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More "Aberration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... maintained friendly relations with a certain intellectual who was reputed a heretic, an acquaintanceship that contributed greatly to the mental development of young Perez. The dignified burghers who were taking turns in supplying him with his meals, alarmed at his aberration from the straight path, one after another withdrew their protection from him. Black misery clutched him. He was but fourteen years old, and already he had entered upon a life of disquiet and adventure. His story is the Odyssey of an erring son of the ghetto. Repulsed by the Mitnaggedim, he ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... secret sin, Some aberration fraught with morbid gloom, A buried hope which ever burst its ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... Gibbon that it does not "deserve" to be better known; and am grateful to M. de Sacy, notwithstanding the prolixity and occasional repetition in his two large volumes, for the full examination of the most extraordinary religious aberration which ever extensively affected the mind of man. The worship of a mad tyrant is the basis of a subtle metaphysical creed, and of a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... large sum on the people who looked after him, and of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, very little may ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... sense. An aberration in which everything is pardonable. Whatever you do, you will be acquitted ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... himself, in a reflective gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... again resume her throne; and it was not till after months of suffering and agony, that she recovered, if that could be called recovery, which gave back a deformed and hapless lunatic, bereft of intellect and of beauty, in place of the once gay and fascinating Rosalie. The dread aberration of intellect was attributed by her medical attendants to the fatal and sudden shock which she had sustained, and to its effect on a mind weakened by previous anxiety and sorrow; while they feared her malady was of a nature, which admitted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... has its martyrs, like religion. It is not only the savage heathen who run under Juggernaut every day. Diseased brains, corrupt hearts, and impossible desires go far to constitute aberration of intellect. Unreasoning love, and unlimited liquor, will make a man fool enough ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... human race, the complete disregard, even by the most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be essential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But the severest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners a single aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves. And what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in moral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "Now, don't take advantage of a moment's aberration, Alice; and for Heaven's sake don't fall in love wiv me" (he made a v of a th, like Jigger). "I couldn't go to Uganda if ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... speech being permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing tone of FORCED SUBLIMITY..." ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his youth or for some other brief space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... and there were few soldiers in the regiment who would accept the theory that any one of the three had connived at the escape. As for the sergeant—he had served four enlistments in the —teenth, and without a flaw in his record beyond an occasional aberration in the now distant past, due to the potency of the poteen distilled by certain Hibernian experts not far from an old-time "plains fort," where the regiment had rested on its march 'cross continent. As for the officers—but who would suppose an officer guilty of anything of the kind—a ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence is to be believed—and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... one day, with some eloquence, how little the most minute study of the brain aided us to understand thought. He was thus answering Auguste Comte, who, in a moment of aberration, claimed that psychology, in order to become a science, ought to reject the testimony of the consciousness, and to use exclusively as its means of study the histology of the nerve centres and the measurement of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... where custom had fastened upon him. Thus he still spelled traffick, almanack, frolick, havock, and it was quite possible for his critics to follow him through a long list of words of this class and detect his frequent aberration from a uniform rule. Yet, instead of receding from his position, the latest edition advances; a nicer discrimination is made in the etymological origin of the variation, but in point of practice a much more general conformity ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... James Galloway, of Xenia, states, that on one occasion, while Tecumseh was quite young, he saw him intoxicated. This is the only aberration of the kind, which we have heard ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... is, as is commonly believed, a sort of aberration of great minds, then Algernon Charles Swinburne is undoubtedly ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... encountered with great acrimony by less gentle friends. They who are not bound to me by blood or intimacy—and some who are—deride, insult, and revile me in every way for my subjection to a mental aberration which is rapidly consuming a pretty property, more than average ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius are prone ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... made four observations in the months of July, August, and October, and believed that he determined the parallax of the star; but it was afterwards discovered that he was in error, and that the apparent displacement of the star was mainly due to the aberration of light—a phenomenon which was not discovered at ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... opportunity of bringing on a collision with the monitors. One or two of their number went, so far as to pick quarrels with members of the rival class, in hopes of a fight. But in this they were not successful. The Sixth chose to look upon this display of feeling among their juniors as a temporary aberration of mind, and were by no means to be tempted into hostilities. They asserted their authority wherever they could enforce it, and sacrificed it whenever it seemed more discreet to do so. Only one thing evoked a temporary display of vexation from them, and that was ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... fall back of a point immediately below its point of starting. This is used by Fromundus with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... temperament, and at others they had thought it only an alternative to the amusements of vanity and flirtation. Each had felt himself a failure with regard to her, and had hoped for a fresh start from each crisis of repentance, notably, from the death of Felix, only to be disappointed by some fresh aberration. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Proportions nearly similar have been observed repeatedly. Better nourished individuals have produced more deviating leaves on one plant, partly owing to the larger number of stems and branches, and poor or average specimens have mostly been without any aberration or with only one or two abnormal leaves. No further improvement could be attained. Quadrifoliolate leaves were always rare, never [360] attaining a number that would put its stamp on a whole bed. I have endeavored to get some ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... time Governor of Paris. The Emperor, informed of this scandal, sent for him, and demanded of him (he was still very angry), if he had sworn to live and die mad. This might have been, from the sequel, taken as a prediction; for the unfortunate general died at last in a fit of mental aberration. He replied in such improper terms to the reprimands of the Emperor that he was sent, perhaps in order that he might have time to calm himself, to the army of England. It was not only in gaming-houses, however, that the governor thus ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... with ignorance and thoughtlessness. How could he approve of your attacks on dogma, your revolutionary theories which tend to the complete destruction of our holy religion? If it be a fact that he had read your book, the only excuse he can invoke is sudden and inexplicable aberration. It is true that a very bad spirit prevails among a small portion of the French clergy. What are called Gallican ideas are ever sprouting up like noxious weeds; there is a malcontent Liberalism rebellious to our authority which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... all degrees. He would have explained to the Inquisitors of State of the Most Serene Republic that the books of magic found by their apparitors in his possession—"The Clavicula of Solomon," the "Zecor-ben," and other kindred works—had been collected by him as curious instances of human aberration. But the Inquisitors of State would not have believed him, for the Inquisitors were among those who took magic seriously. And, anyhow, they had never asked him to explain, but had left him as if forgotten in that abominable ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... first year of war when I was there. But I will say that he must have been both physically and mentally above the average before he went to fight. My examination extended through periods of his unconsciousness and aberration. Once, for a little time, he came to, apparently sane. The nurse said he had noticed several periods of this rationality during the last forty-eight hours. But these, and the prolonged vitality, do not ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... phase of human life and in the development of human character, and has been able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent emotions ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... and struck a bargain, and Sir Charles was to be shifted to Burdoch's asylum, and nobody allowed to see him there, etc., etc.; the old system, in short, than which no better has as yet been devised for perpetuating, or even causing, mental aberration. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above knowledge we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind, from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mind reverted to Edith, with renewed stupefaction over what she had done. Stupefaction was the word. Reflection on the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered. If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter—with the witch in the guise ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... this beloved "inflective" type. Whatever conformed to the pattern of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and German was accepted as expressive of the "highest," whatever departed from it was frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an interesting aberration.[93] Now any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific. A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... lecturing to their disciples on the Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... important, the most significant stage of the sexual process. It is during tumescence that the whole psychology of the sexual impulse is built up; it is as an incident arising during tumescence and influencing its course that we must probably regard nearly every sexual aberration. It is with the second stage of the sexual process, when the instinct of detumescence arises, that the analogy of evacuation can alone be called in. Even here, that analogy, though real, is not complete, the nervous element involved in detumescence being out of all proportion ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... been on the point of going into hysterics, recovered herself, and overcame the still lingering impulse: she felt as if she had awaked from a momentary aberration of the intellect. Mr. Arnold proceeded to light the candles, saying, in a ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... merely nods his head, says a word now and then, or holds his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would be so inconvenient—" The Prioress's thoughts faded away; for even to herself she did not like to admit that it would be inconvenient for Evelyn to confess to Father Daly the sins she had committed—if she had committed any. Perhaps it might be all an aberration, an illusion in the interval between her father's death and her return to the convent. "Her sins have been absolved, and for guidance she will not turn to Father Daly but to me." The Reverend Mother reflected that a man would not be able to help ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... ABERRATION. An apparent change of place, or alteration of their mean position, in the fixed stars, caused by the earth's orbital movement.—Aberration of a planet signifies its progressive geocentric motion, or the space through which it appears to move, as seen from the earth, during the time which ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of Greece an aberration of the amazing political impulse towards [Greek: aristeyein]. The [Greek: polis] utterly opposed to new education; culture ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... close and earnest attention. To the first query, the reply must be made that in one-half, or nearly one-half, of the cases of this variety of insanity there is traceable a hereditary tendency to aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... un-English as that of assassination from revenge, yet when the national prejudices of the prisoner had been explained, which made him consider himself as stained with indelible dishonour, the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard his crime as the aberration of a false idea of honour, rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or habitually vicious. I shall never forget the charge of the venerable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... with the direst consequences if he said a word to her on the subject; moreover in her way she was a wise woman, one who knew when it was best not to ask questions. She was aware that she had suffered from a fit of aberration or madness and that during this time her father had died and certain peculiar things had happened. There she was content to leave the business and she never again spoke to me upon the subject. Of this I was very glad, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... surfaces. (Fig. 139.) All these circumstances still further influence the refracting character of the visual organ. The achromatic arrangement of the transparent refracting mediums of the eye, remedies the aberration of refraction in the different portions ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... difference between these men, however, will seem almost unanimity, if we compare them with others who, so far as logic and authority go, have just as good a claim on our attention. There is hardly any conceivable aberration of moral licence that has not, in some quarter or other, embodied itself into a rule of life, and claimed to be the proper outcome of Protestant Christianity. Nor is this true only of the wilder and more ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... just to go one step further and to question whether the alleged necessity of thought is, in any case and properly speaking, a real necessity. Unless those who advance the present argument are the victims of some mental aberration, it is overwhelmingly improbable that their minds should differ in a fundamental and important attribute from the minds of the vast majority of their species. Or, to continue the above quotation, "They may fairly be asked to consider, whether it ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... instant I stood still, bewildered, as if I'd walked into a dream, beguiled by a false clue of boots; and during my few seconds of temporary aberration my dazed eyes fell upon a book which lay on the table. It was Sir Lionel's "Morte d'Arthur" (second volume; he's lent me the first), and in it for a marker was a glove of mine. I'd lost it at Torquay, after we had our dear, good talk, and he knew I was looking for it, all about ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and from that time either a Papal army or the employment of the army of some friendly monarch was necessary in order to protect these estates. With the confirmation and consolidation of these estates into a kingdom under Charlemagne in the ninth century the Papacy completed its moral aberration. Most of the Popes were still men of good character, and they no doubt persuaded themselves that, since the income of these estates was needed for the fulfilment of their spiritual task, it was proper to defend them by the ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... mountain bore nearly east instead of N. E. N. I saw three of my fixed points, however, by which, with my pocket sextant, I could ascertain our true position, which proved to be very wide of my intended course. It was, like many other accidental frustrations of my plans in this journey, an aberration that did us good, for we had thereby avoided the bad scrub formerly passed through, and also a rocky part of the range. We next descended into a valley in which, after following down a dry watercourse two miles, we ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The struggle, the self-denial, the pain, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... to a focus at precisely the same distance. The rays that pass near the outer edge of the lens have a shorter focus than that of the rays which pass near the center of the lens; this is called spherical aberration. A similar phenomenon occurs with a concave mirror whose surface is spherical. In that case, as we have seen, the difficulty is overcome by giving the mirror a parabolic instead of a spherical form. In an analogous way the spherical aberration of a lens can be corrected by altering ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... provisions, which is an evil counsellor; not so the Necrophori, for, thanks to my generosity, victuals are superabundant, both beneath the soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this slaughter. Here we have the aberration of exhaustion, the morbid fury of a life on the point of extinction. As is generally the case, work bestows a peaceable disposition on the grave-digger, while inaction inspires him with perverted ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... left me in a condition of mental aberration, he sounded again, to begin a persistent, dragging pull which was the most disheartening of all his maneuvers; for he took yard after yard of line until he was far away from me, out in the Panuco. We followed him, and for an hour crossed to and fro, up and down, humoring him, responding to his ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... writings which he produced during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... considered now in the serene light of reason, cannot be looked on as anything but an aberration. Libya is an immense box of sand which never had any value, nor has it now. Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan cover more than one million one hundred thousand square kilometres and have less than nine hundred ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... was where it had no business to be, not a bit of her linen professed whiteness without fulfilling its profession; the very pins on her pincushion were stuck in after a pattern from which she was careful to allow no aberration; and as for her own person, it gave the same idea of perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird. It is true that her light-brown hair was cropped behind like a boy's, and was dressed in front in a number of flat rings, that lay quite away from her face; but there was no sort of coiffure ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... invariable method of self-defence: 'Temper, mum? Well, I 'ave my faults, I daresay, but not that; all as knows me knows my temper is 'eavenly. But the fact is, mum, Mrs. Jones [her late mistress] was a bit flighty.' And she touches her forehead, and even sometimes winks, to indicate aberration of the intellect. A really good-tempered servant is now rare; and there are very few who will bear 'speaking to' when their work is ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... question; but among the oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut character. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... and imperfections. Once there, once identified with his object, he can observe its irregularities without being irritated or perturbed. As for that Rhadamanthine criticism which sits aloof from its object, and treats every aberration from a straight line as something abnormal and abominable, he leaves it to the immaculate. In truth, such criticism, with all its pretences to authority, is open to this fatal objection,—it tends to destroy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... father was a hard-working general practitioner in Birmingham, where his name is still remembered and respected. About ten years ago he began to show signs of mental aberration, which we were inclined to put down to overwork and the effects of a sunstroke. Feeling my own incompetence to pronounce upon a case of such importance, I at once sought the highest advice in Birmingham and London. Among others we consulted the eminent alienist, Mr. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Lord Rayleigh's article on Optics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that a very minute change in the form of the curvature of the surface of a lens will make a large difference in the spherical aberration. This is to be expected, seeing that spherical aberration is a phenomenon of a differential sort, i.e. a measure of the difference between the curvature actually attained, and the theoretical curvature at each point of the lens, for given positions of point and image. Sir H. Grubb gives an illustration ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... flogged; the credulity of the parents would have been laughed at; and the lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect as the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of India to put the heaviest strain upon it, but it will remain so because the Mahomedans realise their own strength—the strength in the knowledge that their cause is just and that they have got the power to vindicate justice in spite of the aberration suffered by Great Britain under a Prime Minister whom continued power has made as reckless in making promises as in ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... cases of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world filled with a morbid ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of all this upon Mrs. Hammond has been painful in the extreme. We can only dimly imagine the terrible suffering through which she has passed. Her present aberration was first visible after a long period of sleeplessness, occasioned by distress of mind. During the whole of two weeks, I am told, she did not close her eyes; the most of that time walking the floor of her ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... been already observed, the money came most opportunely: a greater calamity even than poverty, however, shortly afterwards counterbalanced his good fortune; but the assertion of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, that his mental aberration arose from his having squandered this legacy, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... members of the family at home. I could not see or hear them anywhere, so, presuming they were out walking, I washed my hands, lit a lamp, and sat down to my tea, where it had been left for me on the dining-table. I remembered—wonderful aberration from my usual thoughtlessness—that the book I had left in the hammock had a beautiful cover which the dew would spoil, so I left my tea to bring it in. Two little white squares struck my eye in the gathering dusk. I picked ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... Waterloo next morning, struggling with a desire to say: 'Drive me to Chelsea.' But his sense of proportion was too strong. Besides, he still felt shaky, and did not want to risk another aberration like that of last night, away from home. Holly, too, was expecting him, and what he had in his bag for her. Not that there was any cupboard love in his little sweet—she was a bundle of affection. Then, with the rather bitter ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (odoratio quaedam venatica),—a good scent for truth and beauty,—it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual. Degeneracy in morals roots in a one-sided and wavering philosophy, doubly dangerous, because it blinds ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Anna with a bitter smile, "yes, the virtuous Empress Anna blushed in the arms of her lover, Biron, at this aberration of her sold and coupled niece. She found it very revolting that the poor sixteen-year-old Anna Leopoldowna dared to have a heart of her own and to feel a real love. They must therefore rob her of the only happiness Heaven had vouchsafed ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... vicissitudes of the climate. The care taken by civilized man to preserve health is, by increasing susceptibility, the indirect cause of disease; the more rigid is the observance of regimen, the more pernicious will be the slightest aberration from it; but a total disregard of all the comforts of regular food, and efficient shelter, the habit of cramming the stomach when food is plentiful, and of enduring long abstinence when it cannot be procured, has a far more baneful ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... and devotedly attached. The effect of this blow he never thoroughly got over, but gradually became in every respect an altered man. From one of unflinching energy and firm determination, he degenerated into a desponding, weak, and vacillating imbecile; and lingered on in a mental aberration for some two years, when he died. During the period of his distraction it is not surprising that his practice rapidly declined, and ultimately became completely destroyed; hence, upon his demise, his ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... of interest, rather than the recovery. That they are useful in some cases cannot be denied, but there are many instances too well authenticated to be doubted, where persons desirous of getting rid of aged and infirm relatives, particularly if they manifested any little aberration of mind (as is common in advanced age), have consigned them to these receptacles, from which, through the supposed kindness of their friends, and the management of the proprietors, they have never returned. If the parties ail nothing, they are soon driven to insanity by ill usage, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... exactly true of any one, must, actually, when extended to cases where the error would be appreciable (e.g. to lines of perceptible breadth), be corrected by the joining to them of new propositions about the aberration. The exact correspondence, then, between the facts and those first principles of geometry which are involved in the so-called definitions, is a fiction, and is merely supposed. Geometry has, indeed (what Dugald Stewart did not perceive), ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific discovery. He came under ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... indications of aberration of mind, and seemed rather the object of pity than of amusement; he, however, appeared delighted with himself, and also with his audience, for at the conclusion he walked first to the left of the stage and bobbed his head in his usual grotesque manner at the side boxes; ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... confinement. On one occasion he succeeded in getting half his body through a ventilating hole in his prison, from which he was extricated with great difficulty. The reason he assigned for jumping into the sea was that he feared being 'burnt alive,' in the boiler, a punishment in his aberration he fancied the captain had ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... one who seeks but to reproduce phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar incident in a ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... not wake any more, or rather—I speak incorrectly—all of them awake for a short time before their death and in their mental aberration fly to the jungle, from which they never more return. Of two hundred men, sixty remained to me. Many ran away, many died of smallpox, and some fell ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... beset with very great optical difficulties, and for a long time little advance was made upon the work of preceding generations. Two great optical barriers, known technically as spherical and chromatic aberration—the one due to a failure of the rays of light to fall all in one plane when focalized through a lens, the other due to the dispersive action of the lens in breaking the white light into prismatic colors—confronted ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... are due to mental aberration. It may be the result of a momentary and sudden loss of mental equipoise, or the final and fatal ending of a premeditated desire carried through days, weeks, months, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... do so as yet; for I felt myself, as I lay, under the influence of a pleasure quite new to me; and listened, in a kind of peaceful aberration, to the gentle murmurs of the summer wind, as it breathed on me through the closed window-blinds above me. Then I fancied I heard a voice that spoke to me from the end of the sacristy: it whispered so low that I could not catch the words. I remained motionless, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have seen, under Sally's window, failed in his dreamy state to see her as she looked over the cross-bar at him, and then went on towards the old town. It may be she was not very visible; the double glasses of an open sash-window are almost equal to opacity. But even with that, the extreme aberration of Fenwick's mind at the moment is the only way to account for ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... but it being pointed out by the undertaker that it might involve some uncertainty in the settlement of his bill, together with some reasonable doubt of the thorough resignation of Corbin, whose previous momentary aberration in that respect they were celebrating, the project was postponed until AFTER THE FUNERAL. And here an ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Pritty! Her hysterical fit was now quite over, but pale cheeks and a trembling exhausted frame told eloquently of her recent sufferings. Mr Hazlit's limbs were also shaky, and his face cadaverous, showing that his temporary aberration of reason ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... you must be very careful not to confound monomania with eccentricity. The distinction is as important as it is real. Eccentricity is a conscious aberration from the common course of life; it consists in peculiarities in reasoning, words, and actions, which are wilfully indulged, in defiance of popular sentiment. The eccentric man knows that he is eccentric; he is willing to be so, and to take the consequences; but ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... however, scarcely followed her pen as she sat in the little library that opened from the big, cheery hall. Her thoughts were with all that had betided in the past and what might have been. She canvassed anew, as often heretofore, her strange infatuation, like a veritable aberration, so soon she had ceased to love her husband, to make the signal and significant discovery that he was naught to love. She had always had a sort of enthusiasm for the truth in the abstract—not so much as a moral endowment, but a supreme fixity, the one immutable ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... following narrative, I have endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the ipsissima verba of the valued friend from whom I received it, conscious that any aberration from HER mode of telling the tale of her own life would at once impair its ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Intelligence and morality have abdicated. Nicolai quotes a number of almost incredible examples from the Germany of 1914 and 1915, and equally striking instances could be given in the case of every belligerent nation. There was no resistance to these suggestions. In the collective aberration, all differences of class, education, intellectual or moral value, are reduced to one level; all are equalised. The entire human race, from base to summit, is delivered over to the Furies. If the least sparkle of free will shows itself, it is trampled under foot, and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... English financier, First Lord of the Treasury, Hon. James Hampton-Jones, K.C.B. Immediately everybody echoed his remark, and the strain being thus relieved, the spell dropped from them and several laughed loudly over their momentary aberration. ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell was strolling ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... work—does not know that it is mediocre or bad. That is the horror of it! The artist who has fallen from his original high estate is no more conscious of his failings than the lunatic is aware of his mental aberration. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... be expected roused his keenest attention; and he never relaxed his mental grip of a subject until it had yielded to his persistent inquisition. It was to these qualities that he owed his discoveries of the aberration of light and the nutation of the earth's axis. The first was announced in 1729. What is meant by it is that, owing to the circumstance of light not being instantaneously transmitted, the heavenly bodies appear shifted from their true places by an amount depending upon the ratio which the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... it. I own that your blunder was providential. It is sure and certain that but for you the DUNCAN would have fallen into the hands of the convicts; but for you we should have been recaptured by the Maories. But for my sake tell me by what supernatural aberration of mind you were induced to write New ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... owes him properly a portrait in return for so much portraiture. I may exaggerate the charm and the importance of the modern illustrative form, may see in it a capacity of which it is not yet itself wholly conscious, but if I do so Mr. Reinhart is partly responsible for the aberration. Abundant, intelligent, interpretative work in black and white is, to the sense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of the time, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future. This idea, I confess, is such as to lead one to write not only sympathetically ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the other Boer leaders and their clergy too. The agencies must have been exceedingly subtle, and the jugglery and artifice superhuman, to operate such processes of reasoning, such deception and aberration in honest-minded ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... one armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... made to me this morning when you assured me your daughter had left this house to return to her employment at Stading?" said Merrington, with a cruel smile. "That wasn't true, you know. How do you describe that untruth? As a temporary aberration of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... family few smiles but many tears, and the death-angel passed close to our doors. My eldest brother, while at work in the hayfield, was smitten by the sun, causing a mental aberration which made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and finally led him to cut the thread of life with his own hand; my second brother was pulled by his coat entangled in a wheel, beneath a heavy load which crushed his thigh. This left the rest of us ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... what we do; in spite of every aberration of the individual. And so, when we saw it was impossible that my brother and his wife should live together, we simply transferred our allegiance to the child—we constituted him ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... loss of her first-born. An eminent London practitioner, to whom her case became known, was of opinion that reason would return should a second child be born to the disconsolate mother. This proved to be correct; and after three years of mental aberration the sufferer woke as from a dream. For many months after the awakening she was under the impression that her second child was her first-born, and only became aware of the true state of the case when it was gently broken ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... for a long time out of her wits; some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof had fallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmed that the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause of her mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time when this woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become a beggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in those days this old woman exercised a peculiar influence ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... form, which visibly appeared to them. Although there are people who utterly deny any such thing, and say that no man in his right senses ever yet saw any supernatural phantom or apparition, but that children only, and silly women, or men disordered by sickness, in some aberration of the mind or distemperature of the body, have had empty and extravagant imaginations, whilst the real evil genius, superstition, was in themselves. Yet if Dion and Brutus, men of solid understanding, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... large body of invalided men, who had fought at Weissenburg or Worth, made their way into Paris, looking battle and travel-stained, some with their heads bandaged, others with their arms in slings, and others limping along with the help of sticks. It is difficult to conceive by what aberration the authorities allowed the Parisians to obtain that woeful glimpse of the misfortunes of France. The men in question ought never to have been sent to Paris at all. They might well have been cared for elsewhere. As it happened, the sorry sight affected all who beheld it. Some were angered by it, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... chromatic, spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible—it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Rev. Dr. John M. Krebbs, of New York, states through this clairvoyant that the cause of his mental aberration while on earth was a misinterpretation by him of a spiritual vision which he was permitted to receive. Thus misunderstanding the aim of his spiritual visitants, he became haunted with a fallacy which ultimated in his ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... care for man" (Laws, p. 818).[10] Such was Plato's judgment of mathematics; but the mathematicians do not read Plato, while those who read him know no mathematics, and regard his opinion upon this question as merely a curious aberration. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... last few hours had meant anything whatever they had demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it; that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery that Lanyard had come safely through the Assyrian debacle to take up anew his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general and to the genius of its ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... with the New Vetzlar Eye-pieces, as exhibited at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Lenses of these Eye-pieces are so constructed that the rays of light fall nearly perpendicular to the surface of the various lenses, by which the aberration is completely removed: and a telescope so fitted gives one-third more magnifying power and light than could be obtained by the old Eye-pieces. Prices of the various ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... describes, although as yet he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled—in such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself. According to infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... after Katherine, on Hardy's part, had suggested sundry innovations, involving the condemnation of all the pictures and ornaments she could lay her hands on,—a piece of sacrilege which Mrs. Rogers regarded more in sorrow than in anger, as indicating a pitiable aberration of intellect,—the rooms were ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... the return from church is in all ten parts temporary aberration," I returned. "It is what you might call Seventh Day affection. Quiet, and no doubt sincere, but it is dissipated by the rising of the Monday sun. It is like our good resolutions on New Year's Day, which barely last over a fortnight. Some little word spoken by the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... nothing to select. To put it briefly, I will end by using the language of psychiatry: if one denies that creative work involves problems and purposes, one must admit that an artist creates without premeditation or intention, in a state of aberration; therefore, if an author boasted to me of having written a novel without a preconceived design, under a sudden inspiration, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Kew, to attempt the proof of the earth's motion by observing the annual parallax of stars. He certainly found an annual variation of zenith distance, but not at the times of year required by the parallax. This led him to the discovery of the "aberration" of light and of nutation. Bradley has been described as the founder of the modern system of accurate observation. He died in 1762, leaving behind him thirteen folio volumes of valuable but unreduced observations. Those relating to the stars were reduced by Bessel and published in 1818, at ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... knowledge of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but only ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... contingencies which, though desirable, were certainly not probable. The precise and legal language of the instruments, provoked much ridicule, and might justify a smile. They were chiefly dictated by a gentleman, whose mental aberration led to his removal from office. It is, however, difficult to suggest more explicit forms, and the announcement of the plans of government was a ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... a professional aunt, desirable if not indispensable, is tact. If she should be possessed of ever so little, it will save her a considerable amount of bother. She won't, in a moment of mental aberration, praise dark-eyed children to Zerlina, whose children have blue eyes. Should she do so, by some unlucky chance, it would take several expeditions to the Zoo, and probably one to Kew, before things were as ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... having become known, he was dispossessed of his wealth, and must therefore work for his maintenance. The madman believed the tale, but showed no disposition to rouse himself from the state of indolence which had been the primary cause of his mental aberration. He folded his arms, and sat down, doubtless expecting that in due time a servant would enter as usual to inform him that dinner was ready. But in this he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, a large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... soon became a part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would then remain for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of mind. We were at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until a circumstance happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen, and Biddy became a part ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... from it that gravity does not travel like light, so as to take time on its journey from sun to planet; for, if it did, there would be a sort of aberration, and the force on its arrival could no longer be accurately directed to the centre of the sun. (See Nature, vol. xlvi., p. 497.) It is a matter for accuracy of observation, therefore, to decide whether the minutest trace of such deviation can be detected, i.e. within what ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... gently, but Beth's natural tact stood her in good stead. She related the story of the search for Lucy, the discovery that one of the maids at Elmhurst resembled the missing girl, and the detective's conclusion that Eliza Parsons was none other than Lucy Rogers, who was suffering from a peculiar mental aberration and had forgotten every detail of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... Mahometanism. As for the religion of the Druses, I cannot agree with Gibbon that it does not "deserve" to be better known; and am grateful to M. de Sacy, notwithstanding the prolixity and occasional repetition in his two large volumes, for the full examination of the most extraordinary religious aberration which ever extensively affected the mind of man. The worship of a mad tyrant is the basis of a subtle metaphysical creed, and of a severe, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... illness of 25 days. His complaint was a remittent fever, taken on our short journey into the interior. On the third day after our return, he took to his bed, from which he never rose again, excepting on the day previous to his death, when, under a state of mental aberration, he secretly took off his shirt, and threw himself from out of the port-hole near his bed into the sea; he was soon taken up, but his delirium continued until he expired. At five this afternoon he was buried in Paradise. My other companion, John Debenham, has also been ill ever since our return, ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... treason and executed, while Fisher was necessarily to some degree implicated. Before her death the Nun made a confession of elaborate imposture, but too much weight should not be attached to confessions made under such conditions. Given a certain degree of mental aberration, the case is not without parallels pointing to an absence of conscious fraud. But whether in her case it was fraud or mania, the important fact remains that there were numbers of people who attributed her utterances neither to the one nor the other but to inspiration; ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... feel A glowing ardour, an intense delight, On every subject but the one that lifts The soul above its sensual, vain pursuits, And elevates the mind and thoughts to God! Zeal in a sacred cause alone is deemed An aberration of our mental powers. The sons of pleasure cannot bear that light Of heavenly birth which penetrates the souls Of men, who, deeply conscious of their guilt, Mourn o'er their lost, degraded state, and seek, Through faith in Christ's atonement, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... principles in the soul; and deformity is the want of symmetry, or failure in the attainment of a mark or measure. The latter arises from ignorance, and no one is voluntarily ignorant; ignorance is only the aberration of the soul moving towards knowledge. And as medicine cures the diseases and gymnastic the deformity of the body, so correction cures the injustice, and education (which differs among the Hellenes from mere instruction in the arts) cures the ignorance of the soul. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... should attach us (as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beings incapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating the race, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that our joys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of the world. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring us into the imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or on whose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... says a word now and then, or holds his peace. Does he know what he's about? If they had not heard things concerning his health,—and other things,—they would still feel safe. He seems the only calm man to be found in the hall—but is the calm aberration? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it lives up to or falls short of that standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely better to regulate it ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... that I am liable to fits of delirium but by a sudden and alarming aberration while waiting for her answer I became mentally aware of three trained dogs dancing on their hind legs. I don't know why. Perhaps because of the pervading solemnity. There's nothing more solemn on earth than a dance ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... A physician of eminence has told us of the melancholy termination of the life of a gentleman who in a state of mental aberration cut his throat; the loss of blood restored his mind to a healthy condition; but the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... but hopelessly lost when subjected to the wiles of the experimenter. Had the Bee the least glimmer of reason would she lay her egg on the third, on the tenth part of the necessary provender? Would she lay it in an empty cell? Would she be guilty of such inconceivable maternal aberration as to leave her nurseling without nourishment? I have told the story; let ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... on Ps. 30:1, "In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded," says in explaining the title [*Unto the end, a psalm for David, in an ecstasy]: "Ekstasis in Greek signifies in Latin excessus mentis, an aberration of the mind. This happens in two ways, either through dread of earthly things or through the mind being rapt in heavenly things and forgetful of this lower world." Now dread of earthly things pertains to the appetite. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of mind, madness, lunacy, craziness, derangement, frenzy, delirium, mania, hallucination, aberration of mind, bedlamism; paranoia, monomania. Antonyms: sanity, rationality, lucidity. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... extent, liberty of speech. They could now discuss an address to the sovereign, and give full publicity to their debates. Inquiry could now be made to some purpose, whether the Italian policy of Napoleon III. was sanctioned by France, whether that aberration were national which impelled to the violation of all right and law, in order to unify Italy, and pave the way, at the same time, for the unification of Germany. The revolutionary left of the French parliament, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... inconveniences. Both are more reasonable than Mr. Gladstone, who would have private judgment without its inevitable inconveniences. The Romanist produces repose by means of stupefaction. The Protestant encourages activity, though he knows that where there is much activity there will be some aberration. Mr. Gladstone wishes for the unity of the fifteenth century with the active and searching spirit of the sixteenth. He might as well wish to be in two places ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to get ahead of the rest of the community, and education as merely another weapon to use in making society contribute more to purse and pleasure. And on the firing line, formed by these noisy agitators, mistaken by many as educational leaders, these were the things striven for. But this aberration was only temporary. The real educational leaders, in trying to realize the goal of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and to do it having to combat this movement of wildcat educational speculation, gradually came to see a more important truth even than the one they were seeking. As ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... her throne; and it was not till after months of suffering and agony, that she recovered, if that could be called recovery, which gave back a deformed and hapless lunatic, bereft of intellect and of beauty, in place of the once gay and fascinating Rosalie. The dread aberration of intellect was attributed by her medical attendants to the fatal and sudden shock which she had sustained, and to its effect on a mind weakened by previous anxiety and sorrow; while they feared her malady was of a nature, which admitted no hope of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... inexperienced intellect and an imagination morbidly awakened, to grasp the situation before him. The common sense that had hitherto governed his life told him that the deputy would go to-morrow, and that there was nothing in his wife's conduct to show that her coquetry and aberration would not pass as easily. But it recurred to him that she had never shown this coquetry or aberration to HIM during their own brief courtship,—that she had never looked or acted like this before. If this was love, she had never known it; if it was only ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... increased every day, although his intellect was not wholly obscured; but at the times that it was clearest, he seemed to suffer more than during its hours of partial aberration. He gave way less than at first to fits of violent irritation; the terrible expressions he used to utter, and the murmurs and curses which rose to his lips with such frightful bitterness, were at an end. He even ceased to ask that ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... points, however, by which, with my pocket sextant, I could ascertain our true position, which proved to be very wide of my intended course. It was, like many other accidental frustrations of my plans in this journey, an aberration that did us good, for we had thereby avoided the bad scrub formerly passed through, and also a rocky part of the range. We next descended into a valley in which, after following down a dry watercourse two miles, we found a fine pond of water, exactly as the sun was setting. This day I had shot ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... was probably operated not unlike one of our familiar spaceships. In effect, it was itself a gigantic globular vehicle. Later I learned that it was thought that Wandl's atmosphere could be highly electronized at will, with a resulting aberration of the natural light-ray reflected from her into space. This could have caused the blurring of the image of Wandl when viewed telescopically from ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... the loss of her first-born. An eminent London practitioner, to whom her case became known, was of opinion that reason would return should a second child be born to the disconsolate mother. This proved to be correct; and after three years of mental aberration the sufferer woke as from a dream. For many months after the awakening she was under the impression that her second child was her first-born, and only became aware of the true state of the case when it was gently broken to ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Galloway, of Xenia, states, that on one occasion, while Tecumseh was quite young, he saw him intoxicated. This is the only aberration of the kind, which we have heard charged ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... Vetzlar Eye-pieces, as exhibited at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The Lenses of these Eye-pieces are so constructed that the rays of light fall nearly perpendicular to the surface of the various lenses, by which the aberration is completely removed; and a telescope so fitted gives one-third more magnifying power and light than could be obtained by the old Eye-pieces. Prices of the various ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... and anxieties flocked back on him as time passed and no Americans appeared. Americans. How precious. How clean, and straight, and admirable. Actually he had sometimes, he remembered, thought they weren't. What an aberration. Actually he had been, he remembered, impatient with them when first he came back from France. What folly. Americans. The very word was refreshing, was like clear water on a thirsty day. One American, even one, coming in that afternoon would have seemed to Mr. Twist a godsend, a purifier, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Miserables, that early chapter where Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him? Well, still more important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration? There is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there. It was the old impetus, we are told, that was as yet too strong for the new control; the old instinct, too dark for the new light in the brain. It takes every vessel some time to answer to its helm; ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... of right and wrong and realizes that the act he committed was against the law. Medically he may have a slight aberration, but only experts ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... my culpable silence to 'aberration.' I am out of my orbit, rather, and you must have patience till I come in again. The book is out to-day, and I am going to Captain Washington to see about copies to yourself, the Governor, the Bishop, Fairbairn, Thompson, Rutherfoord, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... identity, and addressed his wife and children as strangers. When the former first heard her husband speaking of 'John Clare' as a third person, she became terribly frightened; but thinking he might recover from his mental aberration by being carefully nursed and kept as quiet as possible, she resolved to do her own duty independent of the world. She was successful, to some extent; for after a while the clouds began, to disappear, and the poet again spoke in ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring. So far was Edward Waverley from expecting general sympathy with his own feelings, or concluding that the present state of things ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... touch with the facts of the situation," said he at last, mopping his heated brow. "Now, gentlemen, I cannot make my point better than by detailing to you what I have myself done this morning. You will the more easily condone any mental aberration upon your own part when you realize that even I have had moments when my balance has been disturbed. We have had for some years in this household a housekeeper—one Sarah, with whose second name I have never attempted to burden my memory. She ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... manes of Thomas Jeffcourt; but it being pointed out by the undertaker that it might involve some uncertainty in the settlement of his bill, together with some reasonable doubt of the thorough resignation of Corbin, whose previous momentary aberration in that respect they were celebrating, the project was postponed until AFTER THE FUNERAL. And here ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan was concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to Harley under the first rough shock of her mother's startling and what then had appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make up for it to the big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously in love. Also she was still all alone in the mental chaos into which everything that had happened last night had conspired ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... French dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Burdoch, and struck a bargain, and Sir Charles was to be shifted to Burdoch's asylum, and nobody allowed to see him there, etc., etc.; the old system, in short, than which no better has as yet been devised for perpetuating, or even causing, mental aberration. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... resemble those of certain diseases of the brain. The person to whom the drug is administered either exhibits an exhilaration akin to undue excess of alcohol, or else the functions of the brain are entirely distorted, with a complete loss of memory or a chronic aberration ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... large instruments are much more liable than smaller ones to what is termed 'chromatic' and 'spherical' aberration; and this also is detrimental to definition. No very large refractor is entirely ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... perfectly delightful!" Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... a general rule, where the child is well managed, medicine, of any kind, is very rarely required; and if disease were more generally regarded in its true light, not as something thrust into the system, which requires to be expelled by force, but as an aberration from a natural mode of action, produced by some external cause, we should be in less haste to attack it by medicine, and more watchful in its prevention. Accordingly, where a constant demand for medicine exists in a nursery, the mother may rest assured, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... time out of her wits; some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof had fallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmed that the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause of her mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time when this woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become a beggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in those days this old woman exercised a peculiar ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... monster. Heaven reserves strength and beauty for the children of love!' The monster, that is I!" said the advocate, with intense rage. "Whilst the other—But let us ignore these preliminaries to an outrageous action. I only desired up to the present to show you the aberration of my father's reason under the influence of his passion. We shall soon ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... nothing. Night and day were the same. He did not eat. When he lay back upon his bed he became irrational, yet seemed to be conscious of it. When he sat up his senses slowly righted. But he preferred the spells of aberration. Sometimes he was possessed by hideous nightmares, out of which he awoke with the terror of a child. Then he would have to sit up in the dark, in a cold sweat, and wait, and wait, until he dared ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Sonnenschein, in his great work, 'The Destructive Type.' We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a murderous man. The type is such that its very life— I might say its very health—is in killing. Some hold that it is not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature. My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets—" (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah!" but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... sensation not lacking in agreeableness. Through the rosy mists of the Burgundy there began to surge up other faces than that cold pallid little face which had hovered before him all the afternoon like a tantalizing phantom; at the Chartreuse stage he began to wonder what hallucination, what aberration of sense had overcome him, that he should have been stirred to his depths and distressed so hugely. Warmer faces were these that swam before him, faces fuller of the joy of life. The devil take all stuck-up ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Her Majesty in the morning, she was nearly in a state of mental aberration. When I saw her again in the evening, the King by her side, surrounded by her family, the Princesse Eizabeth, and yourself, madame' said the kind Count, 'she appeared to me like a person risen from the dead and restored to life. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... thing with a projecting hood that had a remote resemblance to a bowed head, and, squatting like some metal Buddha in this weird light that ministered to its needs, it seemed to Denton in certain moods almost as if this must needs be the obscure idol to which humanity in some strange aberration had offered up his life. His duties had a varied monotony. Such items as the following will convey an idea of the service of the press. The thing worked with a busy clicking so long as things went well; but if the paste that came pouring through a feeder from another room and which it ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... first importance in all these cases, is the lack of self-control. Weakness, aberration or disease of the Will. The Individual Intelligence fails to exercise its divine prerogative and be Master in and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... this instrument at Kew, to attempt the proof of the earth's motion by observing the annual parallax of stars. He certainly found an annual variation of zenith distance, but not at the times of year required by the parallax. This led him to the discovery of the "aberration" of light and of nutation. Bradley has been described as the founder of the modern system of accurate observation. He died in 1762, leaving behind him thirteen folio volumes of valuable but unreduced observations. Those relating to the stars were reduced by Bessel and published in 1818, ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... moment arrived, the clouds were hanging over Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty themselves. The prick was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in following the aberration of the Rhone to think of playing tricks elsewhere. Accordingly, I started for the station in a spirit which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of sentiment, was ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... inductions, or their consequences, to cases in which the error would be appreciable—to lines of perceptible breadth or thickness, parallels which deviate sensibly from equidistance, and the like—we correct our conclusions, by combining with them a fresh set of propositions relating to the aberration; just as we also take in propositions relating to the physical or chemical properties of the material, if those properties happen to introduce any modification into the result; which they easily may, even with respect to figure and magnitude, as in the case, for instance, of expansion ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life, that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the separation came. "Enough of him!" muttered Cope to himself presently, and began to cast about ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... hand, you affirm absence of motive on its part, you must affirm absence of activity also.—Let us then assume that just as sometimes an intelligent person when in a state of frenzy proceeds, owing to his mental aberration, to action without a motive, so the highest Self also created this world without any motive.—That, we reply, would contradict the omniscience of the highest Self, which is vouched for by Scripture.—Hence the doctrine of the creation proceeding from an intelligent ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... of Dorfmeister, Weismann, Merrifield, Standfuss, and Fischer, on seasonal dimorphism and the aberration of colour in butterflies have so often been discussed in biological literature that a short reference to them will suffice. By seasonal dimorphism is meant the fact that species may appear at different seasons of the year in a somewhat different form or colour. Vanessa prorsa is the summer ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... minor degree in some men, and is sometimes well marked in women, usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient. "The mirror," remarks Bloch (Beitraege 1, p. 201), "plays an important part in the genesis of sexual aberration.... It cannot be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual excitement at the sight of their own bodies in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of himself, in a reflective gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of them in all, Paul, the newcomer making the tenth. They were all advanced in years, except one young woman, who was prevented by mental aberration from supporting herself outside the ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's Mother! It ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... threw them off in course of time. He was happy in his marriage and in his family, and such troubles and distresses as were inevitable he accepted calmly and quietly. In his death, as in his life, he was fortunate: he had no long or painful illness, and he was spared the calamity of aberration of intellect, the saddest ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... brand of our failure—it is our aberration from the normal type as it is fully revealed in Christ. "Nothing is so unnatural as sin,"[56] nothing is so irrational, nothing so abnormal—it is always a break from the unity of the divine Life, a movement towards isolation and self-solitariness, a pursuit of narrowing desires, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... suppressed. Drug poisons are added to the waste and morbid matter which are already clogging the channels of life. And, of course, under such unnatural treatment, in many instances things go from bad to worse. Flushes, headaches, rheumatic and neuralgic pains, melancholia, irritability, mental aberration, partial paralysis and a multitude of other symptoms appear and gradually ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... of aberration lighted in the old man's eye. "H'm, yes," said he, pondering. "Stuck to one business. So you did. H'm." Then, suddenly sly, he chirped: "But I've struck it rich now." He tapped his box. "Jewelry," he half-whispered. "Miners ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... The aberration of mind of the unhappy Mr. Armstrong was at last with inevitable and steady step approaching its dreaded culminating point. To the outward eye he exhibited but little change. He was indeed, at times more restless, and his eyes would wander round ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... and after brief deliberation and close investigation he came to the conclusion, 'twas a snare and a delusion to toy with imagination and fear assassination till the hallucination became habituation and his mental aberration get the better of his determination toward analyzation of the sound upon the roof. Of the pat, pat, patter and the clat, clat, clatter of small claws upon the ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... question his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The struggle, the self-denial, the pain, and the victory, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... regard it all as an unfortunate aberration; and if you regret it, and change your mind, you will be free at any time you like to come back and nothing shall be ever said about it. But I'm not begging you to do so. I may be wrong; perhaps ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... with a mallet, he could not have been more overwhelmed. All the scaffolding of his joys, so rapidly run up, fell. This strange fact had occurred, in the impulse of joy he had felt since daybreak he had wholly forgotten that he had to confess. He had a moment of aberration. "But I am forgiven," he thought; "the proof is that state of happiness, such as I have never known, that truly wonderful expansion of soul which I experienced in the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... to strangle with his own hands the woman he had loved so dearly, had at one time adored on his knees. The count rushed out of the room with gestures of desperation, muttering incoherent words; and as he shewed plain signs of mental aberration, his father, Charles of Artois, took him away, and they went that same evening to their palace of St. Agatha, and there prepared a defence in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... advantages to be derived from an infusion of Mahatmas into our population are self-evident. "Think, my sisters," Mrs. Grubb would say, "think, that our mountain ranges may some time be peopled by omniscient beings thousands of years old and still growing!" Up to this last aberration I have had some hope of Grubb o' Dreams. I thought it a good sign, her giving up so many societies and meetings. The house is not any tidier, but at least she stays in it occasionally. In the privacy of my own mind I have ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that which is to happen in eternal life." If, in respect of the high estimation of prophecy, our age were to follow in the steps of Jesus, it would also most readily agree with Him as regards the subject of the prophecy before us. This alone is the cause of the aberration from Him, that people confined and shut up the prophet within the horizon of his time, and then imagined that he could not know anything of the suffering of Christ. It was altogether different in the [Pg 249] ancient Christian Church. In it, the Messianic interpretation ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... part, I had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip-cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the mean time I endeavored, but all in vain, to sound him in regard to the object of the expedition. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to do him honor if he flatters the prevailing direction of taste. But those of the race who follow after, scorn what those before them have admired, and exactly what those of one time have prized as progressive innovations, they who come after reject as mere aberration. What the artist has himself accomplished, I mean his so-called personal comprehension or his capricious interpretation of nature, passes away; but what he simply and honorably reproduces, as he has truly seen it, lives forever, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... and auntie were the only members of the family at home. I could not see or hear them anywhere, so, presuming they were out walking, I washed my hands, lit a lamp, and sat down to my tea, where it had been left for me on the dining-table. I remembered—wonderful aberration from my usual thoughtlessness—that the book I had left in the hammock had a beautiful cover which the dew would spoil, so I left my tea to bring it in. Two little white squares struck my eye in the gathering dusk. I picked them up also, and, bringing ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his book he cut himself off from ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... harmless than he. The Compact had indeed set an indelible mark upon him—a mark which he was to carry to his grave, for during the forty-four years of life that remained to him he was never again the Robert Gourlay of old, and was subject to periodical seasons of mental aberration. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Gabriel, who-was quite unable to understand the true bearing of this aberration among his disciples. Several times when he went up to the tower to spend a few moments with his friends, they would suddenly cease their conversation, looking anxiously at him as though they feared he might ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... opinions and even consult them, although he knew that they entirely rejected his Progressivism. General Luke E. Wright, who remained a devoted friend but did not become a Progressive, used to explain what the others called the Colonel's aberration, as being really a very subtle piece of wisdom. Experienced ranchmen, he would say, when their herds stampede in a sudden alarm, spur their horses through the rushing cattle, fire their revolvers into the air, and gradually, by making the herds suppose that men and beasts are all together in their ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... God that I will so arrange that your confession shall come as a complete surprise. We will make a clean sweep of all these psychological points, of a suspicion against you, so that your crime will appear to have been something like an aberration, for in truth it was an aberration. I am an honest man, Rodion Romanovitch, and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... indicates that every human being, however normal and "good," has somewhere in him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration. But no human being, however abnormal or however "criminal," is born into the world without this ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... culture of Greece an aberration of the amazing political impulse towards [Greek: aristeyein]. The [Greek: polis] utterly opposed to new ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a future state, and religion directs his musings thither. Religion, then, is simply another form of hope; and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect, and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... all this upon Mrs. Hammond has been painful in the extreme. We can only dimly imagine the terrible suffering through which she has passed. Her present aberration was first visible after a long period of sleeplessness, occasioned by distress of mind. During the whole of two weeks, I am told, she did not close her eyes; the most of that time walking the floor of her chamber, and weeping. Powerful anodynes, frequently repeated, at length ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... it was an act of mental aberration, that 'twas his first crash; and, carried away by the excitement and enthusiasm of the moment, the little feller fell into sin. A'm hoping that retribution is ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... scarcely followed her pen as she sat in the little library that opened from the big, cheery hall. Her thoughts were with all that had betided in the past and what might have been. She canvassed anew, as often heretofore, her strange infatuation, like a veritable aberration, so soon she had ceased to love her husband, to make the signal and significant discovery that he was naught to love. She had always had a sort of enthusiasm for the truth in the abstract—not so much as a moral endowment, but a supreme fixity, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... worship was completed, they were led in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... scarce things, and that geniuses[10] and clever people are as common as rats. Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the fiction of Bartley's aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton's injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley's valiant champion, as well ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the Vedas and the scriptures. And the monarch also heard the harmonious cackle of the geese sporting in the lakes. Beholding such exceedingly wonderful sights, the king began to reflect inwardly, saying, 'Is this a dream? Or is all this due to an aberration of my mind? Or, is it all real? O, I have, without casting off my earthly tenement, attained to the beatitude of heaven! This land is either the sacred country of the Uttara-Kurus, or the abode, called Amaravati, of the chief of the celestials! ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... not somebody with a ray of the imagination necessary to a comprehension of Poe's genius given us at least a decent sketch of his brief life! Was Poe in a state of mental aberration when he made Griswold his literary executor? Is the world forever to hear of him only from those who see the dark side of his life and know nothing of his life's work?—from those who look at his life and his ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... boon companion. On one unhappy occasion, when the discussions o a new importation had made a heavy inroad on the morning, Manual left the hut to make his way towards his picket, in such a state of utter mental aberration as to forget the countersign when challenged by a sentinel, when, unhappily, he met his death by a shot from a soldier whom he drilled to such an exquisite state of insensibility that the man cared but little whether he killed friend or enemy, so long as he kept within ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sleep, despair, Of aberration, we have guessed We were not altogether there, But seldom known ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... forbidden food is thus described by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1816: "The chief part of the theory and practice of Hinduism, I am sorry to say," writes the Raja, "is made to consist in the adoption of a peculiar mode of diet; the least aberration from which (even though the conduct of the offender may in other respects be pure and blameless) is not only visited with the severest censure, but actually punished by exclusion from the society of his family ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade's explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... salutation up to the shadow of the crumbling portal. At vespers nearly all Buckeye, hitherto virtuously skeptical and good-humoredly secure in Works without Faith, made a point of attending; it was alleged by some to see if Jovita's glossy Indian-inky eyes would suffer aberration in her devotions. But the rose-crested head was never lifted from the well-worn prayer-book or the brown hands which held a certain poor little cheap rosary like a child's string of battered copper coins. Buckeye lounged by the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... longer might dread reproof for their noise,—all this was less touching than the effect the event had upon the old dowager mother. While the senses of others were stunned by the blow, hers became awakened by the shock; all her absurd aberration passed away, and she sat in intellectual self-possession by the side of her son's death-bed, which she never left until he was laid in his coffin. He was the first and last of her sons. She had now none but grandchildren to look upon—the ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible—it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. I could not even copy them in less than a month, and ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... character of the religious experience. Faith had been regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... during the first year of war when I was there. But I will say that he must have been both physically and mentally above the average before he went to fight. My examination extended through periods of his unconsciousness and aberration. Once, for a little time, he came to, apparently sane. The nurse said he had noticed several periods of this rationality during the last forty-eight hours. But these, and the prolonged vitality, do ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Archie, ignoring the latter expression, "she must either be the victim of an accident, a fit of aberration, or—" ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... said this with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great as technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that the pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in a discipline of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique, doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of pattern most difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The english mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of what has been previously done to reduce by one-half the length of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic and the small ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... aberration from the truth does not prevent the temple from being almost a miracle of art. There is a scrupulous cleanliness about it which differences it from other heathen temples, like that of Kali. In the Jain temples there are no animal sacrifices, for all animal ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... two poets named we see two remarkable examples of the above-mentioned aberration of an entire epoch. While the first of the two, Heinrich von Kleist, possesses all the qualities that go to make up the great poet and at the same time the true German, the other, Theodor Koerner, has only enthusiasm for those qualities; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... we'll begin," said Uncle Richard; "and the first thing is to make our mould or gauge, for everything we do must be so exact that we can set distortion at defiance. We must have no aberration, as opticians ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... concluded, I think, that the mysterious telephone call was due to mental aberration on the part of Norris West, was gnawing at his mustache impatiently when his assistant returned. I administered the powerful restorative, and although, as later transpired, chloral was not responsible for West's condition, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... two cases of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world filled with a morbid ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... army of some friendly monarch was necessary in order to protect these estates. With the confirmation and consolidation of these estates into a kingdom under Charlemagne in the ninth century the Papacy completed its moral aberration. Most of the Popes were still men of good character, and they no doubt persuaded themselves that, since the income of these estates was needed for the fulfilment of their spiritual task, it was proper to defend ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... rule to give way in cases where custom had fastened upon him. Thus he still spelled traffick, almanack, frolick, havock, and it was quite possible for his critics to follow him through a long list of words of this class and detect his frequent aberration from a uniform rule. Yet, instead of receding from his position, the latest edition advances; a nicer discrimination is made in the etymological origin of the variation, but in point of practice ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... and Mr. Morley, who have identified themselves heart and soul with Ireland. Of course, they are far above being turned for a moment from their course by any such comments, but it must be a pain to them nevertheless. It almost seems aberration of mind in Mr. Parnell to be deaf to Mr. Gladstone's words of true patriotism, echoed as they are throughout England and Scotland, and I cannot but believe in thousands of Irish hearts besides. Surely this must have gone far to convince his friends that ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... upon her for a long moment after she had turned away. Marishka sighed gently. Her companion's gaze left her and he peered straight before him, frowning. All this she knew by her woman's sixth sense without even looking at him. Even a thinking machine must have its moments of aberration. In a little while, the choice of roads having been decided, he turned to her again and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... it is but just to go one step further and to question whether the alleged necessity of thought is, in any case and properly speaking, a real necessity. Unless those who advance the present argument are the victims of some mental aberration, it is overwhelmingly improbable that their minds should differ in a fundamental and important attribute from the minds of the vast majority of their species. Or, to continue the above quotation, "They may fairly be asked to consider, whether it is not more likely that they ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... by serious advice, by playful banter, or by seeming to take an interest in my folly for a moment, is encountered with great acrimony by less gentle friends. They who are not bound to me by blood or intimacy—and some who are—deride, insult, and revile me in every way for my subjection to a mental aberration which is rapidly consuming a pretty property, more than average talents, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... debauchery, and confessed it, with ineffectual sobs and tears, to his chosen Guru. A fourth got entangled with a person of the other sex and fell out with his dearest and truest friends. A fifth showed signs of mental aberration and was brought into Court upon charges of discreditable conduct. A sixth shot himself to escape the consequences of criminality, on the verge of detection! And so we might go on and on. All these were apparently sincere searchers after truth, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... nature as greater than her own made a large part of the strength she had found. And the trust was not to be lightly shaken. It is not force of intellect which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts on a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities. Romola was so deeply moved by the grand energies ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... profound moral anarchy weighing on a weakened and irresolute society. The farther we go toward the end of the empire the more its energy seems to fail and the character of men to weaken. The number of strong healthy minds incapable of a lasting aberration and without need of guidance or comfort was growing ever smaller. We note the spread of that feeling of exhaustion and debility which follows the aberrations of passion, and the same weakness that led ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... be one resulting from the simple contemplation of the two facts side by side with one another, or it may depend on some process of mind, by which a previous association has been established between them. Some peculiarity of relation, however, there must be; the fact which can, even by the wildest aberration, be supposed to prove another fact, must stand in some special position with regard to it; and if we could ascertain and define that special position, we should perceive the origin of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... delicate purity and nattiness: not a crease was where it had no business to be, not a bit of her linen professed whiteness without fulfilling its profession; the very pins on her pincushion were stuck in after a pattern from which she was careful to allow no aberration; and as for her own person, it gave the same idea of perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird. It is true that her light-brown hair was cropped behind like a boy's, and was dressed in front in a number of flat rings, that lay quite away from her face; but there ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... generations. It was often forgotten by the unthinking; but those who felt themselves called upon to be serious instructors of public opinion were always to be counted on to assert it, in the face of any popular clamor or aberration. The most deplorable feature, to my mind, of the whole story of the Prohibition amendment, was the failure of our journalists and leaders of opinion, with a few notable exceptions, to perform this duty which so peculiarly devolves upon them. Lest any reader should imagine that this doctrine of the ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... duchess had written, but in a moment of most unusual aberration had put Khartoum on the envelope instead of Assouan, so that it was months, long after the end of this story, that the letter reached him. Strange is it how the lives of men are wrecked or made through ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... everywhere the unequal powers of this writer, decided that he was one who, in certain subjects, knew more than a man could know, while in others he seemed more simple than a child. In the science of Arithmetic he worked hard and made many discoveries; but he was subject to strange and excessive aberration of mind, and was guilty of the most impudent blasphemy, in that he was minded to subject to the artificial laws of the stars the Ruler of the stars Himself, for this thing he did in the horoscope of our Saviour which ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... can guess, are at the back of your conduct and of your mental aberration. If I love France too well, you, you are too ready to forget ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... calmly, "I repeat that the Council is dissolved. In fact its object is fulfilled more abruptly than any of us foresaw, and by means which I at least had been too long out of Paris to divine as possible. I now see that every aberration of reason is possible to the Parisians. The object that united us was the fall of the Empire. As I have always frankly told you, with that object achieved, separation commences. Each of us has his own crotchet, which differs from the other man's. Pursue yours ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the road with a friend. He was one of the pleasantest and most honest men that nature ever moulded. His death was most extraordinary: of a nervous temperament, ill health ended in aberration of intellect. At that time Lord Castlereagh had ended his life of over-excitement by suicide; the details in the newspapers were read by him, and he fancied that he was Lord Castlereagh. Acting precisely ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... in his dreamy state to see her as she looked over the cross-bar at him, and then went on towards the old town. It may be she was not very visible; the double glasses of an open sash-window are almost equal to opacity. But even with that, the extreme aberration of Fenwick's mind at the moment is the only way to account for his ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... his lip. Remembering his own recent aberration, he did not see as much difference as he would have ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... visitors ware not of the same sort with him. One of them was a young fellow of loose character, a clerk in the city, who, attracted by her appearance, prevailed upon her to meet him often. She was not then eighteen. Any aberration from the paths of modesty is exceedingly rare among the gypsies, and regarded with severity; and her father, hearing of this, gave her a terrible punishment with the whip he used in driving his horses. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... theorizing is apt to lead one very much astray, unless it be checked by constant experiment. For this particular subject, lenses must be ground firstly to spherical, and then to curves of conic sections, so as to eliminate spherical aberration from each lens; so that it will be observed that this subject is ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... people like to have preached to them in any form. Add to this that his philosophical expositions of his theory lack the clearness which generally—not always—results from a course of strict preparatory training, and we have more than sufficient foundation for the reports of his mental aberration. On personal acquaintance he proves to be a remarkably earnest, thoroughly convinced, and winning man, although he does not deliberately do or say anything to attract one. His very earnestness is ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... a controlling power is recognised by every church; and moral and mental aberration, such as no communion could tolerate, justified the interposition of authority. An exact conformity with the English custom required the legalisation of an ecclesiastical court; but the church act had subverted the dominant status of the English ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Clemence watched the woman in undisguised amazement, as she arose and paced the room, wringing her hands in the most woe-begone manner imaginable. Her wild appearance immediately suggested the idea that she might be suffering from temporary aberration ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... certainly. My own opinion is, that, whatever insanity he may be occasionally afflicted with results more from an excessive indulgence in liquor than from any other cause. Be that, however, as it may, there is no question but that he is occasionally seized with fits of mental aberration. From what you tell me, and his exaggerated suspicions of a plot between you and Sir Thomas Gourlay, I think it most probable that he ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... I trod them in my boyhood, free and high of heart, or recurred to the din and crash of the battle-field, with the mad bounding of the war-horse, and the loud clang of the trumpet. Perhaps the acute pain of my swollen and suffering arm gave the character to my mental aberration; for I have more than once observed among the wounded in battle, that even when torn and mangled by grape from a howitzer, their ravings have partaken of a high feature of enthusiasm,—shouts of triumph and exclamations of pleasure, even songs have I heard, but ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the aberration of your mind, you who seemed so superior to common credulities. You are not yourself, not at all, and some day you will admit to me that . . . No, the best thing will be to forget it, as you will soon see yourself. We shall never mention that subject in the future. I am certain you will be only ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... bringing on a collision with the monitors. One or two of their number went, so far as to pick quarrels with members of the rival class, in hopes of a fight. But in this they were not successful. The Sixth chose to look upon this display of feeling among their juniors as a temporary aberration of mind, and were by no means to be tempted into hostilities. They asserted their authority wherever they could enforce it, and sacrificed it whenever it seemed more discreet to do so. Only one thing ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... up Trinitarian difficulties, that "orders" are a sort of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he were strait, end by making him so. According to Carlyle, on the contrary, the real "aberration" of Sterling was his choice of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Navy, the all-white Marine Corps seemed to consider the wartime enlistment of over 19,000 Negroes a temporary aberration. Forced by the Navy's nondiscrimination policy to retain Negroes after the war, Marine Corps officials at first decided on a black representation of some 2,200 men, roughly the same proportion as during the war. ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... infringement of usage; teratism[obs3], eccentricity, bizarrerie[obs3], oddity, je ne sais quoi[Fr], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter* [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c. (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch[obs3], monster, prodigy, wonder, miracle, curiosity, flying fish, black sheep, black swan, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Shakespeare's is not more certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private letter—long since addressed to the present commentator by the most illustrious ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... however, do so as yet; for I felt myself, as I lay, under the influence of a pleasure quite new to me; and listened, in a kind of peaceful aberration, to the gentle murmurs of the summer wind, as it breathed on me through the closed window-blinds above me. Then I fancied I heard a voice that spoke to me from the end of the sacristy: it whispered so low that I could not catch ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this. These he fomented; and, according to the charges against him, committed some overt acts of treason. The best excuse for him, over and above that general excuse which applies to all that he has done since his parting with Miss Walladmor, namely, his state of utter distraction (some say positive aberration) of mind,—the best excuse for him, I say, in all his political conduct, is this; that, having lived so much of his life in foreign and convulsed states of society, where every body was engaged in active hostilities ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... violently jealous are suffering from mental aberration. The jealous person loses, for he drives away ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I frankly confess absurd in the highest degree." (Italics ours). After admitting that it "seems absurd in the highest degree," he proceeds, as if it were certainly true. Darwin has been admired for his candor, but not for his consistency. After ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... flights of contemplation. Their chief value, according to Plotinus, is to teach us the meaning of order and limitation ([Greek: taxis] and [Greek: peras]), which are qualities belonging to the Divine nature. This is a very valuable thought, for it contradicts that aberration of Mysticism which calls God the Infinite, and thinks of Him as the Indefinite, dissolving all distinctions in the abyss of bare indetermination. When Ewald says, "the true mystic never withdraws himself wilfully from ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Harper, which owes him properly a portrait in return for so much portraiture. I may exaggerate the charm and the importance of the modern illustrative form, may see in it a capacity of which it is not yet itself wholly conscious, but if I do so Mr. Reinhart is partly responsible for the aberration. Abundant, intelligent, interpretative work in black and white is, to the sense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of the time, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future. This idea, I confess, is ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... velocity of light, founded upon his study of "the aberration of light," is even less worthy ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... established, there were expiations; the ceremonies accompanying them were ridiculous: for what connection between the water of the Ganges and a murder? how could a man repair a homicide by bathing himself? We have already remarked this excess of aberration and absurdity, of imagining that he who washes his body washes his soul, and wipes away ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... rest or motion disturbed by any irregularities lying in the direction of that line, which may be safely supposed the case with our earth. The simple addition of any fluid matter to a body so circumstanced, will not cause any aberration, as it will distribute itself in the parts nearest to the centre of gravity, without regard to the centre of the body, which may or may not be the same. The principal tracts of both land and sea may be held ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... be nothing to conjecture and nothing to select. To put it briefly, I will end by using the language of psychiatry: if one denies that creative work involves problems and purposes, one must admit that an artist creates without premeditation or intention, in a state of aberration; therefore, if an author boasted to me of having written a novel without a preconceived design, under a sudden inspiration, I ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... part of the Government of India to put the heaviest strain upon it, but it will remain so because the Mahomedans realise their own strength—the strength in the knowledge that their cause is just and that they have got the power to vindicate justice in spite of the aberration suffered by Great Britain under a Prime Minister whom continued power has made as reckless in making promises as ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... had been on the point of going into hysterics, recovered herself, and overcame the still lingering impulse: she felt as if she had awaked from a momentary aberration of the intellect. Mr. Arnold proceeded to light the candles, saying, in ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g. sex deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian Mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive functions, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist?" Or, seeing that the Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression, "one might almost as well interpret ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
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