"Retrogression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... telepath, John," I told him. "He has been deliberately trained to make use of the latent power in his brain. And I don't think I'm 'stuck' either. We all know we've been slowly slipping into retrogression ever since '63. None of us like it, but there isn't anything we can do to halt it—yet. We don't want our children, or their children, to keep slipping backwards. If we don't stop it in our lifetime, we may not be able to ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the concert, when, for the first time, the notes of that matchless symphony fell upon the ears of the world: when the supreme desolation of the magnificent, crashing retrogression of the finale held a thousand people in breathless, trembling stillness; the tears of Ivan's boundless yearning: the passions of the true Weldschmerz glazing every eye. Accounts of the mad storm of applause which finally rose into ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... we also maintain: The establishment of the theory of Descent in general, and the continual retrogression of Darwinism in particular. Wigand was entirely right when he said that Darwinism would not ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her—first along the route originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely paragraphed ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... rapid retrogression under new unfavorable geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer. The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... people today make peace and make war—not a sovereign, not the whim of an individual, not the ambition of a single man; but the sentiment, the friendship, the affection, the feelings of this great throbbing mass of humanity, determine peace or war, progress or retrogression. And coming to a self-governing people from a self-governing people, I would interpret my fellow-citizens—the great mass of plain people—to the great mass of the plain people of Brazil. No longer the aristocratic selfishness, which ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... disorganization among them; yet it is not to be doubted that as many causes for interference occur in that body as in our own, but education, discipline, and a well-regulated system for their poor enable them to grapple with every question of good or evil, whether of retrogression or ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... recent fiction it is obvious that we ought to remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our prevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature is never in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to the development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The literary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it.... Admitted facts seem to show ... a general, but not a detailed progression.... It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organisation is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression should ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... sheath of a leaf, with the addition of colouring matter, to be replaced by a perfect leaf, one in which all three constituent parts, sheath, stalk, and blade, are present, it surely can hardly be said that there has been any retrogression or arrest of development in the formation of a complete in place of an incomplete organ. The term retrograde here is used in a purely theoretical sense, and cannot be held to imply any actual degradation. Morphologically, as has been stated, the case is one ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... wheel-barrows, which could be dumped directly into the bench-walls; or, in the case of the arches, shoveled from the platform of the gantry to the intermediate platform on the arch ribs, and thence directly into the arch. This use of wheel-barrows, though apparently a somewhat crude method and a retrogression from the use of the belt conveyor, proved very successful, and really involved no more labor than did the conveyors, although this might not have been the case had these latter worked as ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... observing the ambition, the selfishness, the party spirit, the unworthy intrigues, and the irregularities of moral conduct, which modern rulers and statesmen sometimes exhibit to mankind in their personal and political career, to believe in a retrogression and degeneracy of national character as the world advances in age, will be very effectually undeceived by reading attentively a full history of this celebrated dynasty, and reflecting, as he reads, that the narrative presents, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... out in him with generous ardour. This man suffered intensely at what to him, as to Byron and to Shelley (we must recollect the introduction of the Revolt of Islam), seemed the battle between progress and retrogression; and suffered all the more as he was too pure and just-minded not to feel the impossibility of complete sympathy with either side. Mme. d'Albany answered his letters with Olympic serenity. What was it ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... R. of L.C. table). That's ridiculous. Naturally we must have progress. But that's just the point. (Indicating the curtains.) I don't call this sort of thing progress. It's—ah— retrogression. ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... are hard to find. Few of these groups or communities that are classed as "savage" show no traces of regression from a more advanced cultural stage. But there are groups—some of them apparently not the result of retrogression—which show the traits of primitive savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence, in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the institution of a leisure class ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression—in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker City ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... awful shore. Even the click of her own gate as she opened it, the sound of her own feet on the path, the feel of the door-latch to her hand—all the little common belongings of her daily life were turned into so many stationary landmarks to prove her own retrogression ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... first convention, Germany and the States hauled down their flags. It was so done again before the second; and Germany, by a still more emphatic step of retrogression, returned the exile Laupepa to his native shores. For two years the unfortunate man had trembled and suffered in the Cameroons, in Germany, in the rainy Marshalls. When he left (September 1887) Tamasese was king, served by five iron war-ships; his right to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like an ass. I'll be shot if I ever touch a diamond again! Not if it was the Koh-I-noor; those few whacking stones are too well known, and to cut them up is to decrease their value by arithmetical retrogression. Besides, that brings you up against the Fence once more, and I'm done with the beggars for good and all. You talk about your editors and publishers, you literary swine. Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but a six-barred, barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence. What we really want is ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the world depends, broadly speaking, upon the balance between acquisitiveness and rivalry. The former makes for progress, the latter for retrogression. When intelligence provides improved methods of production, these may be employed to increase the general share of goods, or to set apart more of the labour power of the community for the business of killing its rivals. Until 1914, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had done. He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the clearest soul becomes a cunning fox. For a grief that was private and peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... consider that we thus in any way bind ourselves to adopt Roman, or Greek, or Egyptian, or Scandinavian costumes or customs; nor in our use of the Arts of Antiquity do we perceive any demonstration of retrogression in ourselves. ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... world, were once in a barbarous condition. To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a moment avail to coax or to coerce them into the counter direction. Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into progress, we excelled in that; it was our forte; we could have backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least to distinction—sic itur ad astra; unfortunately, it was not the way to Dublin. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of science at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or else ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the Indrawing; the "Outbreathing and Inbreathing of Brahm," as the Brahmans word it. Universes are created; reach their extreme low point of materiality; and then begin in their upward swing. Suns spring into being, and then their height of power being reached, the process of retrogression begins, and after aeons they become dead masses of matter, awaiting another impulse which starts again their inner energies into activity and a new solar life cycle is begun. And thus it is with all the worlds; they are born, grow and die; only to be reborn. And thus it is with all the things ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is only the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... frontier was perpetually exposed, the Roman government became a despotism which gradually took on many of the vices of the Oriental type. The political weakness which resulted from this allowed Europe to be overrun by peoples organized in clans and tribes, and for some time there was a partial retrogression toward the disorder characteristic of primitive ages. The retrogression was but partial and temporary, however; the exposed frontier has been steadily pushed eastward into the heart of Asia; the industrial type of society is no longer menaced by the predatory type; the ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... He has risen and lives for ever, we have a better presence than that. He is gone from our sight that He may be seen by our faith. That 'now we see Him not' is advance on the position of His first disciples, not retrogression. Let us strive to possess the blessing of 'those who have not seen, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with the best works of Plato and Aristotle proves that the human race has made a sensible advance. But that advance would have been infinitely greater were it not that three general obstacles retarded it and even, at some times and in some countries, caused a retrogression. These obstacles were wars, superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who feared that progress in the science of politics would be dangerous to themselves. In consequence of these impediments it was only in the time of Bodin and Bacon that the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... in Theory.—Progress is self-perpetuating. Instead of insuring a retrogression, it causes further progress. The man who has advanced from the position in which he earned a bare subsistence to one in which he earns comforts is, for that very reason, likely to advance farther and to obtain ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... head, bit her lip, and rustled out of the room in a huff. She reported her ill-success with 'Maryllia Van' to her husband, who, in his turn, reported it to Lord Roxmouth, who straightway conveyed these and all other items of the progress or retrogression of his wooing to Mrs. Fred Vancourt. That lady, however, felt so perfectly confident that Roxmouth would,—with the romantic surroundings of the Manor, and the exceptional opportunities afforded by long afternoons and moonlit evenings,— succeed where he had hitherto failed, that she almost ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... partial frustration and to perverse misapplication—in that potent space of time, so varied in its intellectual and social manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression—this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... in some ways a retrogression from the Greek letter system, for the neumes indicated neither definite pitches nor definite tone-lengths. But it had this advantage over the Greek system, that the position of the signs on the page indicated ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... the treasures he dispensed so lavishly. But the expansion of that energy caused in him the destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had not scrupled to repress in him. And he never perceived that his whole life was a steady retrogression of all his faculties, of his hopes, his joys—a species of gradual renunciation—and that the circle was slowly but inexorably ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... months from the great centers of civilization, tremendous advances had been made in air-ships and the thousand and one other modern phases of human development, but evolution in the world of Nature as we observed it was only destructive—a world-wide katabolism—a retrogression often discernible from month to month. We could scarcely repeat the trip and make the same observations upon pheasants, so rapidly is this group of birds ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... to the convention in October in 1829, said that Virginia was in a state of "moral and political retrogression" and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... fix society in a contradictory position between retrogression and progress, such as is seen in the parliamentary monarchy of England. This is a last phase of the metaphysical polity, and is only a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... venture to contradict him,' said Godwin; 'for it may be that advance is destined only to come after long retrogression and anarchy. Perhaps the way does lie through such miseries. But we can't foresee that with certainty, and those of us who hate the present tendency of things must needs assert their hatred as strongly as possible, seeing that ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... (cont.) Bishop wrote, "After the battle of Prairie Grove, and the gradual retrogression of the Army of the Frontier into Missouri, Fayetteville was still held as a military post, and those of us who remained there were given to understand that the place would not be abandoned ... The demoralized enemy had fallen back to Little ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... the Neapolitan Bourbon copies of two of the statues which adorned his Nevsky bridge—statues representing restive horses restrained by strong men; and the Berlin populace, with an unerring instinct, had given to one of these the name "Progress checked,'' and to the other the name "Retrogression encouraged.'' To this day one sees every- where in the palaces of Continental rulers, whether great or petty, his columns of Siberian porphyry, jasper bowls, or malachite vases—signs of his approval ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Republic of Hayti—a coloured community, which has enjoyed nearly half a century of entire independence and self-rule. And with what issues? As respects moral and intellectual culture, stagnation: in all that concerns material development, a fatal retrogression. He beholds there, at this day, a miserable parody of European and American institutions, without the spirit that animates either: the tinsel of French sentiment on the ground of negro ignorance: even the 'sacred right ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... about himself, his private opinions about life; and when I reflect now upon my lack of real knowledge at five and twenty, I am amazed at the futility of an expensive education which had failed to impress upon me the simple, basic fact that life was struggle; that either development or retrogression is the fate of all men, that characters are never completely made, but always in the making. I had merely a disconcerting glimpse of this truth, with no powers of formulation, as I sat beside my mother in the bedroom, where every article evoked some childhood scene. Here was the dent in the walnut ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... round its own axis, it cannot follow the apparent motions of these evanescent spectra, either before or after the body is at rest. From all which arguments it is manifest, that these apparent retrograde gyrations of objects are not caused by the rolling of the eyeballs; first, because no apparent retrogression of objects is observed in other rollings of the eyes: secondly, because the apparent retrogression of objects continues many seconds after the rolling of the eyeballs ceases. Thirdly, because the apparent retrogression of objects ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... lost too much of its heat and light by then, and will have begun to grow dark and therefore cold, as other stars have done. The conditions of existence here, which are now apparently in their prime, will have become rigorous and increasingly so, and there will be retrogression towards lower types, until the simplest form of life shall have wholly disappeared from the ice-bound surface. The whole living world will then have waxed and ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... remembered that the word evolution may be used equivocally. It is not evident that all evolution is in the direction of a life, brute or human, that we commonly recognize as higher. There is retrogression, as well as progress, where such retrogression is favored by environment. We may call this, if we please, devolution. Were the conditions of his life very unfavorable, man could not live as he now lives; and, indeed, were they sufficiently unfavorable—for example, if the earth cooled off ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... we have a new amendment to the theory of evolution: We are told that the huge Saurians (reptiles) overworked the development idea, and became too large and cumbersome, and hence are now extinct. Prof. Cope says:—"Retrogression in nature is as well established as evolution." It seems that man also has, contrary to all former conceptions, reached the limit of his development, if he has not already ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... undergraduate that he promptly wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab. I feel sure the Speaker will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding this dangerous heresy of retrogression. But I must candidly admit that I have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... laborers, there is a call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial community—and that means our entire community. It is one of the most hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of large brain, high purpose, and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... transmit to the younger generation a more intelligent standpoint and a more advanced starting-point. Culture is the accumulation of the results of activity, and culture could go on improving for a certain time even if there were a retrogression in intelligence. If all the chemists in class A should stop work tomorrow, the chemists in class B would still make discoveries. These would influence manufacture, and progress would result. If a worker in any specialty acquaints himself with the results ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... tennis as it is in bridge, and all bridge players know that the score is the determining factor in your mode of bidding. Let me urge again concentration. Practise seriously. Do not fool on the court, as it is the worst enemy to progress. Carelessness or laziness only results in retrogression, never progress. ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... held itself aloof from other countries and is ignorant of the affairs of the world; the only object sought has been to give ourselves the least trouble, and by daily retrogression we are in danger of ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... said that the labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. On the whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade unions—something which can be said of very few special interests for whose benefit ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... play-bills of John Kemble's last performances before me, and there is none of this fustian: the fact, the performance, and the name are simply announced. If our taste improves in some respects, it does not in this; it is a retrogression—a royal theatre sinking back into the booth of a fair. Shakspeare's and Byron's texts have been converted into the showman's explanations of panoramas: to what vile uses they may be next applied, there is no guessing. Poor ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?—was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth the retrogression that may be ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to be made in behalf of women, therefore, is liberty, as untrammelled a choice of occupation and mode of life, as free a range of individuality and spiritual fruition, as is granted to men. But would this really be an advance, or a retrogression? Many maintain that it would be subversive of the genuine progress of civilization, to abandon the prejudices and throw down the bars which have hitherto restrained women from a full share in the chosen avocations ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Orfeo, or possibly of the old sacre rappresentationi themselves. In 1506 the court of Urbino witnessed the eclogue composed and recited by Baldassare Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga[378]. It also belongs to the octave group, and is diversified with a canzonet. Dramatically the piece is somewhat of a retrogression, but it is interesting from the characters introduced in pastoral guise. Thus in Iola and Dameta we may see Castiglione and his fellow author; Tirsi, who gives his name to the poem, is a stranger shepherd attracted by reports of the court; ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the people was most alive; and when, on the other hand, the public were not yet corrupted with oversensibility. He took that in hand which most actively engaged the spirit of the people; and he carried it through progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was nothing possible but retrogression.—GERVINUS. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, from ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... hopelessness of your retrogression from all good that you should presume to ask such a question," answered Moretti, growing white under the natural darkness of his skin with an impotency of rage he could scarcely suppress, "Your sermon this morning was an open attack on the Church, and the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard and fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... between himself and the ducal rebel. He then digressed to recent political measures, and expressed himself strongly upon the advantages which tranquillity at home, as well as peace abroad, must ensure to the kingdom; after which, as if by some process of mental retrogression, he became suddenly more gloomy in his discourse; and observed, as if despite himself, that although he would struggle even to the end of his existence to secure these national advantages, he nevertheless felt that as ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... to conclude that the corpora lutea have an important influence on the development of the milk glands. According to Lane-Claypon and Starling, if the ovaries and uteri are removed from a pregnant rabbit before the fourteenth day the development of the mammary gland ceases, retrogression takes place, and no milk appears in the gland. If, on the other hand, the operation be performed after the fourteenth day, milk appears within two days after the operation. It is to be concluded from this that the cause of secretion of milk ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... evolution—in a word they would realize that the principle of Creative Progression, when it reaches the level of fully developed mental man, necessarily implies the Resurrection of the Body, and that anything short of this would be retrogression ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... environment served to condition and mold him as a writer. Salem had reached its highest prosperity in all lines and was just beginning its retrogression in Hawthorne's time; the primeval forests of Maine produced a subtle and lasting influence on him during his sojourn in Maine for his health; transcendentalism was the ruling thought at the time when Hawthorne was in his ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... social ills. Such a tendency is certainly good and satisfying; a sign of a notable social progress altho for the majority it is a cause of alarm and regret because of the seeming increase of such ills. Is there a positive increase of immorality? Is there real cause for alarm because of a moral retrogression ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutes visits per day to the sick room. And found what I have learned to expect—retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye which betrays the secret ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... then he came on with a rush in the great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the AEgean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore the appearance of retrogression. I have already asked what the Invisible King was about when he suffered the glory that was Athens to sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the world-leadership; and Rome, though energetic and capable, was never ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... closed, and then drew his chair near to Dumiger's. The latter, quite unaccustomed to the neighborhood of so great a man, immediately withdrew his seat to a more deferential distance; but the dimensions of the room speedily put a stop to the retrogression and his modesty by arresting ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... extend beyond the limited local focus, was not due to the intestinal contents and to bacteria, but chiefly to bacterial toxins which arose from the circumscribed original focus. This fact is pointed out by the prompt retrogression of the diffuse peritoneal symptoms after rupture of the abscess; the diffuse peritonitis of this stage might then be designated a nonbacterial 'chemical' inflammation, according to the terminology now in vogue; finally, it was positively a bacterial infection, although the postmortem finding ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... things in general are those of Hamlet, or Hamlet's those of Prospero. But before it is possible to point out the nature of this difference, and to show that the change is a natural growth of thought, not a mere retrogression, a few explanatory ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... laws, should be purely Japanese. They were not even satisfied with the disendowment of Buddhism: there was a vigorous proposal made for its total suppression! And all this would have signified, in more ways than one, a social retrogression towards barbarism. The great scholars had never proposed to cast away Buddhism and all Chinese learning; they had only insisted that the native religion and culture should have precedence. But the new literary party desired what would have ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... openly renounced Christianity, and, at Halle, led by Ruge, the journalist, embraced the social revolutionary ideas of "Young France," to which almost the whole of the younger journalists of literary "Young Germany" acceded; nor was this Gallic reaction, this retrogression toward the philosophical ideas of the foregoing century, without its cause, German patriotism, which, from 1815 to 1819, had predominated in every university throughout Prussia, having been forcibly suppressed. Hegel, on his appearance in Berlin, was generally regarded as the man on whom ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... a stony and gradually descending trail, and we are making our way across the usual chequered area of desert, patches, abandoned fields, and old irrigating ditches that so often tell the tale of decay and retrogression in the East. These outlying evidences of decay, however, soon merge into green fields of wheat and barley, poppy gardens, and orchards, and flowing ditches; and two hours after obtaining the first view of Herat finds us camped ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... part fixed its own doctrine in the decrees of Trent (period of the Reformation)." This view of history, which, from the Christian stand-point, will allow absolutely nothing to be said against the doctrinal formation of the early Church, is a retrogression from the view of Luther and the writers of the "Centuries," for these were well aware that the corruption did not first begin in the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... as has been explained, was that his own retrogression had disconcerted the plans of this special miscreant for whom, however, he ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... with a definite intention, on the part of the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the bones, especially the bones of the extremities and the skull, and to intelligence and the complexity of the convolutions of the brain. Injury to the thyroid, especially in growing animals, is followed by profound retrogression or arrest of development ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... with progress rather than with retrogression. Most newspaper men admit that this is true, but declare that the public will not buy the kind of papers which all sensible people approve. Just as soon as such papers can be made to pay, they say, we shall have them. One of the objects of this course is ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... that is in contemplation; it is a totally distinct social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... The lips prevent its retrogression. The teeth take possession of it and crush it. The salva imbibes it; the tongue turns it over and over, an aspiration forces it to the thorax; the tongue lifts it up to suffer it to pass. The sense of smell perceives it en route, and it is precipitated into the stomach to undergo ulterior ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of Christianity this science, as well as all others, was stultified. A retrogression took place to the ideation of the most primitive of men, namely, the conception of physical disease as the result of the wrath of God, or the malice of Satan, or by a combination of both. The Old Testament attributes such diseases as the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... they persist in their present mode of action, and, when they are not modified by outward changes, reduce life to its simplest phases. Changes of growth are effected by those apparent hardships to which life is subject; and progression in new directions is effected by retrogression in previous modes of growth. The old leaves and branches must fall, the wood must be frost-bitten or dried, the substance of seeds must wither and then decay, the action of leaves must every night be reversed, vines and branches must be shaken by the winds, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... often pondered over this singular change in character. He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all, merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now of redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. Not only was it easy to forget, it ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... really forges for forming new structures of matter or forms of energy, rather than quarries from which they are cut, and we seem to get a glimpse of the origin of life, perhaps itself the cause of "retrogression" in the material, coming through from the Reality, the Infinite beyond the ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... however, complaints begin to be heard[247]—if it is established, as we believe it is, that progress towards a better state of things has been continuous through all these changes, without any notable retrogression? ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it. You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his mother has ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... on a level with the surroundings suddenly plunged into a deep mud canyon. This canyon had been cut back from far below by the undermining action of the falling water, and it was plain to see that it would continue its retrogression till it eventually reached the mouth of the great canyon several miles above, but I did not dream that it could accomplish this work as rapidly as it actually did years after. During a great flood it washed a canyon not only to Kanab but for miles up the gorge, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... every aspect of the national fortunes, a corresponding barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of national life. Yet a remedy for Henry's misrule was only found because the age of political retrogression was in all other fields of action an epoch of unexampled progress. The years during which the strong centralised government of the Angevin kings was breaking down under Henry's weak rule were years which, to the historian of civilisation, are among ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... and again in 1864 (ibid., p. 89-91) I argued, not as a matter of speculation, but, from paleontological facts, the bearing of which I believe, up to that time, had not been shown, that any adequate hypothesis of the causes of evolution must be consistent with progression, stationariness and retrogression, of the same type at different epochs; of different types in the same epoch; and that Darwin's hypothesis fulfilled ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Tinkleby, fixing his nippers with an air of resolution and defiance, "Heningson's going to open a debate next Saturday. The subject is: 'That this house is of opinion that the moral and physical condition of mankind is in a state of retrogression.' We'll go and hear it. Ward'll let us do our 'prep.' in the afternoon. I've got a little plan in my head, and we'll take a ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... is one of the chief acknowledged factors in the retrogression of British trade. The workers have become class conscious as never before. The wrong of one is the wrong of all. They have come to realize, in a short-sighted way, that their masters' interests are ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... for ever. There was no question with her but that she must bear her father's anger, should he be angry; put up with his continued opposition, should he resolutely oppose her; bear all that the countesses of the world might say to her;—for it was thus that she thought of Lady Cantrip now. Any retrogression was beyond her power. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... water mark was reached in the autumn of 1886. But in the early months of 1887 a reaction became visible. By July 1, the membership of the Order had diminished to 510,351. While a share of this retrogression may have been due to the natural reaction of large masses of people who had been suddenly set in motion without experience, a more immediate cause came from the employers. Profiting by past lessons, they ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... The cause for this retrogression was the love of migratory life which is characteristic of the American race. The Pawnee villages, as I have stated, lay a long ways to the north-west, but among the party that had been on the long tramp, was a strong minority in favor of ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... progression, it is in reality only one of gradual change. It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organization is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression, should ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the literary evolution of the Bible. Everything that has since been done has only been in the direction of retrogression, of injury to the text. We have now a great many later versions, much more scholarly, so far as correct scholarship is concerned, than the King James version, but none having any claim to literary importance. Unfortunately, exact scholars are ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... supposes great progress of the mining countries in civilization in general; and yet, thus far, Mexico's republican independence etc., as compared with the later years of the Spanish colonial system there, is a great retrogression. The conquest of Spanish America by the United States would give a vast impetus to economic improvement; and here, again, the increase of production would be attended by an ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... invention, but I think that I have at least labelled my own thoughts. I suppose what we all desire is to improve the condition of the people by whom we are employed, and to advance our country, or at any rate to save it from retrogression." ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... into the future. There is no reason why in many lines of production we should not surpass all other nations, as we have already done in some. There are no near frontiers to our possible development. Retrogression would be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... which subsisted after the benefits conferred by humanism had been withdrawn from the race. The retirement of the commercial aristocracy from trade, and their assumption of princely indolence in this period of political stagnation, was another factor of importance. But the truest cause of Italian retrogression towards barbarism must finally be discerned in the sharp check given to intellectual evolution by the repressive forces of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... is, as he informs us, "far from regarding this tendency, unfavorable as it is to present progress, as a sign of social retrogression." ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... to the right nor to the left as she swung her leaders around the corner, yet no sign of the town's retrogression since her last visit escaped her—any more than did the mean small-town smirk upon the faces of a group of doorway loafers, who commented humorously upon the "Sheep ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future. Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future, they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather a retrogression. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon illiterate men of a rude native force. It interests scholars to trace the evolutions of religious faiths, but it might be not less suggestive to study the retrogression of religion into superstition. Thomas was as restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes in both during his life. These were, however, changes without improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Bey begins to knit his brows; Shakib shakes his head, biting his nether lip; and here and there in the audience is heard a murmur about retrogression and reaction. Khalid proceeds with his allegory of the Muleteer and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... naturalistic mood. But this is explained by the fact that before the later experience became prominent, the early fervour of poetic creation had already passed. Not the less for this, however, was the poet's later conviction a riper, more advanced wisdom—not a retrogression. ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... part of Europe in which the first spark of reformation was trodden out as soon as it appeared, and from which proceeded the impulse which drove Protestantism back, we find, at best, a very slow progress, and on the whole a retrogression. Compare Denmark and Portugal. When Luther began to preach, the superiority of the Portuguese was unquestionable. At present, the superiority of the Danes is no less so. Compare Edinburgh and Florence. Edinburgh has owed less to climate, to soil, and to the fostering care of rulers ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... perhaps, a fault on the right side. That we have been far too slow to improve our laws must be admitted. But, though in other countries there may have occasionally been more rapid progress, it would not be easy to name any other country in which there has been so little retrogression. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... office-holder, and the Negro politician who aspires to lead the race, for the revenue that is in it. The best men, the wisest, the most unselfish, and above all, the men of the most profound integrity and uprightness, must take the helm or retrogression will be the inevitable result. Politics followed as an end has been the curse of the race. Under it problems have multiplied, and under it the masses have remained longer than they should in the lower stages of development. Only in the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... or intentional bias. From the facts he aims to discover on the above lines what are or were the regular characteristics of the people or peoples he is studying. The ethnic differences so revealed are to him what organic variations are to the biologist and morphologist; they indicate evolution or retrogression, and show an advance toward higher forms and wider powers, or ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... had outlived their usefulness as cruisers were one by one taken out of commission and were not replaced. Thus the navy moved steadily on a downward plane. Through the seventies and into the eighties this retrogression continued. The lowest ebb was reached in 1882, when the entire naval force numbered only thirty-one vessels in commission, all but four of which were built entirely of wood. They were old-fashioned ships, which had been efficient in a past ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... which is the most highly cultivated Romanist country—are, like those which the Jesuits built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less Gothic. The former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of a new fantastic Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a real retrogression from Gothic towards earlier and less natural schools. Next, that the Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and the English Nonconformists, as they are becoming more cultivated—and there are now many highly cultivated men among them—are introducing Gothic architecture ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... oft-asked question: "Do educated Indians go back to the blanket?" it should be said, first, that return to Indian dress in isolated communities where this is still the common dress of the people is not necessarily retrogression. It may be only a wise conformity to custom. Investigation has shown, however, that very few graduates of any school ever do reassume Indian dress or ways. Of those who have attended school but two or three years in all, a larger proportion may do so. A northwestern ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... progress, progression, march, advancement, promotion, preferment, elevation, appreciation, enhancement; overture, tender, proposal, proffer, offer. Antonyms: retreat, retrogression, decline, retrogradation, deterioration. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... fact among breeders of animals that where animals are too highly or finely bred, the eye is the organ first to show a retrogression from the normal. In an examination by myself some years ago among deaf mutes, I found the offspring of consanguineous marriages much affected, and while not only were many afflicted with inflammatory conditions ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... and disquietude to those, like ourselves, who favour the extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into dust and powder at a touch. The stars fall from the human firmament; the beacon-lights dance like will-o'-the-wisps; ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... down, and said, "Oh, you Beauty!" and then went off into various inarticulate sounds, which I recommend to the particular study of the new philosophers: they cannot have been invented after speech; that would be retrogression; they must be the vocal remains of that hairy, sharp-eared quadruped, our Progenitor, who by accident discovered language, and so turned Biped, and went ahead of all the other hairy quadrupeds, whose ears were too long or not sharp enough ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... uncomfortable. Seven gentlemen and two ladies went inside, in a space where six would have been disagreeably crowded. Mr. Sandford preferred the outside, where he could smoke his cigar without molestation. The road was very hilly, and several times our progress was turned into retrogression, for the horses invariably refused to go up hill, probably, poor things! because they felt their inability to drag the loaded wain up the steep declivities which we continually met with. The passengers were therefore frequently called upon to get out and walk—a very agreeable ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the silence that reigned there ring with their voices and innocent shouts of laughter. Virgen del Amporo! how they jumped! how they laughed! What impish tricks those little mad things were up to! For the greater enjoyment of the innocent games that their youthful retrogression demanded, they threw off their mantillas, let their hair loose, took off their gloves, cast aside fan and parasol, did all that youth could suggest, and were as pranksome as any children. Not only was their angelic hair allowed to ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being, dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... some shallow-pate, With smallest brain possession, He uttered no filosofy On Nature's retrogression. To ancient types, by Darwin's rule, He simply said, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... art has no noble champion, during which the true spiritual food is wanting, are periods of retrogression in the spiritual world. Ceaselessly souls fall from the higher to the lower segments of the triangle, and the whole seems motionless, or even to move down and backwards. Men attribute to these blind ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... Indeed many of the most intelligent hearers before retiring, audibly confessed that they came to find fault, but had seen nothing to censure. So some who came to scoff remained to applaud. With such advocates there can be no retrogression of Woman's Rights. Equality is their motto, and onward their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... result, I have enumerated them in my recently published book[6] to which I have already referred. Furthermore the passage of nature enables us to know that one direction along the series corresponds to passage into the future and the other direction corresponds to retrogression towards ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we that nation? If not, have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas on ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... lizard-like type which has lost its limbs; and though this loss has enabled them to occupy fresh places in nature and to increase and flourish to a marvellous extent, yet it must be considered to be a retrogression rather than an advance in organisation. The same remark will apply to the whale tribe among mammals; to the blind amphibia and insects of the great caverns; and among plants to the numerous cases in which flowers, once specially adapted to be fertilised by insects, have lost their ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... ventricle into the lungs without any obstacle to its passage from the mitral valves, when they have previously asserted that the air entered by the same vessel from the lungs into the left ventricle, and have brought forward these same mitral valves as obstacles to its retrogression? Good God! how should the mitral valves prevent the regurgitation of air ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... been the way. This Psalmist is no exception to the devout souls of his time. For though, as I have said, externalisms and ritualisms filled a place then, that it is an anachronism and a retrogression that they should be supposed to fill now, still beneath all these there lay this one ancient, permanent relation, the relation of trust. From the day in which the 'father of the faithful' as he is significantly called Abraham, 'believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... be happy to think that Lamartine was with them for the immediate realization of the Republic. If, however, he judged that the transition of the Regency was necessary they asked him to at least aid them in obtaining serious guarantees against any retrogression. They awaited with emotion his decision ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... their earlier stages, constitutes its growth to maturity; while in the body politic the progress of those changes can not, generally speaking, have any effect but the still further continuance of growth: it is the stoppage of that progress, and the commencement of retrogression, that alone would constitute decay. Bodies politic die, but it is of disease, or violent death; they ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... reproduced, and thus, like the human race itself, run ever on? Quien sabey? Eras of barbarism have overtaken civilizations as pretentious as our own— intellectual nights in which the patiently acquired learning of ages was lost. Petrifaction as in China, retrogression begotten of luxury as in Athens, submersion beneath an avalanche of human debris as in Rome, ignorance-breeding despoliation as in Ireland—these be the lions in the path of civilization. No race or ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of which the majority were convicts or their descendants, was less in proportion than in England; in short, for the first time, in 1840 the exports exceeded the imports; trade was brisk, agriculture increasing, new settlers were arriving; everything betokened progress; no one dreamed of retrogression ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes |
