ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... purpose. So far, the result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, in ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... at the Zoological Gardens, and was pleased to find her recognise the aptness of this description. But heaviest of all on the spirits of the whole party sat the anxiety about Lady Ashbridge. There could be no doubt that some cerebral degeneration was occurring, and Lady Barbara's urgent representation to her brother had the effect of making him promise to take her up to London without delay after Christmas, and let a specialist see her. For the present the pious fraud practised on her that Michael ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... distinction between man and the brute creation—it is the law of nature in the human kind, which the Poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind—which he paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things would lead one to suppose—whether there are not, perhaps, some more efficacious 'humanities' ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... evils which beset men and nations. The only philosophy of life is that derived from its science. We know right from wrong because the destruction is plain in human experience. Right action brings abundance of life. Wrong action brings narrowness, decay, and degeneration. A man must have principles of life above all questions of the mere opportunities of to-day, but these principles are themselves derived from experience. They belong to the higher opportunism, the consideration of what is best in the long run. The ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... but fair to Josephus to consider the times and circumstances in which he wrote. It was an age when the love of truth was almost dead, extinguished partly by the crushing tyranny of omnipotent Emperors, partly by the intellectual and moral degeneration of pagan society. The Flavian house soon showed the same characteristics of a vainglorious despotism as the line of Caesars which it had supplanted. Under Domitian "the only course possible for a writer without the risk of outlawry or the sacrifice of personal honor ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather, the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each seventy-two thousand solar years in length; ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... pair, than that numerous identical members of a common species were simultaneously created. On the other hand, a physiological difficulty occurs, in viewing a race as descended from a single pair, from the fact universally recognised in the later periods of history, viz. the degeneration, and, in the end, destruction or indefinite deterioration of both physical and mental faculties, by continual intermarriage. The houses of Braganza and Hapsburg are notorious instances of this; and, as far as we are aware, there are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation ANY HOW, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church. Which side is right here, who can say? Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths in sight. I conceive this ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... the time and place for extended discussion. The questions before our country are problems of progress to higher standards; they are not the problems of degeneration. They demand thought and they serve to quicken the conscience and enlist our sense of responsibility for their settlement. And that responsibility rests upon you, my countrymen, as much as upon those of us who have been selected ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... very soon have the jaundiced eye and the yellow skin. Diarrhoea is another very common complication. We have frequent purging and, maybe, sickness and vomiting. Fits of a convulsive character are frequent concomitants of distemper. Epilepsy is sometimes seen, owing, no doubt, to degeneration of the nerve centres caused by blood-poisoning. There are many other complications, and skin complaints are ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... Rashtra-pala-paripriccha (Ed. Finot, pp. ix-xi, 28-33) inveighs against the moral degeneration of the Buddhist clergy. This work was translated into Chinese between 589 and 618, so that demoralisation must have begun in the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... operation; the Military College having an average of eleven hundred students annually. The continent of Africa then, is not without a college, but though benighted enough, even to an apparent hopeless degeneration, she is still the seat of learning, and must some day rise, in the majesty of ancient grandeur, and vindicate the rights and claims of her own children, against the incalculable wrongs perpetrated through the period of sixty ages by professedly ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany

... torn away, the neighborhood notes with surprise that what seemed solid wood is dry and crumbling pith. During the last fifteen years of Daniel Webster's life, his wonderfully imposing form and his immense reputation concealed from the public the decay of his powers and the degeneration of his morals. At least, few said what perhaps many felt, that "he was not the man he had been." People went away from one of his ponderous and empty speeches disappointed, but not ill pleased to boast that they too had "heard Daniel Webster speak," and feeling very sure that ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... they kept in close contact with the soil they flourished. With the advance of civilization the peoples change their mode of life from simplicity to luxuriousness and complexity. Thus individuals decay and in the end there is enough individual decay to result in national degeneration. When this process has advanced far enough these people are unable to hold their own. In the severe competitition of nations the strain is too great and they perish. There is a point of refinement beyond which people can ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... Israel's moral degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water strengthens, another weakens; one makes beautiful, another makes ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... France. The sure foundations of states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... "very proper" predecessors in that weddings do not have to be set for noon because a bridegroom's sobriety is not to be counted on later in the day! That young people of to-day prefer games to conversation scarcely proves degeneration. That they wear very few clothes is not a symptom of decline. There have always been recurring cycles of undress, followed by muffling from shoe-soles to chin. We have not yet reached the undress of Pauline Bonaparte, so the muffling period may not ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... he said laughingly, alluding to the "lift" process—"Upon my word, when I think of the strong people of a past age and compare them with the enervated race of to-day, I feel not only pity, but shame, for the visible degeneration of mankind. Frail nerves, weak hearts, uncertain limbs,—these are common characteristics of the young, nowadays, instead of being as formerly the natural failings of the old. Wear and tear and worry of modern existence?—Oh yes, I know!—but why the wear tear and worry at all? What ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... on a high embankment, passed blocks of individually pretentious dwellings, edifices of carved granite, alternating with the simpler brick faces of an older period. A narrow, whitely dusty sweep of green park was followed by a speedy degeneration of the riverside; the houses shrunk to rows of wood marked by the grime of steel mills. Soon after they reached a forbidding fence; and, passing a watchman's inspection, entered into a clamorous region of sheds, tracks and confusing levels such ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... This is the final degeneration into the realm of pure foolery. It is a patent declaration: "This is only a play; laugh and we are content." Once more we venture to point a parallel on the modern stage, in the vaudeville comedian who interlards his dancing with comments such ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... been said in this connection that in such cases the sure instinct with which these species were originally endowed has been distorted, but that is to admit some degree of variation; the hypothesis of degeneration is as gratuitous as the other, and if we go so far as to risk a hypothesis, it would be better to use it to explain facts and not ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... that the practical good sense which never totally deserts the people of the United States is said to be producing a reaction, likely in no long time to lead to the retraction of the error, it might with reason be regarded as the first great downward step in the degeneration of modern ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander down ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... a reflex of their intellectual, moral, and emotional life as their heroic legends and myths. In fact, they are frequently only the fragments of stories which, when they were created, were embodiments of the most profound and impressive religious conceptions of which the people were capable. The degeneration of the sun god of our Teutonic forefathers into the Hans of Grimm's tale, who could not learn to shiver and shake, through the Sinfiotle of the "Volsunga Saga" and the Siegfried of the "Nibelungenlied," is so obvious that it needs no commentary. Neither ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... had to be found, and that there were real organised secret meetings, witches' Sabbaths, to supply this need of sensation,—the thing is less difficult to comprehend. The religious hysteria that resulted in the banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson was but another phase of the same thing. And the degeneration to be noted to-day in the remote hill-towns of New England is likewise attributable to Michelet's "dearth of ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... it seemed to offer an opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... one that is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to the average mind. All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex. The latter day degeneration of sex is the "trail of the serpent," which Woman is to crush with her heel. And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though Woman had fallen from her high estate, to take her place ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... should be elicited and note taken not only of nervous maladies, but of arthritic, tuberculous, pellagrous, and inebriate forms, including a tendency to morphiomania. Even goitre should not escape notice, since it may indicate cretinism or any other form of degeneration. The existence of criminality in the family is of still greater importance, but it is extremely difficult to obtain any information on this head, either from the patient himself or his relatives. A certain amount of strategy ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed of defending, except as crude necessities, things like ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... form of primal perfection to appear among men, might not its divine originality repel an ordinary observer, used to consider beautiful such abortions of the Creator's design as sin and degeneration have produced? Not easily can one imagine what a real man or woman would look like. Painting nor sculpture can teach us; we must learn, if at all, from ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... cicatrix. It would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer

... essential element of that teaching, so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and development as is the privilege of every truly ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... open, and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from religion just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... European quarrels to such an arrangement, Europe of herself may not prove capable of it. Second, that if Europe does not come to some such arrangement the resulting unrest, militarism, moral and material degeneration, for the reasons above indicated and for others to be indicated presently, will most unfavorably affect the development of America, and expose her to dangers internal and external much greater than those which she would incur by intervention. Third, that if America's influence is ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... for two to three days, then jaundice comes on, with enlargement of the liver; haemorrhages from the mucous surfaces and under the skin; later, coma and convulsions. In chronic cases there is fatty degeneration of most of the organs and tissues of the body. The inhalation of the fumes of phosphorus, as in making vermin-killers, etc., gives rise ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... debased form of polytheistic idolatry, and that the higher religions have been developed out of these base rudiments. Dr. Ebrard shows conclusively that the facts all lead to another conclusion, that gross idolatry is a degeneration of mankind from antecedent and purer forms of religious worship.... He first treats of the civilized nations of antiquity, the Aryan and Indian religions, the Vedas, the Indra period of Brahmanism and Buddhism; then of the religion of the Iranians, the Avesta ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... A kind of degeneration, of coarseness—the coarseness of satiety, and shapeless, battered-out appetite—with an almost savage taste for carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their new-born babes. A girl with ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... at the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... condescension, the arrogant tolerance of the proselyte and the parvenu: "So our forefathers used to do, for they were ignorant folk." At times, however, it is with precisely opposite view, mourning the present degeneration from earlier days, "when men were yet skilful rowers in 'kayaks,' or when this or that might still be done ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown

... nocturnal emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... English people, so to speak, have, as it were, gone through the figures of some social aspects, as if dancing the "Lancers," with its forward and back movements, gallop, etc., and have finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have but little to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... York, diabetes goes up." Nephritis, also, may result from emotional stress, because of the strain put upon the kidneys by the unconsumed activating substances. The increased heart action and the presence of these activating secretions may cause myocarditis and heart degeneration. Claudication also may result from ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... in the process of development which is now being taken by many pueblos, which, although an advance from the industrial point of view, is to the student of architecture degeneration. This consists of a return to single houses located in the valleys and on the bottom lands wherever convenience to the fields under cultivation required. This movement is hardly twenty years old, but is proceeding at a steadily accelerating ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... reproaching himself for blindness and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of health-degeneration may go ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but perfectly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... not allude to war; it might be urged that we attribute this rather to the will of the people or kings than to Nature. But poverty, for instance, which we still rank with irremediable ills such as shipwreck or plague; poverty, with all its crushing sorrows and transmitted degeneration—how often may this be ascribed to the injustice of the elements, and how often to the injustice of our social condition, which is the crowning injustice of man? Need we, at the sight of unmerited wretchedness, look to the skies for a reason, as though a flash of lightning had caused ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... the Danish botanist mean?—the more luxuriant weedy character probably acquired by it only in such neighbourhood; and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration possible to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its wild home. It is given by Sibthorpe from the Trojan Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf; the flower described as "triste et pallide violaceus," but coloured in his plate full purple; and as he does not say whether he ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... case between the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact arrested,—arrested so effectually that the counter process of degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count himself ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... usually has no unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... by Sir Walter Scott in his Fortunes of Nigel. Sometimes, perhaps, he might read in the Newgate Calendar down to the year 1788, but he never looked into a book more recent. In fact, he had a theory with regard to the French Revolution, as having been the great cause of degeneration in murder. "Very soon, sir," he used to say, "men will have lost the art of killing poultry: the very rudiments of the art will have perished!" In the year 1811 he retired from general society. Toad-in-the-hole was no more seen in any public resort. We missed him ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... humiliated, hating her for her meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by greed, the man's ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it, for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given the right of way? Then the Bureau of ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... merely could he live at ease, but there would be room in the world for milliards of additional human beings. When compared with this splendid struggle, how puny seems the great war! What has that war to do with the real struggle for existence? It is a product of degeneration. War is justifiable. Not war between human beings. But creative war for man's mastery over natural forces, the young war of which hardly a millionth part has yet been waged. In this war we can foresee victories such as no human being has ever ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... flesh-and-blood natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... if the actors have lives of their own, apart from mummery, it is their business not to show them. It is like watching a game from the grand stand, instead of playing it; betting on a race instead of running it. The transition hither is hard to make. Retired athletes, we know, suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart; retired men of affairs decay. I have walked lately at five miles an hour with the Widgers, and I do not relish dawdling at the rate of two with these people here. Better risk hell for heaven than lounge about paradise ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... Latin as spoken and written in the Middle Ages, being a degeneration of the classical which began as early as the time of Cicero and developed unchecked with the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... more natural life, after centuries of physical degeneration and suppression of all feeling for nature, could not be understood, nor even taken seriously, in surroundings in which air, sunlight, the very right to live, had been refused or measured out penuriously. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... fashioning this warm home in the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one that demanded ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... of the mountains which divide the two Castiles, may be seen gangs of fives and sixes of these people lolling or sleeping beneath the broiling sun on their gigantic and heavily laden mutes and mules, the boast of Spain, but dearly purchased by the debasement and degeneration of a once noble breed of horses. In a word, almost the entire commerce of nearly one half of Spain passes through the hands of the Maragatos, whose fidelity to their trust is such that no one accustomed to employ them would hesitate to entrust them with the transport ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... a place of furtive, obscene whisperings, but he had found there not only vice. There was the chance of an education. He had accepted it at first because he dared not let himself be idle in his spare time. That way lay degeneration and the loss of his manhood. He had studied under competent instructors English, mathematics, the Spanish grammar, and mechanical drawing, as well as surveying and stationary engineering. He had read some of the world's ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration. It is almost as difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very rich man; and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates, a man cannot be. It is a great people that can ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger

... very valuable in medicine. Given in large doses it causes rapid and characteristic poisoning, with alterations in the blood and rapid degeneration of nearly all the internal organs; but in small doses—5 to 15 grains—it partly undergoes reduction in the blood and tissues, the chloride being formed and oxygen being supplied to the body-cells in nascent form. Its special uses are in ulceration of the mouth or tongue (ulcerative stomatitis), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame. In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry and generosity, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... worthless king, of corrupt ministers, and a licentious court, and they are due to the earnestness and vigor of the great body of the English people, qualities which have remained unchanged through every national vicissitude or success. While Pepys and Grammont supply full details of the moral degeneration which weakened and debased the highest ranks of society, the sound morality, steady industry, and progressive nature of the nation are to be seen in the journal of the good Evelyn. His character and occupations, as well as those of his friends, offset the coarse tastes and ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... days, when so much greater liberty is accorded to boys and girls than was given in the past, the friends of liberty should insist with obstinacy on the need for knowledge. For if liberty is unaccompanied and unguided by knowledge, its degeneration into licence will be triumphantly used by the lovers of bondage as an argument against liberty itself. Let me then say boldly that I am all for liberty. I want boys and girls, men and women, to see far more of each other and get to know each other much better than in the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... in schools, colleges, and universities, and is not of the Spirit, and ministers' lives are obvious signs that they are not in the true "apostolic succession."[5] "As for all churches (so called)," he continues, "we beheld you all in the apostasy and degeneration from the true Church, not being gathered by the Spirit of the Lord, nor anointed thereby as the true members of Christ ever were, but to be in forms of righteousness without power, and imitations without life. All the practices of religion we beheld to be without power and life.... ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... short stalk, and white-ribbed, oblong leaves. The stem by which the flower is supported unites at the head of the primary branches into thick, short, irregular bundles, in the form of a corymb. It appears to be a degeneration of the Brassica oleracea costata, or ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... thanks for sending me Weismann's additional Essays,[20] which I look forward to reading with much pleasure. I have, however, read the first, and am much disappointed with it. It seems to me the weakest and most inconclusive thing he has yet written. At p. 17 he states his theory as to degeneration of eyes, and again, on p. 18, of anthers and filaments; but in both cases he fails to prove it, and apparently does not see that his panmixia, or "cessation of selection," cannot possibly produce continuous degeneration ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... deservedly won honoured names and met all hostile criticism have, in their later years, been detected in the most contemptible tricks. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, but if the Court of Arches were to give up its secrets, it would be found that tippling and moral degeneration were by no means confined to psychics. At the same time, a psychic is so peculiarly sensitive that I think he or she would always be well advised to be a life long abstainer—as many ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... first step towards chronic or acute inflammation. The second stage is a breaking down or degeneration of the kidney cells. If degeneration has passed a certain point, there is ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too high ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... for the dishes. Now some tables, or sections of tables, still maintain this lofty standard of good breeding, by the sheer fact that the most of the men are well bred and the rest are ashamed not to be. But where the proportion is reversed degeneration is rapid. The men furtively hang up their hats and turn over their plates before the order, and if a bunch of them take to doing this, there appears to be no remedy for it. "It's up to you," said a sergeant ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... declare "I feel as if there was another person in me," or "I feel compelled as if by another agency to act thus." The explanation of a supernatural agent weighing upon them becomes very easy. For the purpose of this discussion, it is not important whether psychasthenia arises purely from degeneration of structure, or from faults in the chemistry of the plasma which bathes the nerve structures, or whether it is a purely psychopathological condition to which the physical phenomena are secondary, as some would have us believe. Our object is ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... only absorbing feelings of her rights; there was nothing keen in lady Ann; neither sense nor desire, neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. Beyond her own order, beyond indeed her own circle in that order, the universe hardly existed. An age-long process of degeneration had been going on in her race, and she was the result: she was well born and well bred for feeling nothing. There is something fearful in the thought that through the generations the body may go on perfecting, while ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... This is especially true since it has been shown in Germany that under the influence of a continuous high bodily temperature, not intense enough at any time to compromise life, all the muscular tissues of the body undergo a peculiar granular degeneration. Many a typhoid-fever patient has undoubtedly died from the heart-muscle having undergone this change, when, if by artificial cooling the temperature of the body had been kept down, the alteration of the heart-structure would have been prevented, and death averted. It is obvious, also, that the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... work, indubitably one of the best German novels of the last decades, is entitled The Buddenbrooks, the Degeneration of a Family (1901). The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the finest irony ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... art were all applied. Stone carving was applied to architecture, thus colored stones, called mosaics, as wall decorations; from these to the fresco; from the fresco to the pictorial form of painting. To-day the final degeneration of art is in the easel picture, which as an object detached and disassociated from its surroundings, takes refuge in the story-telling phase to justify its raison d'etre. But, alas for the easel picture! alas, also, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... embarrassed face. She had no doubt that close contact with this man had had more to do with the change in Crestwick than the influence of the country; and then she recollected that the lad's degeneration had been marked and rapid while he had taken Clarence for a model. It was a troublesome thought and she ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... circumstance which some, of course, will place to their credit. On the whole, however, it is a dangerous symptom when the mind of a nation turns with preference to the study of the past. It is a sign of flagging strength, of decline and degeneration; it denotes that its people are perilously near to falling victims to the first fever that may happen to be rife —the political fever among others. Now, in the history of modern thought, our scholars are an example of this condition ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... is a late and startling transformation of Gotama's teaching, but the transformation is due rather to the change and degeneration of that teaching in Bengal than to the admixture of Tibetan ideas. Such admixture however was not absent and a series of reformers endeavoured to bring the church back to what they considered the true standard. The first introduction is said to have occurred ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... be destroyed at any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic study of the possible working of electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... Graafian follicles are the most numerous; the entire number contained within the ovaries of the child being estimated at over 70,000. In view of the unquestionably large number of follicles in very young ovaries, and the relatively small number of ova which reach maturity, the degeneration of many follicles after reaching a certain degree of development ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... Max Dessoir, who points out that we must distinguish between onanists aus Noth, and onanists aus Leidenschaft, the latter group alone being of really serious importance. The classification of Dallemagne is also somewhat similar; he distinguishes onanie par impulsion, occurring in mental degeneration and in persons of inferior intelligence, from onanie ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... not to disparage him unduly, for he was the one specimen in my collection, up to that time, who presented the orthodox 'stigmata of degeneration.' His hair was bushy, his face strikingly asymmetrical, and his ears were like a pair of Lombroso's selected examples; outstanding, with enormous Darwinian tubercles and ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman

... pieces, and the young Manfred was left, under papal suzerainty, in nominal possession of the throne of Apulia. We find him at Capua, in surroundings, and attended by a court, in which the spirit of his great father survives, in a state of almost effeminate degeneration. In despair of ever restoring the imperial power of the Hohenstaufen, he seeks to forget his sadness in romance and song. There now appears upon the scene a young Saracen lady, just arrived from the East, who, by appealing to the alliance between East and West concluded by Manfred's ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... It is one of the oldest of known diseases. The Greeks and Graeco-Romans knew it well. It seems highly probable, as brought out by the studies of W.H.S. Jones of Cambridge, that, in part at least, the physical degeneration in Greece and Rome may have been due to the great increase of this disease. Its clinical manifestations were well known and admirably described by the older writers. In the seventeenth century, as I have already told you, the remarkable discovery was made that the bark ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... I have knowledge." This divining and glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier was himself a Tory and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... together and reciprocally labelled: cessation of labor, reduction of wages, over-production, obstruction of the market, alteration and adulteration of products, failures, displacement of laborers, degeneration of the race, and, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... causes a softening of the muscles of the heart, and a fatty degeneration, thus clogging the ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum

... the historian as absurd as to praise or blame an earthquake. It was simply inevitable under the conditions. We may, of course, take it as an essential stage in a social evolution, which if described as progress is therefore to be blessed, or if as degeneration may provoke lamentation. We may, if we please, ask whether superior statesmanship might have attained the good results without the violent catastrophes, or whether a wise and good man who could appreciate ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... his twenty-first wife.[1254] Seneca said that the women reckoned the years by their husbands, not by the consuls.[1255] The women got equality by leveling downwards. "The new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband's."[1256] These cases belong to the degeneration of the mores at the period. As they are astonishing, we are in danger of giving them too much force in the notion we form of the mores of that time. All the writers repeat them. "In the Agricola, and in Seneca's letters to Marcia and Helvia, we ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... not heard. I'm not one of those, maself—I like to meet a bairn that's able and willing to stand up and talk wi' me. And all I can say is that those who are discouraged about the future of the race because of the degeneration of childhood during the war do not know what ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder

... traced to the Sixth Patriarch and his direct disciples. After the Sung dynasty Chinese Zen masters seem to have given undue weight to the Activity, and neglected the serious study of the doctrine. This brought out the degeneration severely reproached by some ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... early Middle Ages, particularly, we find Jewish physicians doing great work and obtaining precious acknowledgment for it in spite of the most discouraging conditions. Later it is not unusual to find that there has been a degeneration into mere money-making as the result of opportunity and consequent ease and luxury. At a number of times, however, both in Christian and in Mohammedan countries, great Jewish physicians arose whose names ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... himself down an ass. The history of critical literature would reveal many such. Think of such an accomplished practitioner as the late M. Brunetiere, writing as he did of Flaubert and Baudelaire. And that monument to critical ineptitude, Degeneration, by Max Nordau. A more modern instance is the judgment of Julius Hart in the publication, Tag (1901), concerning our dramatist. He wrote: "In German literature to-day there is nothing as vile as the art of Frank Wedekind." Fearing this sparkling gem of criticism might ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... Buenavida of the corkscrew curls and quaint taste in pigs. Certainly he was of the old landowning class, and in his refined features and delicate little hands and feet gave evidence of good blood, but the marks of degeneration were equally plain; he was an effeminate, futile person, and not properly to be ranked with the patriarchs. His ugly grotesque neighbour of the piebald horses was more like one. I described the people that lived nearest to us, our next-door neighbours so to speak, because I ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... of the Light! In their inner world, a vanishing world, where nearly all of what once had been a vast country was now covered by the steadily encroaching sea, they had resisted the degeneration which might easily have followed the destruction of a complex civilization. Living simply, and clean of mind, they had clung to the culture of the past as it was taught them by their Wise Ones. And now the People of the Light had ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... government, instituted by the whole people, agreed to by the whole people, supported by the contributions of the whole people, be confined to the accomplishment of those purposes alone, which the whole people desire? How shall it be preserved from degeneration into a mere government for the benefit of a part only of those who established, and who support it? How shall it be prevented from even injuring a part of its own members, for the aggrandizement of the rest? Its laws must be, ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... believed to depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops. Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... one great value of knowledge. Again, when the student is told by Rousseau that "in the hands of man everything degenerates," he can, no doubt, justify the assertion to some extent by recalling observed instances of such degeneration. But, in addition, when he recalls what he has observed and read about the wonderful advance made by man toward a higher civilization, and realizes that Rousseau is denying that there has been an advance, he is in a position to consider whether Rousseau is mainly in the right ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... his degeneration was rapid. The white people gave him the cold shoulder. They were only prevented from cutting him completely by disdainful pity and by a certain dread of his angry violence when he was drunk. He became extremely susceptible and was always ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... als Kunst," describing the degeneration of sound symbols, says "the saving point of language is that the original material meanings of words have become forgotten or lost in their acquired ideal meaning." This applies with special force to the languages of China, Egypt, and India. Up to the last two centuries our written music was ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... sixteenth-century ideals. Eighteenth-century ideals were proverbially low. England, then, had not recovered from the frivolities inaugurated after the Restoration. The slackness and unbelief among the clergy, and the looseness of morals in society were notorious, but this degeneration could not have been universal. There are always a few Noahs and their families left to repeople the world with righteousness after a deluge of degeneracy, and Browning is quite right in his portrayal of an ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... "Fatty degeneration of the heart," replied Temple, with a laugh. On the other hand, quite shocked at people who "make pigs" of themselves, is Mrs. Pavanne, who starves her stomach to beautify her back, and who, I assure you, would prefer after three days' fasting a new boiled silk and trimmings to any similarly ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... years every one of these boys would be transformed into the same class of sodden wretches their jockers now were, who had trained them into the ways of the road, and that they in turn during their life time would spoil the futures of scores of sons of respectable parents, which proves that degeneration ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... oppressed. And Quakerdom made him a rebel by prenatal tendency. Paine's schooling was slight, but his parents, though poor, were thinking people, for nothing sharpens the wits of men, preventing fatty degeneration of the cerebrum, like persecution. In this respect, the Jews and Quakers have been greatly blessed and benefited—let us congratulate them. Very early in life Paine acquired the study habit. And for the youth who has the study habit no pedagogic tears need be shed. There were debating-clubs ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... progress of the last decade has been very great, especially as regards the instruction of women; yet the period has not been noticeably fruitful of literature in the highest sense. In the world of fiction there is much that looks like degeneration; the lighter magazines and serials have multiplied past computation, and form all the reading of not a few persons. To counteract the unhealthy "modern novel" has arisen the Scottish school, the "literature of the kailyard," as it has been ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... the abrogation of the tabu system and the loosening of the old polytheistic ideas, there has been in the hula a lowering of former standards, in some respects a degeneration. The old gods, however, were not entirely dethroned; the people of the hula still continued to maintain the form of divine service and still appealed to them for good luck; but the soul of worship had exhaled; the main study now was to make of the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... and so can afford to pay big bribes. It is characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of quick insanity, of immediate degeneration—a desire to commit crime, to do degraded acts. Within an hour of Susan's being thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. She had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table. The ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... if they attained their goal, not merely lead to general degeneration, but would have a damaging and unnerving effect. . ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking

... reflects the true condition (partly so, because it is incomplete) of the kitchen prevailing at the beginning of our era when the mistress of the Old World was in her full regalia, when her ample body had not yet succumbed to that fatty degeneration of the interior so fatal to ever so many ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... Degeneration, Reaction of. The diminished sensibility to electro-therapeutic treatment exhibited by the human system with continuance of the treatment in question. The general lines of variation are stated in works on ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... to do with the supply of iodine in the system, being particularly affected by the lack of iodine in the food. Again, it is said that when the thyroid gland has degenerated there ensues a condition of auto- intoxication, followed by a degeneration of other organs which destroy and eliminate poisons in the blood. It is claimed that in many cases of thyroid deficiency, as in cretinism, good results have been obtained by the use of thyroid extract, thus supplying ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... more. Regarding the situation, all thoughtful men are concerned and some are panic stricken. The account given by the latter is to the effect that religion is losing its hold; that the Church is being left high and dry; that the morality of classes and masses alike shows darker signs of degeneration with the coming ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... revealed no defect, and his knowledge was quite in accord with his educational advantages. Morally, he was distinctly defective. Physical examination showed various stigmata of degeneration, such as asymmetry of the face; large outstanding and flattened ears; narrow and dome-shaped palate; irregularly placed teeth; prominent parietal bones; two symmetrical depressions on the occiput; congenital flat-footedness; and a sullen facial expression. His ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... pondering this latest aspect of the situation. Mac New's revelation was what Pan would have expected of such a character. Bad as he was, he seemed a white man compared with this underhanded greedy Hardman. Even granting Hardman's gradual degeneration, Pan could not bring himself to believe the man would attempt any open crooked deal. Still this attempt to bribe Mac New had a dubious look. Pan did not like it. If his wild horse expedition had not reached the last day he would have sent Blinky back to Marco or have gone himself to see if ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... upon the portrait, and, as I lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency; its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she were alive, I should love her. Day after day the double knowledge of her wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer. She came to be the heroine of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Tolstoyan type of mind. The very title of this story strike the note of this sudden and simple vision. The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily Telegraph says, of men living in a slum, that "their degeneration is of such a kind as almost to pass the limits of the semblance of humanity," and we read the whole thing with a tepid assent as we should read phrases about the virtues of Queen Victoria or the dignity ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... band of zealous, earnest men, sincere in their convictions, to whom the cause was all and their personalities nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its usual cycle of usefulness, stagnation, corruption, and degeneration. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... Straight was sitting in his office reading a recently published pamphlet,—presenting an elaborate pro-slavery argument, based upon the hopeless intellectual inferiority of the negro, and the physical and moral degeneration of mulattoes, who combined the worst qualities of their two ancestral races,—when a barefooted boy walked into the office, straw hat in hand, came boldly up to the desk at which the old judge was sitting, and said as the judge looked ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... disobedience which forfeited Eden, how merciful and how marvellous is the delicacy of an adjustment, whereby all growth of body, mind and soul being conditioned by work, humanity converts punishment into benediction; escapes degeneration, attains development solely in accordance with the provisions of the primeval curse, man's heritage of labor? Amid the wreck of sacerdotal systems, the destruction of national gods, the periodical tidal waves of scepticism, the gospel of work maintains triumphantly its legions of evangels; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... very often, ultra-conservatism, narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier; probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... over the blackthorn. It is as useless to contend against the purist fad as against the holiness fake. Like a plague of army worms or epidemic of epizootic, it must run its course. Preternicety of expression, an affectation of euphemism, has in every age and clime evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay. When people emasculate their minds, they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus, for nature preserves the equipoise. Every writer of virility is now voted obscene, every man who strikes sledge-hammer blows at brutal wrong intrenched ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann









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