"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... second if the first be but granted. Life—meaning the exact reproduction of reality—is their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not Dickens within his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... seemed quite well, only tired, till suddenly she said in a loud voice, 'I am going to die, that I may come back as a spirit and bewitch these devils till they are spirits too.' Then she called upon the fetish of her tribe, put her hands to her breast and fell down dead. At least," added Hans, spitting reflectively, "she did not fall quite down because the slave-stick held her head off the ground. The Arabs were very angry, both ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... expectation, "this red thatch of mine is a nuisance. At school I was always Brick-top or Red-Head and out here the natives all look at my carrot-colored top-knot as if they'd like to scalp me and keep it for a fetish." ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... for this anomalous situation. One of them is our inheritance of a deep-rooted Puritan distrust of a liturgical service. That distrust is today a fetish and therefore much more potent that it was when it was a reason. Puritanism was born in the Reformation; it came out from the Roman church, where worship was regarded as an end in itself. To Catholic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... told. Among soldiers of the best sort the Regiment is apt to be a fetish, and to Desmond the lightest imputation of disregard for its welfare ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... opinion that every one must have some creed—something from without having an influence over thought and action stronger than the imperfect apparatus of human reason. Scornfully disdaining revelation from above, he groped below, and found for himself a little fetish made of turnips and cabbages. He was as fanatical a devotee of vegetarianism as others have been of a middle state or adult baptism; and, after having torn through a life of spiteful controversy with his fellow-men, and ribaldry of all sacred things, he thus expressed the one weight hanging on his ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Oom Sam too hard," Monty continued. "Remember for the last two days he was doing all he could to get us out of the place. It was those fetish fellows who worked the mischief and he—certainly—warned us all he could. He took us safely to Bekwando and he worked ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... then, as anyone can foresee, Eddy-worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house. I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale. And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one. From end to end ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sticks from her medicine bag, and hands them to one of the Old Men. To each of the others who will dance with her (two or three) she gives a fetish from her bag. They have already put on appropriate headdresses and are prepared for dancing. She motions the rattles to begin. Behind her are the Old Men, with the drums and rattles; on each side, the Fighting Men seated on the ground. The ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... spirit of the great war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... of the people as well as of the dynasty—by the grace of God, not by the consent of the people. The same may be said of the German Emperor, who fills his office as King of Prussia. To the Anglo-Saxon foreigner the dynasty in Germany, and particularly in Prussia, appears a sort of fetish, the worship of which begins in the public schools with lessons on the heroic deeds of the Hohenzollerns, and with the Emperor, as high priest, constantly calling on his people to worship with him. This view of the kingly succession may seem Oriental, but it is not surprising ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... along the corredor away from her husband's room. The fate of the San Tome mine was lying heavy upon her heart. It was a long time now since she had begun to fear it. It had been an idea. She had watched it with misgivings turning into a fetish, and now the fetish had grown into a monstrous and crushing weight. It was as if the inspiration of their early years had left her heart to turn into a wall of silver-bricks, erected by the silent work of evil spirits, between her and her husband. He seemed ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal— since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its sophistications—though for that matter isn't it all rich and precious sophistication?— ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... believes, the experiment will be completed, but not by the autocratic power. In his opinion autocracy is "played out," and must give way to Parliamentary institutions. For him a Constitution is a kind of omnipotent fetish. You may try to explain to him that a Parliamentary regime, whatever its advantages may be, necessarily produces political parties and political conflicts, and is not nearly so suitable for grand sociological experiments as a good paternal despotism. You may try to convince him that, though it ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... benefit. If the time were devoted to acquiring a more thorough understanding of our mother tongue it would be more creditable. To give time to translating good Latin into poor English is paying an extravagant homage to a fetish. Training in the ancient languages must be long-continued and far-reaching, or it seems to be of little value. The needs of culture cannot be satisfied by mere discipline any more than they can be satisfied by merely utilitarian subjects. ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... the Court would rise, determined to wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual details—human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles brought ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... as follows. The "witch doctors" or magicians of the nation—numbering in all something over a hundred— all of whom were then in Gwanda for the purposes of the ceremony, would assemble at sunset that same evening in a sort of fetish house; and there, under the leadership and direction of one Machenga, the head or chief witch doctor, would perform certain mysterious rites, and submit themselves to a certain mysterious form of treatment, lasting the entire night, which, it was generally understood, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... but by a thick cotton leading-rope which is passed over the headstall, and such a rope is carried by every Indian groom. I asked my groom one day to tie up with his leading rope a dog that would not follow. He absolutely refused, and I discovered that the rope was the fetish of his caste and was formerly adored and propitiated in the course of an annual caste festival. To touch a dog with it would have ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they were ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Departure from Badagry. Progress up the River. Arrival at Wow Regulations of the Fetish at Wow. The Village of Sagba. Passage of a Swamp. Basha. Soato. Arrival at Bidjie. Bad Faith of Adooley. Introduction to the Chief of Bidjie. Departure from Bidjie Arrival of a Messenger from Jenna. Laatoo. Larro. The ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... conversationalist, stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city. Even the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper, who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, which would convince the ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his original Mongolian warriors followed Timour in the invasion of India. His armies latterly appear to have consisted chiefly of Turcomans and Persians. It was to obtain popularity amongst these soldiery that he abandoned his old religion, a kind of fetish, or sorcery, and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... least," Rochester answered. "The fetish of birth has never appealed to me. I find as many gentlefolk amongst my tenants and servants, as at the parties to which I have the honor of escorting you. It isn't that at all. It's a matter of insight. Some day you will all ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... speaking all the time, but he took no notice of its remarks—still it went on, as if knowing that sooner or later he would be drawn towards it; and so he was, and passed the tape through his fingers, pausing here and there; and so throughout the day that little chattering fetish dominated him and every one that entered the room. Men came in, and while waiting, or in a pause in conversation, would be drawn to see what was on its tongue. There is nothing more striking about business in New York ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... seems to have been developed by several English authors, each of whom, like pioneers in a new country, left his stamp on subsequent works in the same field. Richardson's governing motive may be summed up in the word "sensibility," which means "delicacy of feeling," and which was a fashion, almost a fetish, in eighteenth-century society. Because it was deemed essential to display proper or decorous feeling on all occasions, Richardson's heroines were always analyzing their emotions; they talked like ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... deal of effort expended by many semi-educated individuals to discredit the knowledge of calories, saying that it is a foolish food science, a fallacy, a fetish, ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred to us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the true, though unknown, God. Whether we see the Papua squatting in dumb meditation before his fetish, or whether we listen to Firdusi exclaiming: 'The heighth and the depth of the whole world have their centre in Thee, O my God! I do not know Thee what Thou art: but I know that Thou art what Thou alone canst be,'—we ought to feel that the place whereon we stand ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... hardcore pornography, softcore pornography; pin-up, cheesecake; beefcake; Playboy[magazines with sexual photos], Esquire, Hustler. [unorthodox sexual activity] perversion, deviation, sexual abnormality; fetish, fetishism; homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality; sodomy, buggery; pederasty; sadism. masochism, sado-masochism; incest. V. mate, copulate; make love, have intercourse, fornicate, have sex, do it, sleep together, fuck[vulg.]; sleep around, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish and doll of themselves showed signs of vitality—but whether they really take them to be alive is unknown to the adult. And if we can not sympathetically ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... long, low, log structure, which he himself could have described in advance. Upon the door, done in the blind, morbid egotism of crime, which so often leaves open sign and signal for its own undoing, there showed, cut deep in the jamb, a rude sign, cabalistic, mysterious, fetish-like. To Eddring it seemed for the instant to be the same mark as that upon the handkerchief. He could not explain these things in his own mind. Others of the party were more interested in pointing out once more, in the confusion of footprints before ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... During hundreds of years it passed over the continent of Africa to settle only at its northern coast line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti, only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... has ever alluded to it," continued she, half laughing, half crying, "but I see them trying to scrutinize it slyly when they are not observed. As for poor old Anita, I believe she thinks it is our Fetish. She walks round it on tiptoe with her hands clasped ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, for the sake of private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their mere presence in office produced all along our lines the same moral effect as the presence ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... them accordingly. They are not guilty of "sins and waste and carelessness"; and some of them are even inclined to question whether they should pay for the results of such sins on the part of other men: and since those who believe in the "fetish of parental responsibility," to quote the favourite Socialist cliche, can show that this is not a fetish but a tutelary deity of Society, whose power has been increasing since backbones were invented, they may be well assured that the last word ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... one of Fenton's peculiarities that he never knowingly shrank from telling himself the truth about his thoughts and actions with the most brutal frankness. Indeed, it might not be too much to say that this self-honesty was a sort of fetish to which he made expiatory sacrifices in the shape of the most cruelly disagreeable admissions before his inner consciousness. He constantly settled his moral accounts by setting down on the credit side "Self-contempt ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... beautiful and the most heroic. I have always been a friend to hero-worship, it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilised people—the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism—it is mere fetish; the savages of West Africa are all spirit- worshippers. But there is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race, and the true hero is the benefactor. Brahma, Jupiter, Bacchus, were ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... was a time in this country, even in this country, when a boy or girl went to an institution of higher learning for only one reason: to get an education. And now! Stadia and bowls instead of laboratories and classrooms. Physical perfection has become a fetish and that is ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... only the prosperity of a class. Yet such is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press, and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... followed, in which Clerambault took a final leave of the bloody old fetish falsely called Country; or rather in opposition to the great flesh-eater, the she-wolf of Rome, on whose altar men are now offered up, he set the august Mother of all living, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... Lady Chepstow with a sudden burst of realization. "Then that holy relic, that fetish, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich, call it power, spirit, or god.' If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Muller. On the other hand, students who regard the growth of the idea of power, which is the predicate of every fetish, as a slow process, as the result of various impressions and trains of early half-conscious reasoning, cannot be disposed of by the charge that they think that 'every human being was miraculously endowed' with any concept ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the end. I wouldn't care to get a punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Corps is to be restricted to some Lieutenant-General senior to Mahon—himself the only man of his rank commanding a Division and almost at the top of the Lieutenant-Generals! Oh God, if I could have a Corps Commander like Gouraud! But this block by "Mahon" makes a record for the seniority fetish. I have just been studying the Army List with Pollen. Excluding Indians, Marines and employed men like Douglas Haig and Maxwell, there are only about one dozen British service Lieutenant-Generals senior to Mahon, and, of that dozen only two are possible—Ewart ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... thing. There was a little bottle on the mantelpiece, a bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered before it, as if it were a fetish. ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... artificial niche into which some one may thrust him. The masses who are most helpfully reached by the Tuskegee Institute are coming to realize that education in its truest sense is no longer to be regarded as an emotional impulse, a fetish made up of loosely joined information, to be worshiped for its mere possession, but as a practical means to a definite end. They are being taught that mind-training is the logical helpmeet of hand-training, and that both, supplemented and sweetened by heart-training, make the ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... that disrespect in Americans," answered Brother Copas dryly. "But we'll credit it to them if you will; and there at once you have a capital reason why our little Miss Bull should worship the House of Lords as a fetish—whereas, it ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... war demand will be true of scores of articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary military service and the fetish ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... hygiene instruction are not enforced, we should not be surprised. It has been nobody's business to see whether and how hygiene is being taught. The moral crusade spent itself in forcing compulsory laws upon the statute books of every state and territory. Making a fetish of Legislation, the advocates of anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco instruction failed to see the truth that experienced political reformers are but slowly coming to see—Legislation which does not provide machinery for its own enforcement is apt to do little ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... civilization and so wide-spreading should come to an end and be superseded by something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you that civilization is, after all, a mere mushroom ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... an adroit flank movement, rapidly executed, Serena managed to possess herself once again of the seat of honour upon the sofa, thereby interposing a thin but impenetrable barrier between her hostess and the latter's own particular fetish, the bishop-designate. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean, assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compass the same end. It is absurd to argue that civilization is either favourable or unfavourable to art; but ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... who provided laborers for his comfort, and paid him for the privilege of living on stony mountain or barren bog. The idea of their having any rights struck him as positively ludicrous. There was but one thing that had rights, and that was the fetish, property. Every attempt, therefore, to lift the people from that condition of serfdom he regarded as absolutely treasonable; and he was my chief opponent in any futile attempts I made to introduce some improvements into the wretched place. And of course ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... with Mrs. Eddy as to the necessity of eliminating a medical fetish, but I disagree with her about religiously preserving a theological one. I have read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" for twenty years, and I have also read the Scriptures for a much longer period. Also, I have lived ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... unbutton his fetish, to attack it with a penknife, and to thrust the new-found plans between the two layers of imitation Saxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr. Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas basin he readjusted ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... sympathy with the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind. I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun, than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist. Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... officer from a battleship might have referred to them collectively as a "something lot of pirates." Pirates they may have been, but at the best of times a strict adherence to the uniform regulations is not a fetish of those serving on board the vessels of the Auxiliary Patrol. They are, it is perfectly true, granted a sum of money by a paternal Government wherewith to purchase their kit, but brass buttons and best serge suits do not blend ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... protest at that picture. "It's all right," she said, "to put up with ugliness if you have to. But what's the use of making a fetish of it?