"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his discovery to the French ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... scorn. There are disadvantages in reducing a man to a subordinate position and allowing him no use for his self-respect; it is a virtue that has a tendency to atrophy. Julia recognised this with something like personal shame. "Your debt is discharged," she said gently, "but mine is not; it has been shifted, not cancelled; it lies with me and Mr. Rawson-Clew now, and it shall ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... was poor, and social progress, as exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they were to let for ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Chinese philosopher, Confucius, are believed to have been introduced several hundreds of years previously. This contact with and importation from China undoubtedly had a marked effect in inducing what I may term atrophy in the development of the Japanese language as also the growth of its own literature, that is a literature entirely devoid of Chinese influences. Indeed it is impossible to speculate on what might have been the development of Japan and in ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Bishop said when the mother conducted him in. But one look at her was enough—that dead, unmeaning look, not unconscious, but unmeaning—deadened—a disease which to a robust child would mean fever and a few days' sickness—to this one the Bishop knew it meant atrophy and death. And as the old man looked at her, he thought it were better that she should go. For to her life had long since lost its individuality, and dwarfed her into a nerveless machine—the little frame was nothing more than one of a thousand monuments to the cotton mill—a mechanical ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... without, and events depending upon other men, or upon the chances of fortune. The rewards of virtue are certain, and our provisions for our natural support are certain; or if we want meat till we die, then we die of that disease—and there are many worse than to die with an atrophy or consumption, or unapt and coarser nourishment. But he that suffers a transporting passion concerning things within the power of others, is free from sorrow and amazement no longer than his enemy shall give him leave; and it is ten to one but he shall be smitten then and there where ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... abroad and at home would be simply impossible on the present occasion. I cannot, however, omit to notice how early Dr. Bucknill was in the field, as his laborious examination of a number of brains of the insane to determine the amount of cerebral atrophy and the specific gravity, bear witness, as also his demonstration of the changes which take place, not only in the brain and its membranes, but in the cord, in general paralysis; these observations, along with those of Dr. Boyd, having been fully ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the other hand, from his ignorance of any power in Nature competent to modify the structure of animals, except the development of parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle for existence, on which, as we shall see, Mr. Darwin ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... successively and at different times, had been unable to extract it. Meanwhile the little patient was suffering from an earache that extended over almost the entire head, and that increased at night and especially in cold and damp weather. To these symptoms were added strokes of epilepsy and an atrophy of the left arm. Finally, in November, 1595, De Hilden, being called in, acquainted himself with the cause of the trouble, and decided to remove the foreign body. To do this, he selected, as he tells us, "a well lighted place, caused the solar light to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... ossium. Here during life the blood shewed, in the main, the features of a simple severe anaemia; but in addition isolated normoblasts, small marrow cells, and moderate leucocytosis. The autopsy, at which the whole skeletal system was subjected systematically to an exact examination, shewed a complete atrophy of the bone-marrow, and replacement of the same by the tumour masses. In this case then the condition of the blood in vivo is satisfactorily explained by the absence of function of bone-marrow. Nothnagel conjectured that the formation of the scanty nucleated red blood corpuscles occurred vicariously ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... who boast that they cannot sing have very often, by the simple denial of their ability, ensured a kind of mental atrophy in the function. It is quite a usual thing for us to fasten unnecessary limitations upon ourselves by refusing to believe in our own powers, and most of us have a large stock of very real inhibitions, which prevent us from doing things otherwise well within our capacity. If we do not ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... lacteals, atrophy. Distaste to animal food. II. Cause of dropsy. Cause of herpes. Scrophula. Mesenteric consumption. Pulmonary consumption. Why ulcers in the lungs are so difficult ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of the Continent the enervating climate, facile conquest, and easy life had naturally tended to atrophy the energy of the Spaniards. In Chile, on the other hand, the constant and fierce struggles of the warlike natives, the hardships and frugal living, and the temperate and exhilarating atmosphere, tended not only to preserve the energy, but even to increase ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... of the ovaries, uterus, external genitals and the breasts can, of course, not be prevented, but that atrophy is a slow and gradual process, and is not in itself the cause of the various distressing symptoms that ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants, workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in Harmony ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... I had observed in various American colleges that a fundamental and most injurious error was made in relieving trustees and faculty from responsibility, and concentrating all in the president. The result, in many of these institutions, had been a sort of atrophy,—the trustees and faculty being, whenever an emergency arose, badly informed as to the affairs of their institutions, and really incapable of managing them. This state of things was the most serious ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... which renews the youth and the energy of the people; and in every age of the world, where you stop the courses of the blood from the roots, you injure the great, useful structure to the extent that atrophy, death, and decay are sure to ensue. This is the reason that an hereditary monarchy does not work; that is the reason that an hereditary aristocracy does not work; that is the reason that everything of that sort is full of corruption ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... compensatory hypertrophy in consequence of the removal of the other testis. At the same time the male instincts and the other generative organs were unchanged. In a few cases, however, Ancel and Bouin observed atrophy of the interstitial cells as well as the spermatic cells. They believe this is due to the nerves supplying the testis being included in the ligature. This is rather a surprising conclusion in view of the fact that testicular grafts show active spermatogenesis. It is difficult ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... that the office of the interpreters exists. When, as from time to time happens, a child is born with some powers of articulation, he is set apart, and trained to talk in the interpreters' college. Of course the partial atrophy of the vocal organs, from which even the best interpreters suffer, renders many of the sounds of language impossible for them. None, for instance, can pronounce v, f, or s; and as to the sound represented by th, it is five generations since the last interpreter ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... penguin still exists, but it is no bigger than that of a wren, and it is hidden away under the skin. The instances might be multiplied a thousandfold. In the same way then any mental faculty becomes atrophied if it is unused. Bad company is that which produces this atrophy of the finer powers; and it is strange to see how soon the deadly process of shrinkage sets in. The awful thing to think of is that the cramp may insensibly be set in action by a company which, as ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... men had been drawn together by a common characteristic. Their consciences were dead. That atrophy of conscience made them all worshipers of the same idol—money. The motives that propelled each of the three to the altar were as diverse as their separate natures, but the sacrifice that each offered to the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every one at the Colleges of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which we find it at the ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... I ordered dinner, Waiting to the very last, Twenty minutes after seven, And 'tis now the quarter past. 'Tis a dinner which Lucullus Would have wept with joy to see, One, might wake the soul of Curtis From death's drowsy atrophy. ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... let me tell you that you're a living example of a contradiction in terms. You use your brains, Mr. Handyside, yet you smoke a cigar calculated to atrophy the keenest intellect. You, an American, chewing a vile Burmese Cheroot! Cre' nom d'un pipe! When this bubble has burst ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... enfeebling the emotional side of one's nature. So far as he could judge, his mind had become in his later years a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, and that atrophy had taken place in that part of the brain on which the higher aesthetic tastes depend. Curiously enough, however, he retained his relish for novels, and for books ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... to promote natural excretions, can be no recommendation of what is generally used; for this constant effect must render them too copious, and thus, according to all physical experience, the blood must be thickened in the greater vessels, which frequently terminates in an atrophy. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... in the treatment of obsessed or insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow contrive to do more—indeed they cannot well do less than is actually done—in teaching the control of that secret undercurrent of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of its duty is to purify the blood from debris (waste matter), to filter out some things, to break up and alter others, and to expel them from the body in the form of bile. There are certain diseases in which the liver suddenly declines to do any more work. Acute atrophy of the liver is the name of this condition, and when it arises death rapidly results from suppression of the secretion of bile. It brings about a state of things called acholia; the patient is actually poisoned by the non-removal of those ingredients from the blood which it is the duty of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... importance than a correct start in life for any boy or girl; but a false start, a bad beginning for the children of the very poor who happen to possess brain power is fatal. Their talents get no chance, for they are never used, consequently they atrophy, or, worse still, are used in a wrong direction and possibly for evil. Good is changed into evil, bright and useful life is frustrated, and the State loses the useful power and influence that should ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music—that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy! You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that the habit isn't ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to supplement the insufficient supply obtainable through the insufficiently patulous glottis, new corks with smaller grooves being substituted as laryngeal breathing becomes easier. Corking the cannula is an excellent orthopedic treatment in certain cases where muscle atrophy and partial inflammatory fixation of the cricoarytenoid joints are etiological factors in the stenosis. The added pull of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscles during the slight effort at inspiration restores their tone and increases the mobility of ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... the sweet creature was falling into an atrophy. So she carried the forlorn damsel post haste to the Black Rock for the recovery of her health, or her heart. Clementina, my dear, no reproachful looks; in your secret soul do not you know, that I could not do a young lady ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... was, that, as Albinia surmised, Mr. Kendal could not recal the finale of their interview, and having lost the thread of the rigmarole, did not know to what his silence had been supposed to assent. Next, Algernon conquered his uncle by representing Lucy as on the road to an atrophy, and persuading him that he should be much safer on the Continent with a wife than without one: and though the two ladies were harder to deal with in themselves, they were obliged to stand by the decision of their lords. Above all, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... helix. IVY. The Leaves and Berries.—The leaves have very rarely been given internally; notwithstanding they are recommended (in the Ephem. natur. curios. vol. ii. obs. 120.) against the atrophy of children; their taste is nauseous, acrid, and bitter. Externally they have sometimes been employed for drying and healing ichorous sores, and likewise for keeping issues open. The berries were supposed by the ancients to have a purgative and emetic ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... analyzed, more seldom cured. There are few students or physicians of human nature, in this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn ihe difference between satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness of mind and body. To sit ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... recommend patients suffering from advanced atrophy to try Nettle Broth. I must say that I am myself nettled, when they reply that they prefer the advanced atrophy. A good counter-irritant in cases of blood-poisoning is a stout holly leaf, eaten raw. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... intended to be remote, and Nikky meant to be firm and very, very loyal. Which shows how young and inexperienced they were. Because any one who knows even the beginnings of love knows that its victims suffer from an atrophy of both reason and conscience, and ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with the traditional mentality, and tend to reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed has caught the stale ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... (Literal Bulbo-nuclear Dysarthria and Anarthria).—Patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. The tongue is no longer regulated ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... extremely and turned to an atrophy. In that gradual decay she often told Lady Mary she was awakened from a dream of vanity; she saw how much a desire to gain the applause of a few people had made her forget the more necessary aim of obtaining the approbation of her Creator. She had indeed no criminal ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... goodness of his constitution, the force of the distemper at last abated, yet could not be so intirely eradicated, as not to leave a certain pressure and debility upon the nerves, by some called a fever on the spirits, which seemed to threaten either an atrophy or consumption; his complexion grew pale and livid, and his strength and flesh visibly wasted; and what was yet worse, the vigour of his mind decayed, in proportion with that of his external frame, insomuch that, falling into a deep melancholy, he considered himself as on the ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... know—as you need to—make a song about it!" winced the Senior Surgeon. "It's just about the crudest case of complete muscular atrophy ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... cortical substance, or even to the tubular. The kidneys are occasionally much larger than usual, without any other change of structure; or simple hypertrophy may affect but one of them. They are subject to atrophy, which may be either general or partial; or one of the kidneys may be completely wanting, and this evidently the consequence of ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... require a counterpoise to sociocracy. We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... be right and wrong expression. If a man permits his life to run riot and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and the qualities not used atrophy and die. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of these reasons, the negative one, is that aesthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But before entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to call to mind that curious ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... startling difference between the phenomena presented by different species. The younger the animal, the grosser the morbid symptoms witnessed. The animal fails to grow. The bones and cartilage, except of the skull, fail to develop. The abdomen projects and becomes large and flabby. The sex organs atrophy. There is sterility. Pregnant rabbits abort, hens produce very small eggs or none at all. These are the results of removing the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... apparently useless structures. I confess, however, that it has often appeared to me that the facts of Dysteleology cut two ways. If we are to assume, as evolutionists in general do, that useless organs atrophy, such cases as the existence of lateral rudiments of toes, in the foot of a horse, place us in a dilemma. For, either these rudiments are of no use to the animal, in which case, considering that the horse has existed in its present form since the Pliocene epoch, they surely ought ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by their personal ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... which he had great confidence; but its trial blew him up into a tympany, from which he was only relieved by having recourse to a drug, also of his own discovery, which, in counteracting the syrup, reduced him to an alarming state of atrophy. But the mischances of the historian do not enter into his history: and our curiosity must be still eager to open Lenglet's "Histoire de la Philosophie Hermetique," accompanied by a catalogue of the writers in this mysterious science, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... was temporarily out of commission and her stricken men in the hospital; but by the time the specialists had diagnosed the trouble as amblyopia, from some sudden shock to the optic nerve—followed in cases by complete atrophy, resulting in amaurosis—another ship came into Honolulu in the same predicament. Like the other craft four thousand miles away, her deck force had been stricken suddenly and at night. Still another, a battle-ship, followed ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have an opportunity ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the mother of a family of healthy children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... birth ought to administer to her parents, pay calls, uphold the Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry her and give her emancipation. The happiness which goes with a career, even if that career fails, is saving daughters from this parentally imposed "atrophy." They are learning that to live one's own life is not necessarily to live a "bad" life, but a "fuller" life. Thus the young are teaching the Old People wisdom—the knowledge that youth has its Declaration of Rights no ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... procured, but he pronounced her system so debilitated and detoned as hardly probable to outride the shock, the nervous centres being depressed and atrophy ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of the phenomenon must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it—but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given identity, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach his lips. His position on the inside of the walk offered a barrier between Leigh and the retreating couple, and he gave a curious impression of maintaining ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... their mental bias, they had lost the blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance. In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible. The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste. The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... France; and, to supply the demands of bureaux and staff, constant details from the infantry were called for, to the great discontent of the officers in the field. Hydrocephalus at Shreveport produced atrophy elsewhere. Extensive works for defense were constructed there, and heavy guns mounted; and, as it was known that I objected to fortifications beyond mere water batteries, for reasons already stated, the chief engineer ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Chalky deposits in Shoulder joints, Arm joints, Hand joints, Atrophy of the muscles of Arms, Shoulders, Stiffness of all those joints, Insomnia, Excruciating pains most of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vain that the spy plied him with question and suggestion, one phrase was like a galvanic current to this inert atrophy of muscle and mind. "Look here, old man," the intruder said at length, baffled and in despair, "you mark my words!" The brawny form had come close in the shadow and towered over the recumbent and helpless creature, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... perfect atrophy of moral sense. This heredity is a wall in which one can make as many windows as one pleases. The doctor is such a window. He considers himself as being degenerated from the nervousness of the family; it means that he is ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... artery may be more affected than the other, and the lumen may be narrowed at one side and not at the other, allowing the artery to expand irregularly from the force of the heart beat. As the disease continues, the internal elastic layer is lost, the muscular coat begins to atrophy, and then small calcareous granules may begin to be deposited, which may form into plates. In the large arteries, the advance of the process differs somewhat. There may be more actual inflammatory signs, fatty degeneration may occur, and even a necrosis ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... sell milk "pure from the cow." From the quality of this morning's supply, I should be inclined to fancy that that cow is suffering from an advanced stage of atrophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic, who had not even enough sense of humour to see the absurdity of his own request, that she should go out to the shore of this ocean of corruption, and repeat the ancient role of King Canute, or Dame Partington ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... DIU—and I believe, between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground-officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo of Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master's death, sir,—ye would hardly believe such a scandal,—but this Bullsegg, being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved on this ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... certain that the longer you are in darkness the more you see. You see more at the end of a day than after a few hours, and at the end of a year, still more. The eye, perhaps, changes in some degree for just this purpose. But a prolonged use of the visual mechanism tends to hypertrophy— or atrophy, as the eyes of deep-sea fishes show. It is well, in any event, to be careful about contradicting the testimonies of patients who have long lived in the dark, concerning what they have seen. The power to see in the dark is so various that without examination, much injustice ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... association occurs, which is exerted on the pulmonary and cutaneous absorbents by reverse sympathy, and produces a great absorption of the fluid effused into the cellular membrane in anasarca, with dry skin; constituting one kind of atrophy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... different—sonorous, tense, elastic; On it you might a tattoo beat, with fingers or with a stick. There's costiveness and atrophy, with features Hippocratic; When these appear, there's much to fear, all safety is erratic. Although a cordial laxative, mix'd up with some carminative, Might be prescribed, with morphia, or hops, to keep the man alive; Take care his diet's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... social perfection. But if you have 100,000 persons in a city like Naples who do not enjoy the certainty and discipline of employment at methodical and common labor, you need not wonder that the uncertainty of daily life, an illfed stomach, and an anemic brain, result in the atrophy of all moral sentiment, and that the evil plant of the Camorra spreads out over everything. The processes in the law courts may attract the fleeting attention of public opinion, of legislation, of government, to the disease ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey progenitors, who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys! They had lost their power to climb trees, and accordingly had no longer any use for tails to let themselves down from the limbs. A "beneficent necessity" therefore, according to Mr. Emerson, dropped the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a lumber camp is a time when a man can put in loads of thinking. Dried fish and boiled tea do not atrophy a man's brain. Loggers do not say much except on Sundays, when they wash their shirts. Even then it was Sylvanus who did ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, in so far as the conditions of her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; It is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... by the change was better. That milk fresh from the udder was the best. The Talmud describes jaundice and correctly ascribes it to the retention of bile, and speaks of dropsy as due to the retention of urine. It teaches that atrophy or rupture of the kidneys is fatal. Induration of the lungs (tuberculosis) was regarded as incurable. Suppuration of the spinal cord had an early, grave meaning. Rabies was known. The following is a description ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... necessarily dies. The attacks of this fungus on the host-plant are essentially similar in their results to those of the black knot of the plum, though the immediate effect on the inner bark is here one of atrophy, while in the latter case it is one of hypertrophy. The fungus is also related to the black-knot fungus on the plum, but its life-history is not yet known. There may be other spore forms in its life cycle, and therefore it ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... able to walk after being a few minutes on his feet; when first rising he was very unsteady. Knee-jerk lost, no reinforcement. No sexual power. Some difficulty in emptying the bladder. Examination showed slight atrophy of both optic nerves, Argyll-Robertson pupil, and myosis. He was ordered two weeks' rest in bed, with massage, cool sponging daily, and galvanization of the areas of neuralgia. After two weeks he was allowed to get up gradually, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... apostasy, apparatus, apparition, appellate, appertain, appetency, apposite, approbation, appurtenance, aquatic, aqueous, aquiline, arbitrary, archaic, arduous, aromatic, arrear, articulate, ascetic, asperity, asphyxiate, asseverate, assiduity, assimilate, astringent, astute, atrophy, attenuate, auditory, augury, auscultation, austerity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... forward the elder man rose and turned with some embarrassment. In his movements the son read with a pang of sudden realization the approaching atrophy of age. "I'm sorry to intrude on your office hours, Hamilton," began the father, "but the fact is—I—er—I—" he broke ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... individual will put himself in the way of enjoying them. Good morals are dependent on right associations. Human beings need the stimulus of good society, otherwise the mind vegetates or broods upon real or fancied wrongs until the moral nature is in danger of atrophy or warping. Family feuds develop, as among the Scotch highlanders or the mountain people in certain parts of the South. Lack of social sympathy increases as the interests become self-centred; out of this characteristic grow directly such evils as petty lawlessness, rowdyism, and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... consequence of dependence on the complex machinery of a foreign government is the atrophy of the communal sense. The direct touch with administrative cause and effect is lost. An outside protector performs all the necessary functions of the community in a mysterious manner, and communal duties are not realised by the people. The one reason addressed by those who deny to us the ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... Their Senses Gradually.—New-measurism was resorted to by the General Synod in order to revive the dying Church. The true cause of her apathy, atrophy, and decay, however, was not diagnosed correctly. It was the prevailing confessional indifference, religious ignorance, and the neglect of Lutheran indoctrination by catechization, especially of the young. Dr. Hazelius, himself a revivalist, as early as 1845, ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... for no event affected him except the work of his office, perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the Admiralty or at home, for he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues. His mind, which was in a state of atrophy from his depressing daily work, had no other thoughts, hopes or dreams than such as related to the office, and there was a constant source of bitterness that spoilt every pleasure that he might have had, and that was the employment of so many commissioners of the navy, tinmen, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... recall Goethe's reply to the botanist, Wolff, who had ascribed the metamorphosis of plant-organs from root to blossom to a gradual stunting or atrophy of their vegetative force, whereas it was clear to Goethe that simultaneously with a physical retrogression, there is a spiritual progress in the development of the plant. The fact that all Wolff's efforts to see clearly did not save him ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... patriotic endeavour finally converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated by an accumulation of hereditary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... discuss socialism....I rather like the idea though of the strong man having the opportunity to prove himself stronger than Life...find out what, he was put on earth and endowed with certain characteristics for...rather a pity all that should atrophy....However—what shall my friend do? Continue to live ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton |
