"Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of "United" States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... have meant to convey by the remarkable collocation At roseo niueae residebant uertice uittae. Properly, the wreaths are rosy, the locks snow-white; but the colour of the wreaths is so blent with the colour of the locks that each is lost in the other, and an inversion of ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus every glass he tossed off ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Those who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution having suppressed inequality, this has again arisen in an inverse sense. The ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mutilation the hourly incident of their lives. They have no retaining fee and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them 20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is perspiring for his client at ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... thirty degrees from the south pole, is seen in its whole revolution, and, accordingly, when off the Cape, I have observed it in every stage, from its triumphant erect position, between sixty and seventy degrees above the horizon, to that of complete inversion, with the top beneath, and almost touching the water. This position, by the way, always reminded me of the death of St. Peter, who is said to have deemed it too great an honour to be crucified with his head upwards. In short, I defy the stupidest mortal that ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... followed by death. These are confirmatory of his inferences from the experiments on rabbits. The instances given are—an os uteri torn off; extensive laceration of the uterus and rectum in labour; four uteri extirpated on account of chronic inversion, (p. 13.) One of these last under his own care. It was removed by a wire, and came off in 11 days, without one bad symptom, (p. 14.) Rupture and laceration of the abdominal coverings, four fingers' breadth, the bowels hanging out, (p. 14.) Two spleens removed; ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... is rather an elaborate one. After the subject has been carried through the first time, the subject is introduced in a new form, in inversion (measure 43, alto), all ascending passages in the original being now imitated in downward directions and by the same interval. This taken as a new subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on the fugue becomes very complicated ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers—it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life—wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to the ear. I am sure that the French poets deserve a great deal of credit for producing such masterpieces of versification from a language, which, however elegant, is the least poetical in Europe; which allows little or no inversion, scarce any poetic license, no enjambement, compels a fixed caesura; has in horror the hiatus; and in fine is subject to the most rigorous rules, which can on no account be infringed; which rejects hyperbole; which is measured ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... mirror-writing here observed parallels that of many other cases in which the left-right direction is reversed. These commoner cases take on an added interest when considered in connection with a case of double space inversion. Such a case is on record.[1] The double inversion consists in writing all verbal symbols and digits up side down and backward. In this case the boy had perfect pseudoscopic vision at the beginning of his school work. Stratton, by a system of lenses, artificially produces the same distortions ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... is told us be true, namely that the Presbyter Laurentius has been groping for fatal riches among human corpses. An odious inversion of his functions, that he who should preach peace to the living has been robbing the dead, and that hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains, instead of distributing his own honestly acquired substance to the poor. If after diligent ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... in order to see what I see, the obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him therefore view the wretch upside down. If he neglects that simple direction, of course I don't answer for anything that follows: without any fault of mine, my description will be unintelligible. This inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature that will ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... illusion to suppose that they have generated it. They represent the dialect and the imagery by which moral truths have been conveyed to minds at certain stages of thought; but it is a complete inversion of the truth to suppose that the morality sprang out of them. From this point of view we must of necessity treat the great ethical questions independently. We cannot form a real alliance with thinkers radically opposed to us. Divines tell us ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... let me assure the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Erewhonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fascination for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler. College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for Samuel ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the golden dust that may be filed off from the great ingot and solid block. They are but the outward tokens of His far deeper and true preciousness. They are secondary; He is the primary. What an inversion of our notions of good! Do you degrade all the world's wealth, pleasantness, ease, prosperity, into an 'also?' Are you content to put it in the secondary place, as a result, if it please Him, of Christ? Do you live as if you did? Which do you hunger for most? Which do you labour for hardest? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... their backs turned away from the axis, the raphe being next to the axis and representing the midrib the funicle corresponding to the petiole. The outer tegument of the ovule, according to Griffith, is a leaf united along its margins, but always more or less open at its apex. No inversion can, therefore, really take place in anatropous ovules, but the blade of the leaf is bent back on the funicle, with which ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, and to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; spurious Jeremiahs; sham Heraclituses, who, the lugubrious day done, return, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... spirit of inversion which tries to make the assumed infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was arrested for napping on his own paepae ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... poet, and misunderstand his spirit by treating his words as matter-of-fact prose. His imagination is at work, and our sympathetic imagination must be at work too, if we would enter into his meaning. Death a shepherd—what a grim and bold inversion of a familiar metaphor! If this psalm is, as is probable, of a comparatively late date, then its author was familiar with many sweet and tender strains of early singers, in which the blessed relation between a loving God and an obedient people was set forth under that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to or falls short of that standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... quite follow all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner group, did ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... inversion of facts. The proposal to relieve Kars by way of Redoutkale and Kutais originated, not with Capt. Burton, but with the Turkish Seraskier, who recommended for this purpose the employment of Vivian's Turkish Contingent and part of Beatson's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... were, with one leg raised before the gladiatorial arena of musical London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor Pozzi." He was saved. By the simple inversion of the first two words, the substitution of z's for t's, without so fortunately making any difference in the sound, and the retention of that i, all London knew him now ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... factors the n elements in the dexter diagonal. And we thence derive the rule for the signs, viz. considering the primitive arrangement of the columns as positive, then an arrangement obtained therefrom by a single interchange (inversion, or derangement) of two columns is regarded as negative; and so in general an arrangement is positive or negative according as it is derived from the primitive arrangement by an even or an odd number of interchanges. [This implies the theorem that a given arrangement can be derived from the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... calculations does not lie in the application of amortization to administrative finance. It is nevertheless one of the touchstones in the valuation of certain mines or mining investments. That is, by a sort of inversion such calculations can be made to serve as a means to expose the amount of risk,—to furnish a yardstick for measuring the amount of risk in the very speculations of extension in depth and price ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... conclusions of ratiocination must be verified by collation with the concrete phenomena, or, if possible, with their empirical laws; and then the only effect of an increase in the complication of the subject will be a tendency to a disturbance, and sometimes even to an inversion (which, indeed, M. Comte thinks inseparable from all Sociological enquiries) in the order of the two processes, obliging us, first, to conjecture the conclusions by specific experience, and then verify them by a priori reasonings showing their connection with the principles ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... cannot be too carefully kept in mind, between individual expressions of opinion, which may be biassed, and professional reputation, which, like public sentiment, usually settles at last not far from the truth. Despite this curious inversion of the facts by Lord Hood, there probably was no one among the naval forces, nor among the soldiery, who did not thoroughly, if perchance somewhat vaguely, appreciate that Nelson was the moving spirit of the whole operation, even beyond ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... if we would rise from natural and selfish life into spiritual and heavenly life. It was our selfishness and passion that drove us asunder. Thus it is, dear Rose, that my thoughts have been wandering about in the maze of life that entangles me. In my isolation I have time enough for mental inversion—for self-exploration—for idle fancies, if you will. And so I have lifted the veil for you; uncovered my inner life; taken you into the sanctuary over whose threshold no foot but ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... predicate subject. This order occurs also in independent clauses, and is employed (a) when some modifier of the predicate precedes the predicate, the subject being thrown behind. The words most frequently causing Inversion in Old English prose are then, onne then, and :r there: fr h, Then went he; onne rna hy: ealle tweard :m fo, Then gallop they all toward the property; ac :r bi medo genh, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... all, that resemble Indra himself to attend to her comforts—even she, so chaste and exalted, hath now to attend to the comforts of others, that are to her far inferior in rank. Behold, O Pandava, my plight. It is what I do not deserve. You are alive, yet behold this inversion of order that time hath brought. She who had the whole Earth to the verge of the sea under her control, is now under the control of Sudeshna and living in fear of her. She who had dependants to walk both before and behind her, alas, now herself walketh before and behind Sudeshna. This, O Kaunteya, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the simple truth; and the lawyer, being (by some strange inversion of professional excellence) honest at the bottom, was deeply pained at having such words used, as to, for, about, or in anywise ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the improving effect of these operations. [Footnote: In one or two sentences he has left a degree of stiffness in the style, not so much from inadvertence as from the sacrifice of ease to point. Thus, in the following example, he has been tempted by an antithesis into an inversion of phrase by no means idiomatic. "The plain state of the matter is this—I am an extravagant young fellow who want money to borrow; you, I take to be a prudent old fellow who have ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... by experiment, which perfectly explains this "odious feast," the excuse for which is simply maternity. The Philanthus knows, instinctively, without having learned it, that honey, which is her ordinary fare, is, by a very singular "inversion," a mortal poison to ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... with chaplets of flowers on their heads and necklaces of black figs around their necks. It is recorded, among the South Sea Islands, that a traveller once witnessed such a sacrifice as this memorized in the classic Greek festival. Then, by a queer but common inversion of idea, this baleful but sacred individual is fetched back into the community, as the outcast, hidden in Lady Wood, was brought back into Combe Martin, being beaten and reviled, and yet keeping his sacred character as a being set apart from the rest of men. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... about it is its inversion of a yet more consecrated form: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee". Emily Bronte does not follow St. Augustine. She has an ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts is likely to question the declaration that it would be a perversion, not to say an inversion, of fact to rate their patriotic devotion to the Union today lower than that of any other section of the country or any other class or ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... developed, the middle ones halfway towards maturity, and the upper ones very rudimentary. Every stage of evolution is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the replacing of a riper egg by another in ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... was able to show similarities in mechanisms that had no apparent relation. He was first to recognize that the fixed link of a mechanism was kinematically the same as the movable links. This led him to the important notion of inversion of linkages, fixing successively the various links and thus changing the function of the mechanism. He devoted 40 pages to showing, with obvious delight, the kinematic identity of one design after another of rotary steam engines, demolishing for all time the fond hopes of ingenious but ill-informed ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... fact in history is announced by the angel chiefly as the reason for Joseph's going on with his marriage. Surely that strange inversion of the apparent importance of the two things speaks for the historical reliableness of the narrative. The purpose in hand is mainly to remove his hesitation and point his course, and he is to take Mary as his wife, for 'that which is conceived ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates separated from their common parent-stem long before the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the possibility of another interpretation of the last line, though I think the one just given is correct, "I need the world of men; it is a natural law." Now it is just possible that we could interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and I must go to do my share." This would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. I have never quite surrendered to the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... life for Thy sake.' What a strange inversion of parts is here! 'Lay down thy life for My sake'—with Calvary less than four-and-twenty hours off, when Christ laid down His life for Peter's sake. Peter was guilty of an anachronism in the words, for the time did not come for the disciple ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... whole account of the matter suggests the existence of a fetichism directed to the nates, impelling him to the most disgusting acts, which he has several times performed. A similar case, but on a homosexual basis, will be found recorded as Case 20 in my work on Sexual Inversion.[65] ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... keeping with the eminence of the work he does. Moreover, who does not see that the difference between the two loves is like that between what is principal and what is instrumental? One who ascribes to himself personally the eminence of a position appears in the spiritual world, when this inversion is pictured, as himself inverted, ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... such subtle matters of the harmonic expression of melody that its artistic use is one of the surest signs of the difference between classical and merely academic music. There are many melodies of which the inversion is as natural as the original form, and does not strikingly alter its character. Such are, for instance, the theme of Bach's Kunst der Fuge, most of Purcell's contrapuntal themes, the theme in the fugue of Beethoven's sonata, op. 110, and the eighth of Brahms's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... the Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel returned his hail. The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry in the distance. Here ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which, in turn, might have been mollified in some degree amid the peaceful duties of home;—a state of things that has existed in many families, which have, nevertheless, enjoyed a fair share of domestic happiness in spite of this inversion of the natural relations of their heads. But Mrs. Wilde had brought into her husband's house that deadliest foe of domestic peace, an elderly, ill-tempered, suspicious female relative, serving in the capacity of confidante. This curse was embodied in the person of a much older sister, who happened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certain popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... with the subject of inversion of the uterus, Soranus points out that this condition may be caused by traction on the cord. It is noteworthy that he recognized the method of embryotomy as necessary when other ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the possession of great gifts, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... as the preparations were, they were not visible to the watchful diplomatic agents who maintained the relations of the Government with the tribesmen. So extraordinary is the inversion of ideas and motives among those people that it may be said that those who know them best, know them least, and the more logical the mind of the student the less he is able to understand of the subject. In any case among ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... secondary question. On the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... he and she had reached the depths. This temptation capping the climax of her rejection—this monstrous inversion of the classic triangle! "What is she, then?" he asked himself, "and what am I?" For he caught hold of her as if he were going to crush her doubly perfidious, inexplicable heart, and fastened his lips to hers ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... grand entertainment to certain distinguished persons of both sexes at Wittenberg. To render the scene more splendid, he contrived to exhibit a memorable inversion of the seasons. As the company approached the doctor's house, they were surprised to find, though there was a heavy snow through the neighbouring fields, that Faustus's court and garden bore not the least marks of the season, but ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... labour itself produces, the idea that labour, in respect of its pecuniary remuneration, is, under present conditions, the victim of any general wrong, is so far from having any justification in fact that it only touches fact at all by representing a direct inversion of it. Labour, as a whole, does not, under existing conditions, get less than it produces.[22] It gets a very great deal more. If, therefore, the claims of labour are based on, and limited to, the amount of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... aplomb; the men appearing, for the more part, greatly disposed to run for shelter behind the bolder petticoats; particularly the stablemen. The footmen, being more accustomed to ladies' society, are less embarrassed by their own hands, and by the exigencies of chivalry. This inversion of the usual attitude of the sexes, will, no doubt, be set more than right when we have retired. The moment has arrived. I quit father's arm—for the first time in my life I am honestly sorry to drop it—and go up to my ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... it emanates by an invisible vascular plexus, it can, at will, draw to itself, by a sort of aspiration, the greater part of the living forces which animate the latter. One sees, then, by a singular inversion, life withdrawn from the body, which then exhibits a cadaverous rigidity, and transfers itself entirely to the phantom, which acquires consistency—sometimes even to the point of struggling with persons before whom it materializes. It is but exceptionally ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... abdomen, pelvis, and reproductive organs sometimes show an inversion of sex-characters. In 42% the sacral canal is uncovered, and in some cases there is a prolongation of the coccyx, which resembles the stump of a tail, sometimes ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... picture of shopping activity as Bond Street or Piccadilly. The chief trouble is the facility of confusing such an address as No. 44 East 45th Street with No. 45 East 44th Street; and so natural is an inversion of the kind that one is sometimes heedless enough to make it in ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the general title of Immediate Inference Logicians discuss three subjects, namely, Opposition, Conversion, and Obversion; to which some writers add other forms, such as Whole and Part in Connotation, Contraposition, Inversion, etc. Of Opposition, again, all recognise four modes: Subalternation, Contradiction, Contrariety and Sub-contrariety. The only peculiarities of the exposition upon which we are now entering are, that ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... be urged that the objects enumerated in the preceding number ought to be provided for by the State governments, under the direction of the Union. But this would be, in reality, an inversion of the primary principle of our political association, as it would in practice transfer the care of the common defense from the federal head to the individual members: a project oppressive to some States, dangerous to all, and baneful ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... mild ales and stouts, as it gives a peculiarly sweet and full flavour to the beer, to which, no doubt, the popularity of this class of beverage is largely due. Invert sugar is prepared by the action either of acid or of yeast on cane sugar. The chemical equation representing the conversion (or inversion) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... circuitous journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... performed by intervals. 9. Inversion of the cutaneous absorbents. 10. Increased secretion of bile and pancreatic juice. 11. Inversion of the lacteals. 12. And of the bile-ducts. 13. Case of a cholera. 14. Further account of the inversion of lacteals. 15. Iliac passions. Valve of the colon. 16. Cure of the iliac passion. 17. Pain of gall-stone distinguished from pain of the stomach. Gout of the stomach from torpor, from inflammation. Intermitting pulse owing to indigestion. To overdose of foxglove. Weak pulse from emetics. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... drop one in now and then, such as, 'All flesh is grass.' 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' 'He that marrieth not doth well, but he that marrieth doth better.' To be sure, there is a slight inversion of text here, but then it ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... shortcomings now to be noticed bear not upon Mr. Longfellow's own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic over words of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... nature. Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... cursing under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through 90 degrees into ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... impracticable; as, "The people sought him, and came unto him, and stayed him, that he should not depart from them."—Luke, iv, 42. Here, to prove that to be a pronoun, the disciples of Tooke and Webster must resort to more than one imaginary ellipsis, and to such inversion as will scarcely ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... [322] The inversion of the organs shown by Vertebrates as compared with Invertebrates is due to the reversed position of the embryo relatively to the yolk! ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... the women of the Earth have done their utmost to impress indelibly upon my mind—the lesson that woman is but a less lovable, more petulant, more deeply and incurably spoilt child. Your mother's reproach is an exact inversion of the truth. No one could have acted with more utter unselfishness, more devoted kindness, more exquisite delicacy than you have shown in this miserable matter. I could not have believed that even you could have put aside your own feelings so completely, could have recognised so promptly ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... although expected, was not expected at the moment. The revolution itself must, of course, have taken place in an easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion—that is to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my person ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... The inversion of reference in these lines is an illustration of the rhetorical figure 'chiasmus.' Cp. the arrangement of the demonstrative pronouns in these sentences from 'Kenilworth':—'Your eyes contradict your tongue. That speaks of a protector, willing and able to watch over you; but ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... "saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal force and perspicuity. It must, indeed, be allowed, that the structure of his sentences is expanded, and often has somewhat of the inversion of Latin; and that he delighted to express familiar thoughts in philosophical language; being in this the reverse of Socrates, who, it was said, reduced philosophy to the simplicity of common life. But let us attend to what he himself ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... hystericus. Hysteric suffocation is the perception of a globe rolling round in the abdomen, and ascending to the stomach and throat, and there inducing strangulation. It consists of an ineffectual inversion of the motions of the oesophagus, and other parts of the alimentary canal; nothing being rejected from ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... line, though he may not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... though not, as has been seen, with complete success. The calmer grew the mind of Mr. Winkleman, and the clearer his thoughts, the less satisfied did he feel with the part he had taken in the morning's drama. By an inversion of thought, not usual among men of his temperament, he had been presented with a vivid realization of his wife's side of the question. The consequence was, that, by dinner-time, he felt a good deal ashamed of himself, and grieved for the pain he knew ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... same problem to all; it is the replies alone that vary, and the nature of these replies is determined by the knowledge at our disposal. The difference is not in nature but in man. The answers given by primitive man to these eternal questions are a complete inversion of those of his better informed descendants. The conception of natural force, of mechanical necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... code follow the younger, but the numbering is continuous as if welding the two codes into one. Thorpe follows the manuscripts in this arrangement, though not in the numbering of the sections, and the student who consults his edition is apt to be confused with this chronological inversion, unless he has taken note of the cause. Ine reigned over a mixed population of Saxons and Britons, and his code is of a more comprehensive character than that of the Kentish kings. His enactments became, through subsequent re-enactments, the basis of the laws not only of Wessex, but ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... of yellow-red, lighter vase in yellow-green, and darker vase of green, with slight addition of black. Vary by inversion of the colors in ground and ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... our present life. And aware of this Mr. Holyoake solaces himself, and attempts to sustain the spirits of his friends with the assurance, "Whatever is likely to secure your best interests here will procure for you the same hereafter,"—a strange inversion of the scriptural maxim, for it practically amounts to this, "Seek first the things of this world, and the kingdom of heaven shall be added unto you." And he states the ground or reason of his confidence in this respect: ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... of the water. Villages and farms are seen at occasional intervals in the distance, and sloops, with their sails hanging idly against their masts, float upon the placid surface of the lake as upon a mirror. Indeed, so perfect is the inversion, that the eye can scarcely determine how much is real and how much the result of optical illusion. Passing in sight of the town of Linkoping, which lies to the left, we soon reached the entrance of the West Gotha Canal, which here makes a direct ascent from the waters ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... children, and singularly attached to his home; yet he had remained all that time in voluntary exile, and he had left them in entire uncertainty as to his fate except so far as they could accept the probability of his death by a horrible casualty. This inversion of the natural character of a man was one of the most striking phenomena of insanity, and Putney, for the purpose of argument, maintained that it could be made to tell ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... fixedness at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... displaced in the great earthquake of Riobamba, in the province of Quito, on the 4th of February, 1797, and in that of Calabria, between the 5th of February and the 28th of March, 1782. The phenomenon of the inversion or displacement of fields and pieces of land, by which one is made to occupy the place of another, is connected with a translatory motion or penetration of separate terrestrial strata. When I made the plan of the ruined town of Riobamba, one particular spot was ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... but, like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely, was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term. Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the astuteness of the girl's policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in Dick's future depended on his capacity ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... been refreshing myself with Irish Memories since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border—those were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever she might be, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... called ogee recta—that is, right side up; or it may be inverted, as in Fig. 193, with the concaved surface below, and is then called ogee reversa. Contrast these two views and you will note what a difference the mere inversion of the strip makes in the appearance. Second, because the ogee has in it, in a combined form, the outlines of nearly all the other types. The only advantage there is in using the other types is because you may thereby build up and space your work better than by using ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... learned more from Ysaye than from any of my teachers. It is rather the custom to decry Sevcik as a teacher, to dwell on his absolutely mechanical character of instruction—and not without justice. First of all Sevcik laid all the stress on the left hand and not on the bow—an absolute inversion of a fundamental principle. Eldering had taken great pains with my bow technic, for he himself was a pupil of Hubay, who had studied with Vieuxtemps and had his tradition. But Sevcik's teaching as regards the use of the bow was very poor; his pupils—take Kubelik with all his marvelous ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... in their feet any thing of pure iron; but in their heads is iron mixed with clay, in their breasts is each mixed with brass, in their loins is also each mixed with silver, and in their feet is each mixed with gold: by this inversion they are changed from men (homines) into graven images of men, in which inwardly nothing coheres; for what was highest, is made lowest, thus what was the head is become the heel, and vice versa. They appear ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... which distinguish men and women in all races, and for those which distinguish them in each race, or each society. An interesting subordinate inquiry may be, how far such mental differences are inverted in cases where there is inversion of social and domestic relations; as among those Khasi Hill-tribes, whose women have so far the upper hand that they turn off their husbands in a summary ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... necessary for it. In another, two or three burning glasses, wherewith he made both men and women sometimes mad, and in the church put them quite out of countenance; for he said that there was but an antistrophe, or little more difference than of a literal inversion, between a woman folle a la messe and molle a la fesse, that is, foolish at the mass and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... first proving the existence of God and then discussing his nature and attributes, as Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Daud and others did before him, he treats exhaustively of the divine attributes in the first book, whereas the proof of the existence of God does not appear until the second book. This inversion of the logical order is deliberate. Maimonides's method is directed ad hominem. The Jews for whom he wrote his "Guide" did not doubt the existence of God. But a great many of them had an inadequate idea of his spiritual nature. And apparently ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... moment to its own inclination. This entails strict attention and much muscular effort, and, of course, the latter comes into play also in turning at each end of the field. The result is very effective; the flat mould-board offers the least possible resistance to the inversion of the soil, whereas the iron plough, with a curling mould-board, presses the crest of the furrow-slice into regularity of form, and gives a more finished appearance at the expense of much extra friction and labour ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... 16 meters the proportion of women to men who could hear was 34 to 17. The converse is true of children, for at a distance of 20 meters and more the percentage of boys was 49.9 and girls 43.2. The reason for this inversion of the relation lies in the harmful influences of manual labor and other noisy occupations of men. These comparisons may be of importance when the question is raised as to how much more a witness may have heard than one of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the werewolf kept his human form, his hair grew inwards; when he wished to become a wolf, he simply turned himself inside out. In many trials on record, the prisoners were closely interrogated as to how this inversion might be accomplished; but I am not aware that any one of them ever gave a satisfactory answer. At the moment of change their memories seem to have become temporarily befogged. Now and then a poor wretch had his arms and legs cut off, or was partially flayed, in order that the ingrowing ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... magnificence and hospitality, was held in high reputation, assuming, in these respects, the attitude of a royal court in the northern parts of the kingdom; and the family were regarded with such veneration and esteem that the following harmless inversion was familiar "as household words:"—"God save the Earl of Derby and the King;" the general feeling and opinion thereby apparent being love to their lord and loyalty ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... an inversion of the old problem, If the ton of coal cost ten dollars, what will the cord of wood come to? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... was beyond question. He had struck out a line for himself; and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one. This the Archdeacon, being a good Conservative, disapproved. It worried him sadly, making him actually, if unconsciously, exceedingly jealous. And precisely on that account, by an ingenious inversion of reasoning, he felt he owed it to abstract justice—in other words to his much disgruntled self—to make all possible use of this offending, this renegade personage, when opportunity of so doing occurred. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... our rulers. But to suppose that this great revolution can be accomplished by a temporary army, that this army will be subsisted by State supplies and that taxation alone is adequate to our wants is in my opinion absurd, and as unreasonable as to expect an inversion of the order of nature to accommodate itself to our views. If it were necessary it could be easily proved to any person of a moderate understanding that an annual army or any army raised on the spur of the occasion besides being unqualified for the end designed is, in various ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... ingenious and laborious composer, who carried the art of canonic imitation to a much finer point than had been reached before his time. He is generally credited with having composed a motette in thirty-six parts having almost all the devices later known as augmentation, diminution, inversion, retrograde, crab, etc. The thirty-six parts here mentioned, however, were not fully written out. Only six parts were written, the remainder being developed from these on the principle of a round, the successive choruses following each other at certain intervals, according ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... children were carried off by fairies, and others left in their places. 47. Who is said to have lived without meat, on the smell of a rose. 48. "Essentiae rationalis immortalis." 49. St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. x., cc. 9, 19, 32. 50. That which includes everything is opposed to nullity. 51. An inversion of the parts of an antithesis. 52. St. Augustine—"Homily on Genesis." 53. Sir T. Browne wrote a dialogue between two twins in the womb respecting the world into which they were going! 54. Refinement. 55. Constitution another form ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... mannerism appears in his earliest writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment, at least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless to give examples of a tendency which marks almost every page of his writing. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... officer killed at Queenston Heights was General Brock," or "The province west of Manitoba is Saskatchewan," would be to make the recitation unnatural and formal. When answers are a mere echo of the question, with some slight inversion or addition, they become exceedingly mechanical, and useless from the point of view of language training. While it is desirable to avoid, as far as possible, questions that admit of answers of a single word or short phrase, such questions are sometimes necessary and are not ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 'we see that this Radium, which seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed to go to ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Professor Bjerknes all the phenomena of magnetic induction can be reproduced directly and perfectly, but the phenomena of magnetic action are not so exactly reproduced, that is to say, they are subject to a sort of inversion. Thus when two bodies are pulsating together and in the same phase (i. e., both expanding and both contracting at the same time), they mutually attract each other: but if they are pulsating in opposite phases, repulsion is the result. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE—the fundamental condition—of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... mostly of the killing back of the lower limbs and twigs with some varieties being killed outright. Killing of the lower limbs as compared with the tops of the trees is probably related to lower temperatures near the ground due to temperature inversion and possibly to the fact that the lower branches were somewhat weaker in their growth. This sort of injury ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... was asking only about trivial matters, which might be dealt with in the way he mentioned, while great offences, such as those against a sovereign or a father, could not be dealt with by such an inversion of the principles of justice [5]. In the second Book of the Li Chi there is the following passage:— 'With the slayer of his father, a man may not live under the same heaven; against the slayer of ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... fumes will ruin cylinders and piston rods. A small quantity of some corrosive substance, a handful of emery will be the end of oil cups. When it comes to dynamos or transformers, short circuits and inversion of poles can be easily managed. Underground cables can be destroyed by fire, water or ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... sorry if others did. Your criticisms on Murchison were to me, and I think would be to many, particularly acceptable. (562/2. In a paper "On the Geological Structure of the Alps, etc." ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume V., page 157, 1849) Murchison expressed his belief that the apparent inversion of certain Tertiary strata along the flanks of the Alps afforded "a clear demonstration of a sudden operation or catastrophe." It is this view of paroxysmal energy that Lyell criticises in the address.) Capital, that metaphor of the clock. (562/3. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only the fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. The Restoration was much more than a triumph of the party of the royalists over that of the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... you love me," he went on, with an inversion of the due order of the proposition, and an assumption that would have been intolerable in anyone else, "and you know that I love you dearly." It was a proper compliment to her perspicuity that she should know already that he loved her, but ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... be detected by the blue coloration it gives with iodine solution, and confirmed by microscopical examination, or it may be converted into glucose by inversion, and the glucose estimated by means of ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... see, the great difficulty that Guichard encounters is in getting from the Hebrew to the Aryan group of languages. How he meets this difficulty may be imagined from his statement, as follows: "As for the derivation of words by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it is certain that this can and ought thus to be done, if we would find etymologies—a thing which becomes very credible when we consider that the Hebrews wrote from right to left and the Greeks and others from left to right. All the learned recognise such derivations ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... explanation, the sorrowful expression of Antinous must indicate the agony of death through which he passed into the company of the undying. Against this interpretation is the fact that we have no precise authority for the symbolism of the torches, except only the common inversion of the life-brand by ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain indicative sentences in the two stanzas—(1) 'Honest labour wears a lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations: both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... readily expressed in signs (see page 366), it is done once for all in the connection to which it belongs, and once established is not repeated by any subsequent intimation, as is commonly the case in oral speech. Inversion, by which the object is placed before the action, is a striking feature of the language of deaf-mutes, and it appears to follow the natural method by which objects and actions enter into the mental conception. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... them; | |this is very considerable, some having about one-third of the sail, others | |only the hull. | 60|Light wind from SE. Sky cloudy, somewhat hazy; but the horizon sharp and | |unbroken. | 61|The inversion of the vessels as conspicuous as before. Parts of the | |horizon observed ESE and WNW. | 62|A light breeze from the SE. Cloudy and close.—N.B. Instrument readjusted. | 63|Part of the horizon observed N and S. | 64|Part of the horizon observed E and W. A moderate breeze from the SW. Clear | |overhead; ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... dismay, Bobby set to work in the dogged analytical mood which difficulties already aroused in him. The remedy for the inversion was plain enough. Bobby changed the type end for end and turned the R and the E right side up, but he worked slower and slower and his brow ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... expressed by as many different characters. This is not all: the arrangement of all these monosyllables appears to be under no general rule; so that to know the language after having learnt the words, we must learn every particular phrase: the least inversion would make you unintelligible to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... bodies—"never found in inorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis." Orders and suborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, in assimilation. Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, some produce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation. These enzymes are at once the products and the agents of life. They must exert force, chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force into life force, or, to use Professor ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... 1856. The American conservative, indeed, descended the stairs of compromise until his descent into utter abnegation of all that civilized humanity holds dear was arrested by the Rebellion. And the reason of this strange inversion of conservative principles was, that the movement of Slavery is towards barbarism, while the movement of all countries in which labor is not positively chattellized is towards freedom and civilization. True conservatism, it must never be forgotten, is the refusal to give up a positive, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... work, but the sounds came distantly. On the hill and in the fields there was silence, save for the steady tramp of the advancing Northern troops. Then from the rear of the marching lines suddenly came a burst of martial music. The Northern bands, by a queer inversion, were playing Dixie: ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... herald each his new transformation of the whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you will, feel ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... five shillings a bottle, champagne (nee gooseberry) at five pounds, Cape smoke at two shillings per two fingers,—and, at a given signal, there was an inarticulate roar from dusty throats, an inversion of tumblers over thirsty mouths, and a second inversion over the ground to show that ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... my labor there, the book would have been lost on the shop-shelves; but writing ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental passion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a method of inversion, peppering my argument with platitudes on war as a needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fortitude and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what I had intended as subtle irony was discovered by a great conservative journal to be an unassailable argument, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... parted, and never more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as this comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities, and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... his knife and fork, and was staring at his son in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to pay ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... "Given an inversion of their relative positions, I feel like Faust befriended by Mephistopheles. I felt it when he stood by my side on the hilltop, seven years ago. I felt it when he thrust that money into my hand, and bade me go and see what I could make of life, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to be attended to, is, The Inversion of the Phrase. This flings the Stile out of Prose, and occasions that Suspense which is the Life of Poetry. This builds the lofty Rhyme (as Milton expresses it) in such manner as to cause that Majesty in ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed invested with all the dignity of the consulship, the praetorship, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer |