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... himself as one having a mission upon earth, even before he had received the revelations which announced him as a prophet chosen of Allah, for he long brooded over the things of the spirit, and although he had not, up to his fortieth year, openly protested against the fetish worship of the Kureysh, yet he was regarded as one who had a different idea of worship from that of the men with ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor Julian's project was hopeful in comparison with the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... cup of tea which Marna was offering her guests, and as she looked wistfully out of her tangle of dark hair,—in which lines of silver already were beginning to appear,—she impressed herself upon Kate's mind as one of the innumerable army of martyrs to the fetish of fecundity which had borne down men and women through ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... is a matter for our father's children only," she had said, and Walter had, as usual, bowed to her ruling. Ever since their mother's death May had been the high priestess of the family fetish, the position ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street after street, through district after district, looking at ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... human mind, in framing a class of objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... aberration which is called religion, and a survey of the present state of the world, from the fetish worshipper of central Africa to the super-subtle Theist of educated Europe, furnish us with countless illustrations of the truth of Montaigne's exclamation. God-making has always been a prevalent pastime, although it has ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... for, with the privilege of an old servant, he did not scruple to join in our conversation at all times. "I go and talk to dem and tell dem better t'ings. I tell dem dat dere is one God who lubs dem, and when dey are ill dat dey pray to him. Dat he hear dem, when de fetish hab no ears to hear, and no ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... him closer. Strange, she was afraid of him! Afraid of him as of a fetish! Fetish afraid, and fetish-fascinated! Or was her fear only a delightful game of cat and mouse? Or was the fear genuine, and the delight the greater: a sort of sacrilege? The fear, and the dangerous, sacrilegious power over that ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... sought lay beyond nature and was subject to some rule of which he did not even know the elements, and much less the axioms. Herein his instruments, or indeed, any that man could make, were as futile and as useless as would be the prayers of an archbishop addressed to a Mumbo-jumbo in a fetish house. The link was wanting; there was, and could be, no communication between the two. The invisible ether which he had subdued to his purposes was still a constituent part of the world of matter; he must discover the spiritual ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... placed upon them. On the statue of Olympic Jove appeared the bust of the contemptible Caligula; and this incongruous adaptation represented the change of the popular faith from its former heavenly idealisations to the most grovelling fetish worship of the time. This deification of the emperors avenged its terrible blasphemy by the sublime wickedness of those who were so raised above humanity. Here, in this last pagan temple of Rome, converted into one of the earliest Christian churches, we see the darkness and despair ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... stood there swallowing, her head bent, and her hands crossed over her breast, and clasped firmly there was the crucifix she had found in the guest room. Little pagan that she was, she regarded it entirely as a fetish of much potency with white people, and surely she needed help of all gods when she spoke for the whole pueblo to this man who ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... terror and pain have been the best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory, teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the common inheritance ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Serbian language," laughed Alec. "It opposes me at every turn; it mocks at my best efforts; it swathes me like the bandages of a mummy,—and I am growing weary of its restraint. This is a question of self interest, too. Perhaps, if I can persuade our good Kosnovians to adopt some more up-to-date fetish, they may drop the hereditary habit of carving their chosen rulers into mincemeat whenever a change of Government ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... to go and see the station it sheltered. Landing was no easy matter, and I waited a long time in a big canoe, manned by twenty paddlers kneeling forward, before the old negro in the stern decided the attempt to be possible. He never stopped invoking every fetish under the sun, and sprinkling the sea out of a brandy bottle, keeping his eye the while on the waves as they came rolling in. Then all at once he gave a great shout, loudly responded to by the twenty paddlers, who yelled in cadence, while the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... State and the Portuguese have started large farms for breeding European cattle which thrive here satisfactorily. Higher up a solitary rock overhangs the left bank. This is known as Fetish Rock from the legend that the natives used to throw live people from it into the river as sacrifices. This is possibly true but there is little evidence to show that the natives of the Congo ever sacrificed either living or dead ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... saw him. All were intent on the sensational prize they had secured, a young and beautiful white woman so contentedly roaming about the shores of this Fetish island. With the slow speed advised by the Roman philosopher, the backsight and foresight of the Lee-Metford came into line with the breast of the coarse brute ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... nursling, learner, teacher, Thus foreshadow things to come, When the girl shall grow the creature Of false terrors vain and dumb, And entrust their baleful fetish with her being's scope ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of maxims are full of the respect you feel toward him. 'The greatest crime is loss of time.' 'Time flies.' 'Time waits for no man.' These are only small instances, but their total effect is not small, for it is life itself that you sacrifice to this fetish. Your G'il actually won't let you take good full draughts of existence—he keeps you so busy dividing it into months, days, and minutes. You imagine that it is because you lead crowded lives that you do it. But it is ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... concert artist takes up teaching as a last resort, without enthusiasm or the true vocational instinct. The false standards he sets up for his pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish of virtuosity—those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago. Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and others, whose virtuosity is a true ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical god of Paley,' as this does the fetish ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... intellectual power, the pure reason directed to spiritual ends. The different shades of blue all indicate religious feeling, and range through all hues from the dark brown-blue of selfish devotion, or the pallid grey-blue of fetish-worship tinged with fear, up to the rich deep clear colour of heartfelt adoration, and the beautiful pale azure of that highest form which implies self-renunciation and union with the divine; the devotional thought of an unselfish ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... her fatigue, to rest passive in the midst of quiet, and soft light, calm in the belief, almost the certainty, that this desert village contained no acquaintance to disturb her, was to know all the joy she needed for the moment. She drank it in dreamily. Liberty had always been her fetish. What woman had more liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the shadowy ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... including the axe, about twenty of duffel. This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending "the mechanical God of Paley," as this does the fetish of the savage. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... is getting to be a ridiculous nuisance. Nothing can be done, no plans can be made, without some veto connected with that animal's whims or convenience being imposed. If you were a priest in attendance on some African fetish you couldn't set up a more elaborate code of restrictions. I believe you'd ask the Government to put off a General Election if you thought it would interfere with ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intellectual form, the Germans have magnified its force and enhanced its monstrosity. But the passion itself is not peculiar to Germans, nor is it only they to whom it is and has been a motive of State. Power has been the fetish of kings and emperors from the beginning of political history, and it remains to be seen whether it will not continue to inspire democracies. The passion for empire ruined the Athenian democracy, no less than the Spartan or the Venetian oligarchy, or the Spain ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Naya may be thwarted. Our enemies have arranged to strike their blow three moons from now, but ere that we shall be back in Mo, and they will find that they go only to their graves. Kouaga has made fetish for the son of his royal mistress, and has come to ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... voice. "My uncle, who was a missionary, brought it from West Africa. I rather forget the facts, but Jeekie, my negro servant, knows them all, for as a lad my uncle saved him from sacrifice, or something, in a place where they worship these things, and he has been with us ever since. It is a fetish with magical powers and all the rest of it. I believe they call it the Swimming Head and other names. If you look at it, you will see that it seems to swim ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... life, but,—in her palmy days,—she had loved. And the necessity of loving had apparently remained a part of her nature, otherwise it would have been a sheer impossibility for her to have selected so strange a fetish as Lady Wicketts for her adoration. Lady Wicketts did not, in any marked way, respond to Miss Fosby's tenderness,—she merely allowed herself to be worshipped, just as in her youth she had allowed scores of young bloods to kiss her hand and murmur soft nothings ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... which confronted him. There was something fascinating as well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the weight and effect ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... developing in what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost obliging him to create his own ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... together in the Indian Census under the denominational rubric of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements. Low as is their social status, it is but little lower than that of the Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the social ladder of Hinduism without ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... that fortified her—beyond her first gently tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in her pale, composed face—and the lawyer was at last brought to the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood. The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret among the men."—"I finished the Scarlet Letter yesterday. It falls off sadly after that fine opening scene. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... for the poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their own purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet than a magnificent Fetish. They did not really want him, but they have heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use of him. They call upon his name, they do certain things that are supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying prayers ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... of the packed front room into the passage, and then into a sort of bar parlour. Malim and I also made our way there. "That's the fetish of the club," said Malim, pointing to a barrel standing on end; "and I'll introduce you to the man who is sitting on it. He's little Michael, the musical critic. They once put on an operetta of his at the Court. It ran about two nights, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... rosaries, who believes in wonder-working relics, and purchases pardon for his sins by means of indulgence-money or Peter's pence, we willingly concede the claim to possess the "only saving religion"; but with such fetish-worshippers we will willingly submit ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, however carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian medicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,—the dry bones clothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold fast the robust faith of our fathers,—the creed of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Party, from the leading advocate of bimetallism with-or-without-the- concurrence-of-Europe. The utterances of both gentlemen were delivered with the repose and dignity peculiar to their body, and Patriotism and the Constitution would appear to be their watchword and fetish. Burleigh came up to the gallery as the Silver Senator sat down, and smiled wearily at Betty's ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study had been erected into a fetish. There was a total failure to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists—the kind of work which Hart Merriam and his assistants in the Biological Survey have carried ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the Hebrew religious records how the priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a fetish called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this fetish and wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god. And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... classification schemers have made over their schemes—some of them many times. I am not arguing against classification, which is essential to the practical utility of any library. An imperfect classification is much better than none: but the tendency to erect classification into a fetish, and to lay down cast-iron rules for it, should be guarded against. In any library, reasons of convenience must often prevail over logical arrangement; and he who spends time due to prompt library service in worrying over errors in a catalogue, or vexing his soul at a faulty classification, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... I put my hand inside my tunic and stroked Dinky and said to him, "For God's sake, Dink, see me through this time." I meant it too. I was actually praying,—to my mascot. I realize that this was plain, unadulterated, heathenish fetish worship, but it shows what a man reverts to in the barbaric ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... was supposed to be there; but his wife, his children, his bonne, and his kitchen wench issued forth, oblivious alike of dull care and of bombarding Prussians, to enjoy themselves after their wont by gossiping and lolling in the sun. The Strasburg fetish had its usual crowd of admirers. Every bench in the Champs Elysees was occupied. Guitars twanged, organs were ground, merry-go-rounds were in full swing, and had it not been that here and there some ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training, which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual, whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life. If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... been long a minister, before I found this worship of the Bible as a fetish hindering me at every step. If I declared the Constancy of Nature's Laws, and sought therein great argument for the Constancy of God, all the miracles came and held their mythologic finger up. Even Slavery was 'of God,' for the divine statutes in the Old Testament admitted the principle ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... the Celtic races. It is an immutable witness that has no death. The animal, the plant, above all the human figure, only express the divine life under a determinate form; the stone on the contrary, adapted to receive all forms, has been the fetish of peoples in their childhood. Pausanias saw, still standing erect, the thirty square stones of Pharse, each bearing the name of a divinity. The men-hir to be met with over the whole surface of the ancient world, what is it but the monument of primitive ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the rule, she must give a goat to be killed; its flesh is distributed, and its blood, diluted with water and mixed with herbs, is sprinkled on the watering-place and on the paths leading to it. Were any woman to disregard these salutary precautions, the chief fetish-man in the village would fall sick and die, which would be an irreparable ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Standing before this rude fetish, between it and the altar, whereon lay some flowers, and in such fashion that the moonlight struck full upon her, was a white-robed woman. She was young and very beautiful both in shape and feature, and though her black hair streaming almost to the knees took from her height, she still ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... when alone, Lucy asked herself why she stayed on at Sefton Falls to sacrifice her life on the altar of family loyalty. Was not her youth being spent to glorify an empty fetish which brought to no ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... German clerk and Chinese aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely the utter antithesis of "home" is that same "dangerous life." These young men who economise and grow stingy in their desperate endeavour to establish a "home nest," some "Acacia Villa" in Wood Green or Croydon—what can they know of living ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... misunderstanding just noticed is; yet our usefulness depends upon our being able to clear it away, and to convince [xv] those who mechanically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not culture's work or aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question. In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the two we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails; and until it is dissipated, culture ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... best it is only a mistake, not a deliberate lie. The lawyer thinks he owes a moral obligation to his client and to himself to cross-examine. He is compelled to go on. There is a musty tradition of the law that a trial without cross-examination is not a proper trial. It is a legal fetish and one of the things that is done. The judge expects it, the jury expect it, the client expects it ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... nor ain't I'se funky ob him, neider! My fader in Jamaiky he one big fetish man; an' I not 'fraid ob Captain Snaggs, or de debbel, or any odder man; an' I wants ter go ter 'Frisco, too, an' dat's de ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... household; but there, too, the efficiency which had been her fetish made interference unnecessary. Her well-trained servants chuckled among themselves at the Madam's sudden interest in housecleaning, in ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"—an acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and amusing to ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... But her heart leaped to think how well she knew the answer. No need to speak of it, though. It would be almost profanity to talk to this women, who knew about as much of it as an African fetish-worshipper knows of the Eternal—of that love which counts fidelity not by months and years; which, though it has its root in mortal life, stretches out safely and fearlessly into ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... entertained the same feeling of contempt for it. Not again would I make light of it,—this potent engine of destruction which had procured me the character of being a magician. I would hide it from human gaze, and cherish it as a sort of fetish. So I bought a walking- stick and an umbrella, and strapped it up with them, wrapped in my plaid; and when, shortly after, an unexpected remittance from an aunt supplied me with money enough to buy a horse from one of the officers ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... of the rest, although their association with white men from their birth had rendered them more amenable in some respects than were the more recent importations, the tenacity with which they had adhered to their fetish-worship, with all its secret and horribly revolting customs, tended to keep them still utterly savage at heart, and only too ready to lend a willing ear to any suggestion which offered them an excuse to indulge their inherent lust for cruelty. Moreover, the African black who has been a slave is a ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in the dreams of the poet, and that Longfellow's ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... ready for the full public avowal of this principle, but he was driven to the wall and was forced to own it or lie. He boldly gave his position, and declared that marriage was a fetish, and that its basis on a union for life without regard to the feelings of the parties was a fountain of corruption, and was the source of the monopolistic instincts that ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... primary consideration is the child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her activities, never makes a fetish of the book. It has its use, to be sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. It is not a necessity, but a mere convenience. She could dispense with it entirely and not do violence to the child's interests. No book is large enough to compass all that ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Wanderer. In what past age or at how great a distance it was from his own world, he could only imagine. But that the big man who called himself Wanderer loved this country there was not the slightest doubt. It was a fetish with him, a past he was in duty bound to revisit time and again, and to ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... the campaign which Christophe was conducting in the Review. His slaughter in the opposing camp had seemed to them to give signs of a strong grip which it would be as well to have in their service. Christophe had also let fly certain disrespectful remarks about the sacred fetish: but they had preferred to close their eyes to that: and perhaps his attacks, not yet very offensive, had not been without their influence, unconsciously, in making them so eager to enroll Christophe before he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... shellfish, for the cooking of which I made a fire of some dried wood. Moira showed the greatest astonishment and some alarm at my flint and steel, which I now used for the first time in her presence. Nothing would persuade her to touch it. She regarded it as something beyond her comprehension, as a fetish to be worshipped. When we had finished our meal we fell asleep, worn out by the fatigues ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... meadows and sand-dunes, the waves that lap peacefully or dash thunderously, tell us nothing of these old and often dismal quarrels. They are but secular things after all; the things that are eternal reach deeper than creed or vestment. We do not ask what fetish or totem the sleepers in the grassy barrows believed in; we may ask if they lived their lives truly and faithfully, doing that which was good according to the light of ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... is lucky the Colonel is not here. Never speak of the big drum in that irreverent tone to him, I pray. It would well-nigh give him a fit. The big drum is his fetish, though he nearly smashed it himself ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... murderous slug shot through the lungs, fired from the old flint musket of one of the King of Abarri's adherents, in the pestilential African stream up which he had gone to demolish a native stronghold that had defied the fetish of the British flag, this allowance for my support ceased, and I was thenceforth left a poor pensioner on my uncle's bounty. I will do my relative the justice of stating that I do not believe he would ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... have seen that the NGARONG may assume the form of some curious natural object, or of some one animal distinguished from its fellows by some slight peculiarity, which receives the attentions of some one man only. In such cases the NGARONG is hardly distinguishable from a fetish. In other cases the man, being unable to distinguish the particular animal which he believes to be animated by his NGARONG, extends his regard and gratitude to the whole species. In such a case it seems difficult to deny the name "individual totem" to the species, if the term is to ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... through brush. She had pulled him from a quicksand bed,—made of cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" that was his fetish, had insisted on a panorama of the fall, so that there was no chance for Gil to save himself the bruises he got. Gil Huntley's part it was always to die a violent death, or to be captured spectacularly, because he was the villain ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... sympathetic bonds with those nations who are allied to us in policy. It has also attempted to produce that kind of "Balance of Power" in Europe which on its own showing makes for peace. This Balance of Power, so often and so mysteriously alluded to by the diplomatic world, has become a veritable fetish. Perhaps its supreme achievement was reached when two autocratic monarchs—the Tsar of Russia and the German Emperor—solemnly propounded a statement, as we have seen, at Port Baltic that the Balance of Power, as distributed between the Triple Alliance ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... can explain it, it's a funny kind of a mixture—partly theology, partly Darwinism, or at least, making a fetish of evolution, and partly pure economic determinism. They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause—that is the nearest English equivalent—and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... as a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object to teach him its use, or want of use, and the process ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... If I had time to read up for the bar, and pass my examinations, I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music, Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish rag which makes ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish [Footnote: Fetish (also spelt "fetich"): a material object, venerated by certain African tribes; a sort of idol, which is sometimes punished by its owner in disappointment or anger.] which she ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the marks of my slavery," he replied, bitterly. "They were a set of hideous brutes; and the fetish they worshipped was cruelty. I carry about me other marks that must go with me to my grave; but there is no need to dwell on these horrors. He sent His angel to deliver me," he continued, reverently; "and again my benefactor was ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... broke out, in the parish of St. Mary, and spread through almost every other district of the island, an old Koromantyn negro, the chief instigator and oracle of the insurgents in that parish, who had administered the fetish, or solemn oath, to the conspirators, and furnished them with a magical preparation, which was to render them invulnerable, was fortunately apprehended, convicted, and hung up with all his feathers and trumperies about him; and his execution struck ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... will be happy?" he said. "Do you think you will ever manage to forget what you have sacrificed to this fetish you call Love,—how you broke the heart of one of the best fellows in the world, and trampled upon the memory of your dead child—the little chap you used to call the light of your eyes, who used to hold out his arms directly he saw you and ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Him no tell Massa Huggin. Him no kill pore black darkie. Iss, Caesar tell um," he whispered now, with his lips so close that the lad felt the hot breath hiss into his ear. "Dat Obeah, massa. Dat black man's Obeah. Come along now Caesar know. Find fetish. Plenty many black ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... piece of money where stray asses have gone, its enthusiastic attitude to the monarchy, its obvious delight in the splendid presence and powers of Saul, its intimate knowledge of the ecstatic prophets, its conception of the ark as a sort of fetish whose presence insures victory—all these things bespeak for the document that relates them a high antiquity. The other document represents Samuel as a great judge and virtual regent over all Israel, it has a wide experience of the evils of monarchy, it idealizes David, and it regards Saul as a "rejected" ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... emotion. I have risked my life a score of times to serve you. This morning I saved you from something worse than death, and surely I deserve a little consideration at your hands. Will you not think again? Since heroism is your fetish, can you find nothing heroic in ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... way full of thought. Her first impression was that the mason must be a superior sort of workman because he kept his home and his few possessions neatly and orderly. She did not know that there are many naturally clean persons in the laboring-classes. However, she made no fetish of tubbing herself once a day, and thought on to more important considerations. Evidently the young man was attached to his beautiful solitary abode—he had planted and watered a vine for the door. She resolved to tell him that he could help himself ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798 had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by arresting thirty of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... know conclusively who made it. Tony had gone in from the West coast after big game, and he found the thing put up as a sort of fetish in a devil house. It was one of the tribes near the Karamajo range. As I told you, we have only Tony's diary for it. I found the thing among his effects after he was killed in Flanders. It's pretty certain Tony did not understand the water color. There was only this single entry in the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... jury, and the reverence paid to rank, and the horror of all things which, as poor Corney Grain used to say, 'are not nice,' I reckon the Sunday sirloin, cooked and served, one and indivisible as the typical fetish of the great English middle class. With this fact before my eyes, I can assure you I did not lightly lay a hand on its integrity. My friends, you have eaten that sirloin without knowing it. You may remember that yesterday after ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... lower jaw. It was the blunt-nosed Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in the village, who had given his name to the village; the demon of the ford before the railway bridge, came—murderer, man-eater, and local fetish in one. He lay with his chin in the shallows, keeping his place by an almost invisible rippling of his tail, and well the Jackal knew that one stroke of that same tail in the water would carry the Mugger up the bank with the rush of ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained; "and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of proprietary rights and the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... spent in destroying the two great stockades, cutting down the bush round them, and blowing up the fetish tree; as well as burying the enemy's dead, thirty in number. On the evening of the next day, ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... trusting in yourselves, you rose to the first rank of antiquarians. To-day, well-off, owning this shop, "The Mercury," you attribute the success of your undertakings to that clasp. To lose it would to your eyes spell bankruptcy and poverty. Your whole life has been centred upon it. It is your fetish. It is the little household god who watches over you and guides your steps. It is there, somewhere, hidden in this jungle; and no one of course would ever have suspected anything—for I repeat, you are decent people, but for ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... hand from a broomstick with its legs drawn up under it, the whole evolution of mankind is re- enacted. You can trace clearly the cave-dweller, the hunter, the scout. What, then, does Wriggly represent? Fetish worship—nothing else. The savage chooses some most unlikely thing and adores it. This dear little ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will desert me now," he said to himself, when he was safely in a train bound for Sydney. "I've lost my fetish." ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... In a corner of this he installed the ring of cork and canvas, and remained by it, patting and caressing it. When it rained again, he appreciated, for the first time, the comfort of shelter, and became a cave-dweller, with a new god—a fetish, to which he transferred his allegiance and obeisance because ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."[18] This statement of Marx is one of the most ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and assuredly it is not ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... been sixteen months when, on the soil of their France and looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold what remained to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness. When the world expressed its surprise and admiration at French courage France smiled politely, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... finished?" she asked. "What you are proposing to do is to sacrifice your life—and my life, James Lyons, for the sake of a—er—fetish. Horace Elton, under the pretence of friendship for us, has taken advantage of your necessities to extract from you a promise to support an evil scheme—a bill to defraud the plain American people of their rights—the people whose interests you swore to protect when you ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... and proceeded as far as Yansong, the chief town of Acquimbo, distant from the coast about one hundred and forty miles. Here the natives were celebrating the Yam feast, a sort of religious ceremony, to witness which Park got up into a Fetish tree, which is regarded by the natives with fear and dread. Here he remained a great part of the day, exposed to the sun, and was observed to drink a great quantity of palm wine. In dropping down from one of the lower branches, he fell on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... iron. And everywhere is the machinery ready, though different in its frame and operation in different torture-chambers, to crush out the budding skepticism, and to mould the mind into the monotonous decency of general conformity. Foe or Fetish, King or Kaiser, Deity itself or the vicegerents it has appointed in its stead, are answerable for it all. God himself has looked upon it, and it is very good, and there is no appeal from that approval of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... life," went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
