"Congenital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... young man, began to ask questions about Helen. Was she normal? Was there anything congenital or hereditary? Had anything occurred that was likely to alienate her from ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... for, on Saturday morning, by the maiden sister of her divinity. Miss Isabella Shepherd was a fair, short, pleasant young woman, with a nervous, kindly smile, and a congenital inability to look you in the face when speaking to you; so that the impression she made was that of a perpetual friendliness, directed, however, not at you, but at the inanimate objects around you. Laura was so tickled by this peculiarity, which she spied ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." This is a startling passage. We should have pronounced hitherto that Milton's one hopeless, congenital, irremediable want, alike in literature and in life, was humour. And now, surely as ever Saul was among the prophets, behold ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... development of the malformed flower, to ascertain whether the altered arrangement is due to an excessive or to a diminished action. Practically, however, it is of comparatively little importance to know whether, say, the isolation of parts, that are usually combined together, is congenital (i.e. the result of an arrest of growth preventing their union), or whether it be due to a separation of parts primitively undivided; the effect remains the same, though the cause may have ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... consequences of an alcoholic inheritance which have been traced by careful observers are: Morbid changes in the nerve centers, consisting of inflammatory lesions, which vary according to the age in which they occur; alcoholic insanity; congenital malformations; and a much higher infant death rate, owing to lack of vitality, than among the children ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... furtively underlying my philosophy, a latent ambition to be regarded as a final authority on things in general. Hitherto this aspiration had fallen short, partly owing to the clinging sediment of my congenital ignorance, but more especially because I lacked, and knew I lacked, what is known as a 'presence.' Now, however, the high, drab belltopper and long alpaca coat, happily seconded by large, round glasses and a vast and scholarly pipe, seemed to get ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame. Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our society,—we ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the manor born. Especially is the transmission of the habits of thought which characterize the predatory master somewhat precarious in the case of a line of descent in which but one or two of the latest steps have lain within the leisure-class discipline. The chances of occurrence of a strong congenital or acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive aptitudes are apparently best in those members of the leisure class who are of lower class or middle class antecedents—that is to say, those who have inherited the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... silent, scarcely daring to draw breath. Never in all his life had he seen his father in a rage so royal. Yet it seemed to inspire no fear in Fenzileh, that congenital shrew whose tongue not even the threat of rods or hooks ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Man, a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism (for a newspaper, not having to act on its description and reports, but ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... reasonable cost, should require medical examinations for marriage licenses and provide for such examinations at moderate charges or at public expense, should require certain sanitary precautions in care of eyes of new-born infants, and should provide for discovery and treatment of congenital syphilis in school children. These are lines in which good laws might help vastly in the war against the social diseases. Moreover, it is obvious that all laws which help control the social evil will work indirectly against ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... dirty and unlettered, and when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... that our laws should contain so much social injustice towards woman, so much exasperating discrimination, all based upon the theory of the servile dependency of woman upon man, resulting from her congenital mental and physical inferiority? Moebius is incarnated in our Codes, governs our policy, and influences all the customs and usages of our social and political life, to such a point that we ought to be ashamed that in the midst of this era of vindication, when all ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... spirit; and, urged by it, the gold-seekers, chiefly aliens from the United States, plunged into the wilderness of Athabasca without hesitation, and without as much as "by your leave" to the native. Some of these marauders, as was to be expected, exhibited on the way a congenital contempt for the Indian's rights. At various places his horses were killed, his dogs shot, his bear-traps broken up. An outcry arose in consequence, which inevitably would have led to reprisals and bloodshed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... and I will answer that it's simply—life. Disagreeables for disagreeables, I prefer our own. The way I have been bored and bullied in foreign parts, and the way I have had to say I found it pleasant! For a good while this appeared to be a sort of congenital obligation, but one fine day it occurred to me that there was no obligation at all, and that it would ease me immensely to admit to myself that (for me, at least) all those things had no importance. I mean the things they rub into you in Europe; the tiresome international topics, the petty ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... plantaris (symmetric keratodermia), as regards the local condition, is a somewhat similar affection. It consists of hypertrophy of the corneous layer of the palm and soles, usually of a more or less horny and plate-like character, but is congenital or hereditary, and not necessarily dependent ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... the hump, and it was really not a disagreeable face,—very old-looking, Tom thought. He wondered how much older Philip was than himself. An anatomist—even a mere physiognomist— would have seen that the deformity of Philip's spine was not a congenital hump, but the result of an accident in infancy; but you do not expect from Tom any acquaintance with such distinctions; to him, Philip was simply a humpback. He had a vague notion that the deformity of Wakem's son had some relation to the lawyer's rascality, of which he had so often heard his ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... subject to abnormal growths and structural changes in chronic endocarditis or as a result of acute endocarditis. Sometimes valves are torn by sudden, extreme muscular effort or a congenital abnormality. Cases are also reported in which they have ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... discomfort is an experience universal at one time of life or another; but the reaction to it is infinite in variety; and while part of it depends upon the congenital dispositions which are the common property of humanity, a larger part is contingent upon the psychogenetic factors which have ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... in part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell's generation were mostly senile from youth. They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their senility was congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions, which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams from the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the defensive, with Mr ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... parents. All this we have known, but now we learn from the doctor that the evil effects of these causes do not stop at the clothes and skin, but go a little deeper. Yet probably they have not hurt the essential nature of the children. Congenital defects are rare; the doctor discovers even a high average of constitutional fitness, due, it may be, to severe "natural" selection weeding out the more delicate. It is certain that the village produces quite ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... appears to be for believing that peculiarities of race are themselves originally formed by the influence of external circumstances on the primitive tribe; that, however marked and ingrained they may be, they are not congenital and perhaps not indelible. Englishmen and Frenchmen are closely assimilated by education; and the weaknesses of character supposed to be inherent in the Irish gradually disappear under the more benign influences ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Tiberius is rather good-looking than otherwise, not an Antinous certainly, but manifestly a dreamer; one whose eyes must have been almost feline in their abstraction, and in the corners of whose mouth you detect pride, no doubt, but melancholy as well. The pride was congenital, the melancholy ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day," I retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. "And if you knew the owner of that house as I do you would know that if there was any one at that window he is paying rent ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... different races people the earth—on the one hand, unintelligent and cannibal negroes; on the other, the proud, handsome, and intelligent, though selfish and cruel white race. Again, from a moral standpoint, who can explain congenital tendencies to crime, the vicious by birth, the wicked by nature, the persons with uncontrollable passions? Wherefore are thrift and foresight lacking in so many men, who are consequently condemned to lifelong poverty and wretchedness? ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... can be made to burst by tying all the venous outlets from it. I have seen very high intra-ocular tension develop in a few hours after general thrombosis of the orbital veins. The absence of the canal of Schlemm is noted in congenital buphthalmos. The enlargement of the anterior perforating veins is an old symptom of chronic glaucoma. Obstruction to outflow of blood through the vorticose veins, by the increased intra-ocular pressure, has long been a recognized explanation ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... a "screw" or "kinked" tail, that is, one having congenital dislocations at the joints, but such appendages are not desirable in the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... but with your prospects, surely you can sign something, or make over something, or back something, say a post obit or post vincula, or employ some other instrument? Excuse my inexperience; or, I should say, excuse my congenital inability to profit by experience, now considerable, of DIFFICULTIES—and of friendship. Let not the sun of May-day go down on Harold Skimpole in ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... freely from Bemiss),[8] and enlarged greatly upon its fallacies. He also collected statistics of the deaf-mutes in Paris, and, by an amazing manipulation of figures, "demonstrated" that consanguinity of the parents was the cause of nearly one-third of the cases of congenital deafness. The savants of the Societe d'Anthropologie took sides and the debate became very entertaining. Finally M. Dally came to the rescue, and published some very sane and logical articles which avoided both extremes, and first advanced the theory that any ill effects of consanguineous ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... over the conduct of affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be an enlightened patron ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of Gudrun's Lament in the "Elder Edda," or of Sonatorrek, Egil Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation after Egil had lamented. But they saw that it would not do, that the fabric ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... but little question that in all cases of animals under natural conditions such behavior has an instinctive basis. Though the effect may be to establish a means of communication, such is not their conscious purpose at the outset. They are presumably congenital and hereditary modes of emotional expression which serve to evoke responsive behavior in another animal—the reciprocal action being generally in its primary origin between mate and mate, between parent and offspring, or between members of the same family ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Constitution, the avowed purpose of its framers, their own practice and the practice of their successors, without being absolutely convinced that this whole fabric of opposition on constitutional grounds is as flimsy as a cobweb. This country of our love and pride is no malformed, congenital cripple of a nation, incapable of undertaking duties that have been found within the powers of every other nation that ever existed since governments among civilized men began. Neither by chains forged in the Constitution nor by chains ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... no brand that was snatched from the burning; no sot who picked himself or was picked from the gutter; no drunkard who almost wrecked a promising career; no constitutional or congenital souse. I drank liquor the same way hundreds of thousands of men drink it—drank liquor and attended to my business, and got along well, and kept my health, and provided for my family, and maintained my position in the community. I felt I had a perfect right to drink liquor just ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... benign growths in the larynx papilloma is the most frequent. It may occur at any age of childhood and may even be congenital. The outstanding fact which necessarily influences our treatment is the tendency to recurrences, followed eventually in practically all cases by a tendency to disappearance. In the author's opinion multiple papillomata constitute a benign, self-limited disease. There ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... artistic form, which, from poverty of wit, is most commonly employed recognition by signs. Of these some are congenital,—such as 'the spear which the earth-born race bear on their bodies,' or the stars introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes. Others are acquired after birth; and of these some are bodily marks, as scars; some external tokens, ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Lysander argued that the oracle really warned the Spartans against making Leotychides king; for the god was not likely to allude to actual lameness, which might not even be congenital, but might arise from some accidental hurt, as disqualifying any one for the office of king, but rather meant by a "lame reign," the reign of one who was not legitimate, and not truly descended from Herakles. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... aware of the frequent dependence of menorrhagia upon anemia, not only acquired, but congenital. The existence of anemia, or of an imperfect elaboration of the blood and vascular system, previous to the occurrence of the first menstruation, is a possible condition of menstrual disorder that must always be very carefully ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... had known Masham all her life, and she really was a very good woman, in spite of her caps. As for her expanse, it was not her fault, but the hand of Nature; and her black jet ringlets were, Gwen believed, congenital. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... before the young birds of the same year. By the way, I have just used the forbidden word "nature," which, after reading your essay, I almost determined never to use again. There are very few remarks in your book to which I demur, but when you back up Asa Gray in saying that all instincts are congenital habits, I ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... waking hours with self-analysis, and to grit his teeth at his own impotence. But there was no strength, no virile grip to take his fate in his own hands and mould it like a man. He only mourned his disadvantages, and sometimes blamed destiny, sometimes a congenital infirmity of purpose, for the dreary course of his life. Nature alone could charm his sullen moods, and that not always. Now and again she spread over the face of his existence a transitory contentment and a larger hope; ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk. He was the last of Teta Elzbieta's children, and perhaps he had been intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... deaf can, by a great amount of painstaking and practice, become speech readers in some small degree, a relative degree of facility in articulation is not nearly so attainable. As to the accuracy of this view, the writer cannot venture an opinion. Judging from the average congenital deaf-mute who has had special instruction in speech, it can safely be asserted that their speech is laborious, and far, very far, from being accurate enough for practical use beyond a limited number of common expressions. This being the case, it is not surprising that as an unaided means of instruction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... personalities widely differ. This class of natures is much larger than would be supposed. Inheriting opposite, even conflicting, traits from father and mother, they assume, as either element predominates, diverse characters; and that which is the result of temperament (in fact, congenital inconsistency) is set down by the unthinking world as moral weakness or duplicity. Those who have sufficient skill to perceive and reconcile—or, at least, govern—the opposing elements are few, indeed. Had the power ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... same with all branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which threaten those who criticise their superiors. But ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... unaccompanied, himself go to the forest and live with the sons of Pandu. For then, if the Pandavas, from association, feel an attachment for Duryodhana, then, O king of men, good fortune may be thine. (This, however, may not be)! For it hath been heard that one's congenital nature leaveth him not till death. But what do Bhishma and Drona and Vidura think? What also dost thou think? That which is beneficial should be done while there is time, else thy purposes will ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... to civilisation, of knowing again the decencies of life, was to "go sick" as it is termed, and be sent down the line for a spell in hospital; and no one but a congenital idiot took more liberties with his constitution than his work made necessary; the climate alone was more than sufficient for ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... many cases of stricture or complete occlusion of the vagina, congenital or acquired from cicatricial contraction, obstructing delivery, and in some the impregnation seems more marvelous than cases in which the obstruction is only a thin membranous hymen. Often the obstruction is so dense as to require a large bistoury to divide it, and even ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... her all over again, even to her bones and marrow. Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been molded in the rose-red clay of love before the breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love capacity is a congenital endowment; and I think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of it. Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride, in the sense of contemning others less gifted than ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the beauties of Prague are in the habit of congregating. That would have been something for you, my friend! I fancy seeing you,—not walking, but limping,—after all the pretty girls and women! I did not dance, neither did I spoon;—the first because I was too tired, the second because of my congenital bashfulness. But I saw with great pleasure how all these people hopped about delightedly to the music of my 'Figaro' turned into contradances and Allemands. Here nothing is talked about except 'Figaro,' nothing played, piped, sung ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... perhaps the slightest possible shrinking in Harcourt's eyelids—the one congenital likeness to his discarded son—but his otherwise calm demeanor did not change. Grant went on more cheerfully: "I've told you all I know. When I spoke of an unknown WORST, I did not refer to any further accusation, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... then," he said. "You have now got two candidates elected, A. and B. You take from them 653 votes, which do not legitimately belong to them, and you mix them up with the surplus votes of the remaining eight candidates. Unless C. is a congenital idiot, or a felon, or otherwise incapacitated, he will then be found to have 4,129 votes, and he too will be elected. For the last place you must proceed on a basis of geometrical progression. There are still seven candidates, but four of these have no earthly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... gravity would be shifted to the pre-natal period," explained Marindin, "when the soul is more liable to noble influences. The moment the human being is born it is definitely moulded; all your training can only modify the congenital cast. But the real potentialities are in the unborn. While there is not life there is hope. When you commence to educate the child it is already too late. But if the great forces of education are ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... its form, and then she asked herself doubtfully: "Are women such inferior beings?" a position which carried her in front of her father at once by a hundred years, and led her rapidly on to the final conclusion that women had originally no congenital defect of inferiority, and that, although they have still much way to make up, it now rests with themselves to be inferior or not, as ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... promptly secured in the favorable varieties of consumption by any important increase in the vital volume, I believe fully justify the statement that tubercles are the results of defective nutrition directly traceable to inadequate respiratory capacity, either congenital or acquired—in other words, tubercles are composed of particles of food which have failed to acquire sufficient life while undergoing the vital processes, because the person in whom they occur habitually breathed too little ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... congenital and uninstructed deaf-mutes to be now considered are either strictly natural signs, invented by themselves, or those of a colloquial character used by such mutes where associated. The accidental or merely suggestive signs peculiar to families, one member of which happens to be a mute, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... hereditary defect there is a tendency for the defect to appear at either an earlier or later stage in life in each successive generation (Mercier). In the first case the family dies out, in the second case it recovers itself. In cases of congenital defect, there is very little to fear. The lunatic is locked up and the epileptic ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... her," exploded Diana, with more than her congenital exasperation. "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind. She still says she's going away with Smith in ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she could recite, with feeling, portions of The Culprit Fay and of ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... identification of these two, and is attained by knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (maya) conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to him—in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it had been taught by some ancient schools of Aupanishadas, and was very like the doctrine of some of the Buddhist idealists; but the vigour and skill with ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... of criminals for years, and I think that it is safe to say that in most cases that have come under my observation there were either congenital or hereditary deformities to which the special obliquity could be traced. Such has been the history of crimes in all eras, and one only has to turn to the medical history of the world to see that scientific men have even given greater cognizance to these causes than can ever be brought before ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... represent him still, what was best in his kindly, limited nature, his friendly, competent, tiresome insistence on harmony—on identity of "period." Nick could hear him yet, and could see him, too fat and with a congenital thickness in his speech, lounging there in loose clothes with his eternal cigarette. "Now my dear fellow, that's what I call form: I don't know what you call it"—that was the way he used to begin. All round were flowers ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... frequently tending to obliterate inherited family resemblances. According to Piderit, physiognomy is to be considered as a mimetic expression which has become habitual. The criminal type of face, so conspicuous in old offenders, is in many cases merely a prison type; it is not congenital; men who do not originally have it almost always acquire it after a prolonged ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... employment a red-haired, congenital idiot who ambles about New York in an absent-minded way, as if he were on a desert island? The man I refer to is a short, stout ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... HOSPITALS.—The reports of hospitals for lunatics almost universally assign intemperance as one of the causes which predispose a man's offspring to insanity. This is even more strikingly manifested in the case of congenital idiocy. They come generally from a class of families which seem to have degenerated physically to a low degree. They are puny ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... and fences. From this ram was descended the breed of ancon, or otter, sheep. Now the stimulus which had excited this variation must have been applied early in embryonic life, or perhaps during the formation or maturing of the germ-cells themselves. Such a variation we call a congenital variation. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as we control the output of beef and of mutton. Then the face of the world will alter. Millions of money is annually spent in order that mindless humanity, congenital lunatics and madmen, may be fed and housed and kept alive. Their existences are to themselves less pleasurable than that of the beasts, they are a source of agony to those who have borne them; but they live to old age and devour tons of good food, while wholesome ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... sadly and considered thickly in his slow brain. Annie did not come out, and he knew better than to ask for her, for Mr. Colborn's niece, who kept house for him, was but newly come from home, and thought all black fellows congenital murderers, which indeed they are in some parts of the north. So Billy sat and waited, for he wanted a new coat. How could he be respected in one whose natural divisions were unnaturally extended to the very neck? It was obviously necessary to get a new garment at once, and the best ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... but a congenital condition in which the intellectual faculties are either never manifested or have not been sufficiently developed to enable the idiot to acquire an amount of knowledge equal to that acquired by other persons of his own age and in similar circumstances with himself. Idiots, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... fractional quantity, can be ascribed to the statement that Jesus healed those who were maimed from their birth ([Greek: tous ek genetaes paerous] [Endnote 280:2]). The word [Greek: paeros] is used specially for the blind, and the fourth Evangelist is the only one who mentions the healing of congenital infirmity, which he does under this same phrase [Greek: ek genetaes], and that of a case of blindness (John ix. 1). The possibility urged in 'Supernatural Religion,' that Justin may be merely drawing from tradition, may detract from ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... they would not care to bring their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our casual experience ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... since birth to congenital lassitude, which has rendered all labour, whether manual or mental, distasteful, nay, intolerable to me, I find myself at the age of 41 so out of touch with the spirit of strenuous effort which has invaded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... night when the New York thermometer ranges up toward the nineties it is a pure and unadulterated joy to labor inside an ice box. I scrubbed and rinsed and wiped until Schmitz almost looked approving. Only it was congenital with Schmitz that he never really showed approval of anything or anybody. Schmitz was the kind (poor Mrs. Schmitz with her three months only of freedom) who always had to change everything just a little. There would echo down the line an order, "One Swiss cheese, little one" (that referred to me, ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... similar figures showed that women living in comfort and luxury did not want to be bothered with confinements. It had been said that the degree of sterility could be regarded as an index to the morals of a race. Congenital sterility was rare, but the number of children born in England was decreasing. It had been estimated that one-third of the pregnancies in several great cities abroad aborted. Dr. Gibbons then quoted ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... Foetus, by W. E. Horner, M. D., &c. 2, Imperfect Development of the Cerebral Organs in Monsters. 3, Imperforate Vagina. 4, Fallopian Tubes. 5, Monsters. 6, Foetus grafted into the Chest of another. 7, Foetus without a Stomach, Head or Anus. 8, Congenital Hydrocephalus, with Transposition of the Viscera. 9, Unusual Arrangement of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... extent, not yet clearly determined, the causes of crime are temperamental, due to congenital defects or overexcitable impulses. The inherited effects of insanity, alcoholism, and other pathological conditions, make self-control far more difficult for some unfortunates. Such baneful inheritances will some day be minimized ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Doctrines of heredity and congenital transmission. Teratology, or the production of varieties and monstrosities. Ethnic and racial anatomy. Evolution of man. Comparative anatomy of man and anthropoids. Simian and lemurian analogies. ...
— Anthropology - As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States • Daniel Garrison Brinton
... and terrible element besides her congenital and conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of being something in the existence of a superior ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the fertilization of orchids. He had held at one time the family living at Borlsover Conyers, until a congenital weakness of the lungs obliged him to seek a less rigorous climate in the sunny south coast watering-place where I had seen him. Occasionally he would relieve one or other of the local clergy. My father described him as a fine preacher, who gave long and inspiring sermons from what many men ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... are certain pathological conditions, such as rickets, scurvy, congenital syphilis, tubercle, suppurative conditions, and tumour growths, which render separation of the epiphyses liable to occur from injuries altogether insufficient to produce ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... inestimable service to his fellow men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature for consigning men to ineptitude when they should be entering upon their best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... example shews that man may sometimes possess the arrangement of tendons of thumb and fingers characteristic of the macaque; but whether such a case should be regarded as a macaque passing upwards into a man, or a man passing downwards into a macaque, or as a congenital freak of nature, I cannot undertake to say." It is satisfactory to hear so capable an anatomist, and so embittered an opponent of evolutionism, admitting even the possibility of either of his first propositions. Prof. Macalister has also described ('Proceedings Royal Irish Academy,' vol. x. 1864, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... not a man to be rebuffed by pleasantry such as this. He declared the King of Portugal to be impotent, after what the Queen had expressly stated. The Pope annulled the marriage, and the Queen courageously wedded her husband's brother, who had no congenital weakness of any sort, and who was, as every one ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... we are under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to take over the actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." The disciples' question implied their belief in a state of moral agency and choice antedating mortality; else, how could they have thought of the man having sinned so as to bring upon himself congenital blindness? We are expressly told that he was born blind. That he might have been a sufferer from the sins of his parents was conceivable.[869] The disciples evidently had been taught the great truth of an antemortal existence. It is further to be seen that they looked upon bodily affliction ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... skin is often altered in disease. It is yellow in jaundice, and is bluish, especially over the face, in congenital heart disease. There is a purplish tint around the eyes and mouth, with a prominence of the veins of the face, in weakly children or in those with disordered digestion. A pale circle around the mouth accompanies nausea. The skin frequently acquires an earthy hue in ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... State decrees that a citizen shall not only support all for whose existence he is responsible, but also all those unable to support themselves, born into the world in increasing numbers as congenital defectives, and manufactured in the world by legalised drinking saloons, and by pauperising charitable aid and benevolent institutions, then our self-respecting right-respecting citizen must decide whether he will forego ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... or short-sight, in which the eye is egg-shaped, and too long from front to back; the retina in this case lies behind the focus, and is therefore fitted to see distinctly only very near objects. This condition is not commonly congenital, but comes on in youth, the liability to it being well known to be transmissible from parent to child. The change from the spherical to the ovoidal shape seems the immediate {9} consequence of something ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... this, of course, for himself, by the introspective method alone. He (with M. Cousin and other philosophers who take the same view) does not apply the analytical method to inquire whether his necessity of belief may not be a purely acquired necessity and nowise congenital. It is, indeed, remarkable that these philosophers do not even seek to apply the introspective method as far as that method will really go. They are satisfied with introspection of their own present minds; without collecting results of the like process as applied to other minds, in different ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... sighed. "Of course, from that moment I was supposed to be a great magician. Also Bausi made a blood brotherhood with me, transfusing some of his blood into my veins and some of mine into his. I only hope he has not inoculated me with his tumours, which are congenital. So I became Bausi and Bausi became me. In other words, I was as much chief of the Mazitu as he was, and shall remain so ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... of races, and its meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit of sleeping in coal-holes and subsisting on an innutritious diet. In addition to these physical disadvantages, its shrinking and inconsequent movements revealed a congenital weakness of character which, even under more favourable conditions, would hardly have qualified it to become a useful member of society; and Millner was not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp of the hind leg that probably ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... to Town to breathe the sweet original atmosphere for just one night before we leave old England," put in Trooper Punch Peerson (son of a noble lord) who would at that moment have been in the Officers' Mess but for a congenital weakness in spelling and a dislike of mathematics. "Pity we can't get 'leaf,' and do ourselves glorious at the Carlton, and 'afterwards'. We could change at my Governor's place into borrowed, stolen, and hired evening-kit, paint the village as scarlet ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the purchase of a book; not because they did not want it, nor because they deemed the price exorbitant, nor yet because they were not abundantly able to pay that price. Their hesitancy was due to an innate, congenital lack of determination—that same hideous curse of vacillation which is responsible for so much misery in ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... protest,—a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You may teach ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... to the outskirts of the town in a line as nearly straight as the congenital deviousness of Sialpore's ancient architects allowed. There was not a street but turned a dozen times to the mile. At one point she bade Dick stop, and begged Tess to let Tom Tripe take her home, promising to see her again within the hour. But ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... an instinct must be carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready, without any instruction, any model to imitate, any experience to go upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely congenital or inborn; the nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as the external conditions of life are such as to make its performance ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... meet with in Sahalin. There is very little congenital syphilis, but I saw blind children, filthy, covered with eruptions—all diseases that are evidence of neglect. Of course I am not going to settle the problem of the children. I don't know what ought to be done. But it seems to me that one will do nothing by means of philanthropy ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... gained at the loss of another. It is a symptom of their inferiority in the struggle for existence. Their condition is not only a variation from the ordinary conditions of development—that is to say, they are 'congenital monsters,' the study of which belongs to the science of teratology—but it is a variation also from a state of health, physically and normally sound. In other words, they are diseased, and fall within the domain of the pathologist. Here then, as Brissaud says, you have your giants despoiled ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... we regard them as inspired or criminal according to the inclination of our own beloved predilection. And no spectacles will correct the mental astigmatism of the multitude, a fact that is often a cause of considerable annoyance to the possessors of normal sight. That defect of vision, whether congenital or induced by the confinements of early training, persists and increases throughout life, like other forms of myopia. The man who sees a ball as slightly flattened, like a tangerine orange too tightly packed ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... institution, coeval and congenital with man. The first home was in Eden; the last home will be in Heaven. It is the first form of society, a little commonwealth in which we first lose our individualism and come to the consciousness of our relation to others. Thus it is the foundation of all our relationships in life,—the ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... them." As Miss Alida S. Williams, principal of Public School 33 in New York City, has in many articles and addresses freely illustrated from school experience, the art of seeing is acquired, not congenital, and every human being who possesses it has ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... generations, and in all the branches into which the original stock divides; in other cases, the hereditary tendency is to gentleness and harmlessness of character, with a full development of all the feelings and sensibilities of the soul. Others, again, exhibit congenital tendencies to great physical strength and hardihood, and to powers of muscular exertion and endurance. These differences, notwithstanding all the exceptions and irregularities connected with them, are obviously, where they exist, deeply seated and permanent. They depend very slightly ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... had only to look at him, from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form" must be congenital in any one who knew how to wear such good clothes so carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace. As a young admirer had once said of him: "If anybody can tell a fellow just when to wear ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... ignorant minds in the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their every action a pretence—just as a being born in doeskin gloves would necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate hour, this ingenious comparison ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... really to know a countrywoman of a type so different from her own friends. She, like Wilbur, had heard all her life of these interesting and inspiring beings; intense, marvellously capable, peerless, free-born creatures panoplied in chastity and endowed with congenital mental power and bodily charms, who were able to cook, educate children, control society and write literature in the course of the day's employment. The newspapers and popular opinion had given her to understand that these were the true Americans, and caused her to ask herself whether ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... book. Dr. Ray considers the existence of insanity or remarkable eccentricity in a previous generation a prolific source of mental unsoundness. He addresses words of most solemn warning to those who have not yet formed the most important connection in life. A brain free from all congenital tendencies to disease results from a rigid compliance with the laws of parentage. The intermarriage of those related by blood is no uncommon cause of mental deterioration. Dr. Ray thinks that the facts collected in France and America upon this point are much more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... very small one, may be made by animals brought under the control of man. It is said, for instance, that a young pointer dog will sometimes point at game without any training. But in this case the acquired knowledge is congenital, and is therefore to be regarded as a development brought about by superintended selection. But with man none of the acquired knowledge is innate. It is a treasure entirely external to himself until he has appropriated it by study of some ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... painted ones, Palla thought she had never before beheld such a concentration of every type of commonness in her entire existence. Faces, shapes, voices, language, all were essentially the properties of congenital vulgarity. The language, too, had to be sharply rebuked by Puma once or twice amid the wrangling of director, camera man ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... showing their origin in the peculiar nature of the social order which so long prevailed in Japan. This is a study of Japanese psychogenesis. The question to which we shall continually return is whether or not the characteristic under consideration is inherent and congenital and therefore inevitable. Not only our interpretation of Japanese evolution, past, present, and future, but also our understanding of the essential nature of social evolution in general, depends upon the answer ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... rectus muscles have been cut and cicatrized, and if the deformity be not congenital, it ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... modifications. Even in this case, however, it would be the exertions, or use and disuse, that would be the main agents in the modification. But it is not often that Mr. Wallace thus backslides. His present position is that acquired (as distinguished from congenital) modifications are not inherited at all. He does not indeed put his faith prominently forward and pin himself to it as plainly as could be wished, but under the heading, "The Non-Heredity of Acquired Characters," he writes as follows on p. 440 of ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... nobler trappings, but still, at bottom, a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe, though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic than either Emerson or Lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, and moreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style. The man, for all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to the era of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. His occasional affectation of scholarship has deceived no one. It ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... It is probably a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... slightest discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere defective innervation of these parts; or it might result from congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect of the internal ear, which only a ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Each congenital idiot whom the ax-grinders name for the office of Tnediserp has upon the "ticket" with him a dead man, who stands or falls with his leader. There is no way of voting for the idiot without voting for the corpse also, and vice versa. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... in young animals. It consists in a collection of fluid under the meninges, but outside the brain proper. This defect is usually congenital. It is accompanied with an enlargement of the skull, especially in the region of the forehead. The pressure of the fluid may cause the bones to soften. The disease ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... aeons I should find eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I have ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... incidentally, as it were, somewhat roughly handled, the over-enthusiasm of his professional admirers must bear the blame. There is much prentice work in 'Lads' Love,' some strenuously enforced emotion, which is not genuine, and a congenital misunderstanding of the essential difference between tedium and humour; but if the whole of Mr. Crockett's work had reached its level, the protest against his reviewers would have ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... Mechanical Substitution for the Left Ventricle in Man," pp. 642-644, and "Pulmonary Volvuloplasty under Direct Vision using the Mechanical Heart for a Complete Bypass of the Right Heart in a Patient with Congenital ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... reinforced capitalistic accumulation. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. The child-slavery in the European manufactories needed for its pedestal the slavery, pure and simple, of the negroes imported into America. If money, according to Marie Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... community with the spirit of society is eminently, therefore, a community with the spirit of equality. A nation with a genius for society, like the French or the Athenians, is irresistibly drawn towards equality. From the first moment when the French people, with its congenital sense for the power of social intercourse and manners, came into existence, it was on the road to equality. When it had once got a high standard of social manners abundantly established, and at the same time the natural, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold |
