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More "Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books



... antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... the test in such a way that the 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 ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... the 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 for all that ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... an apparently plausible, but really fallacious inversion of the Pantheistic view of the Universe, I repeat that the latter is the precise opposite of Atheism. So far from tolerating any doubt as to the being of God, it denies that there is anything else. For all objects of sense and thought, including individual consciousness, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life, and even of religion, which might otherwise have remained dark to me, and to throw ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... effect their deliverance and to leave the road clear? I very much fear that logic has carried your deductions beyond the bounds of reality. Rationally speaking, my dear sir, nothing could be more accurate than your inferences; and yet we must forgo the theory of the strange inversion which you suggest. None of the Bramble-bees with whom I have experimented behaves after that fashion. I know nothing personal about Odynerus rubicola, who appears to be a stranger in my district; but, as ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... 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. His mask and traditional dress, his ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... it 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 ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... it is generally designated. Nevertheless, as it is united with the body from which 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

... spinifex fires, and the traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires there are sure to be natives, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... the militant followers of and participators in a militant God. We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... seems to be an inversion of la Trenise, except that in nineteen cases out of twenty, the waistcoat, tip, camellia and wristbands, seem to undergo intense mental torture; for if there be such a thing as "poetry of motion," pastorale must be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various

... 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 a programme which looked like formal irony on ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... 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 Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his pages ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... 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 ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... Corson, in his chapter on "Browning's Obscurity," has done his best to smooth the path of the reader by explaining, and so removing from his way, those grammatical obstructions, habits of word inversion and baffling ellipses that stand as a lion in the path to so many of the poet's untried readers. This chapter is exceedingly well wrought out, and, once carefully studied, with the illustrations given, can hardly fail ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... The inversion of the organs shown by Vertebrates as compared with Invertebrates is due to the reversed position of the embryo relatively ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... 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 the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... assembled, Mr Benson followed, unmarshalled and unattended. When he had closed the pulpit-door, and knelt in prayer for an instant or two, he gave out a psalm from the dear old Scottish paraphrase, with its primitive inversion of the simple perfect Bible words; and a kind of precentor stood up, and, having sounded the note on a pitch-pipe, sang a couple of lines by way of indicating the tune; then all the congregation stood up, and sang aloud, Mr Bradshaw's great bass voice being half a note in advance of the others, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... man once indulges himself in murder, he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking; and from that to incivility and procrastination.' One laughs at this whimsical inversion; but I don't think one laughs very heartily; and certainly one does not find, as in really deep humour, that the paradox is pregnant with further meaning, and the laugh a prelude to a more melancholy smile. Many of the best things ever said are couched in a similar form: the old remark that ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... and classified in any sphere of investigation, and these are found uniformly to reveal the same Law or Principle, it is assumed that all similar Phenomena are invariably governed by this Principle or Law, which, in reality deduced or derived, is, by this inversion of terms, said to be induced from the observed Facts. The Law so established has thenceforth two distinct functions: I, all the Facts of subsequent Observation, by the primitive Method of observation, are ranged under the Law ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... in 8vo., as Heber's fragment appears to have been; but then the initials of the author are given as N.B., whereas in my fragment they stand B.N., a usual inversion with Nicholas Breton; the brief address "To the Reader" is also subscribed B.N.; and then begins the body of the work, thus headed: "Crosse and Pile, or, Crossing of Proverbs." It ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various

... 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 to us ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... 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 Americans, to-day the French are perfecting it, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... about the inversion of objects by the astronomical telescope. It is singular that any difficulty should be felt about so simple a matter, yet I have seen in the writings of more than one distinguished astronomer, wholly incorrect ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... that asceticism is an absolute inversion of the Divine order, since it seeks life through death instead of finding death through life. No degree of mortification can ever bring us to sanctification. We are to "put off the old man with his deeds." But how? By "putting ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... looked so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were there—with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately bred—that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease that had brought him to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... texts of Scripture, and 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

... Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the "prettier verses," with a note of exclamation (!). {73a} But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd's old copy, and nobody ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang

... ask why had I come to the moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious to pursue the details of this mad inversion of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... degree in which it lives up 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 better to regulate it than to affect to be oblivious of it. The Japanese ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... given,—bass at 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 all the contents ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... wife, 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... among 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 ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... 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 examination ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... right. 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... acquaintance with the mythology of other nations, were made to furnish him with the materials for hastily applying one solution to all the early Jewish histories, which he failed to invalidate by the application of the historic method just described. By an inversion of the argument of the early Christian apologists, he pretended that the early history preserved among the Hebrews was borrowed from the heathens, instead of claiming that the heathen mythology was a trace of Hebrew ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... edition of this volume was published in 1899, following "Sexual Inversion," which now forms Volume II. The second edition, issued by the present publishers and substantially identical with the first edition, appeared in the following year. Ten years have elapsed since then and this new edition will be found to reflect the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office—for in its ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... 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 my ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... himself into a cab and drove to all the hotels in Grenada" (he overlooked the police station), and, failing to find Margot, becomes mad. He goes about ejaculating "Mad, mad!" than which nothing could be more eloquent of his complete mental inversion. In his paroxysms the Countess di Morno persuades him to "lead her to the altar," but on the way (with a certain indelicacy they go to church in the same conveyance) she lets slip a little secret. So Di Sorno jumps out of the carriage, "hurling the crowd apart," and, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... 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, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... origin; perhaps an inversion of bel cece, "beautiful chick (pea)," or from Fr. chiche beau, with same meaning), the term in Italy from the 17th century onwards for a dangler about women. The cicisbeo was the professed gallant of a married woman, who attended her at all public entertainments, it being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... profitably with a man aware of one's peculiar habits. And another advantage from such an arrangement is, that one gets any little alteration or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule— ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... 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 the Bible countenanced their anthropomorphism. Hence ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... pleaded for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to defend herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story, though she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a singular inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it was her heart that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the 'gallant and handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her mind from the fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... inversion of the usual process of proposing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy; but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... 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

... of your levity hits the nail on the head sometimes," said Carne, "though the blow cannot be a very heavy one. Nature has not fashioned me for enjoyment, and therefore affords me very little. But some little I do expect in the great inversion coming, in the upset of the scoundrels who have fattened on my flesh, and stolen my land, to make country gentlemen—if it were possible—of themselves. It will take a large chimney to burn their title-deeds, for the robbery has lasted for a century. But I hold the great Emperor's ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... interesting and most honorable pursuits in which a man can engage. Ambition to serve is always noble. Desire for the honors and emoluments of public office, however, may crowd out the desire to render public service. Such a substitution of selfish for patriotic considerations, such an inversion of the proper order of interests in a man's mind, is the vice of political ambition. The ambitious politician seeks office, not because he seeks to promote measures which he believes to be for the public good; not because ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... satisfied before the conclusion of the second stanza. A further step towards the provision of closer unity between the separate stanzas was the chanso redonda, which was composed of coblas estrampas, the rime order of the second stanza being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches its highest point in the sestina, which retained the characteristic of the chanso redonda, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should correspond with the first rime ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... astronomical telescope ordinarily in use, it is seen upside down. This is, however, a matter of very small moment in dealing with celestial objects; for, as they are usually round, it is really not of much consequence which part we regard as top and which as bottom. Such an inversion would, of course, be most inconvenient when viewing terrestrial objects. In order to observe the latter we therefore employ what is called a terrestrial telescope, which is merely a refractor with some extra lenses added in the eye portion for the purpose ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... 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 locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... cupric reduction value about 50 p.ct. that of an equal weight of dextrose. As an extreme hydrolytic treatment the products were dissolved in 70 p.ct. H{2}SO{4}, allowed to stand 24 hours, then considerably diluted (to 3 p.ct. H{2}SO{4}) and boiled to complete the inversion. The yields of glucose, calculated from the ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross

... reinvestment. The purpose of these 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 of metals which attach to a mine. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... "Principle of Beauty" and the "Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's passion of reverence for the old historic places—provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition, when ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... 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) of cane sugar is:— ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... dearest—and since, I have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. It seems to me too that the language is freer—there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. It just strikes me so for the first impression. At any rate the interest grows and grows. You have a secret about Domizia, I guess—which will not be told till the last perhaps. And that poor, noble Luria, who will be equal to the leap ... as it is ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... 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

... 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

... of the sub-fields that demand observation, is shown by an entry in the Psychological Index: "1202. Benedict, F.G. "Studies in Body—Temperature." 1. Influence of the Inversion of the Daily Routine; the Temperature of ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth

... witnessed, but the chronic form, of which we more particularly speak, is more rare. We have seen three cases of the latter, and, no doubt, might have found many more if our opportunities of studying canine pathology were equal to those of the English writers. The inversion of the eyelids upon the globe is accompanied with pain and irritation, swelling and inflammation, both of the lids and eye, which ultimately renders the dog almost useless, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... sources of Corrupt Readings, is Transposition, or the arbitrary inversion of the order of the sacred words,—generally in the subordinate clauses of a sentence. The extent to which this prevails in Codexes of the type of B[Symbol: Aleph]CD passes belief. It is not merely the occasional writing of [Greek: tauta panta] for [Greek: ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... in the present day the great object of Christianity should be, not to change the lives of men, but to prevent them from changing their opinions; that would be a singular inversion of the purposes for which CHRIST ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... simply and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, the colonel chuckled. ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske

... explained the inversion by which a bailee's right of action against third persons was supposed to stand on his responsibility over, although in truth it was the foundation of that responsibility, and arose simply from his possession. The step was ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... other countries, the revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; and these are carried out of the country without producing anything to compensate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... have it; all really nice people have it. I have 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 ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... two forms and the sole nourishment of the predatory insect in its adult phase, is for the larva of the same insect an object of insurmountable disgust, and probably a poison. The transfiguration of the chrysalis surprises me less than this inversion of the appetite. What change occurs in the stomach of the insect that the adult should passionately seek that which the larva refuses under peril of death? It is no question of organic debility unable to support a diet too substantial, too hard, or too highly ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at each turn ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... manque, of a man who would be a genius were it not for the 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 ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... 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 to be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that with which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The impression was so strong on him as he turned over the manuscript, that he shuddered. What was ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley, resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is our sensation only: for a day ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... 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 ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... 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

... simplifications effected by Esperanto, but these will not fail to strike the learner after a very brief acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle cxu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... words as produced this effect, they added the habit of frequently omitting the usual particles, and of conveying their meaning in short and contracted phrases. The only artifices they used were those of inversion and transition."[7] It is difficult to give examples to those unacquainted with the language, but the following extract may serve to indicate our meaning: it is taken ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... the women, and the women bind themselves in their vows to accept the same rules as the men. Yet in these rules there are many things which cannot possibly be carried out by women, either as superiors or in the lower orders. In many places we may even behold an inversion of the natural order of things, whereby the abbesses and nuns have authority over the clergy, and even over those who are themselves in charge of the people. The more power such women exercise over men, the more easily can they lead ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... a strange 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 Horse ("his Bashi-bazuks"), ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... some 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 ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... are 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 three parts ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... especially, in these break-of-day 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. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... perhaps 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 to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... This letter does not say who the enemies were or in which direction they advanced. Perhaps "Bikhisi" may be regarded as the present "'Abbaseh" (by inversion of the guttural), which is fifteen miles southwest of Damascus, near the main road to the town of Jabesh, whence ...
— Egyptian Literature

... 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 ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... silk mills, 70.5 per cent.; in the flax-spinning mills, 70.5 per cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a note ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... 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 ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... '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 each stanza ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... clinging beauty, but the girl of the 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 prey to destruction and extermination ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... there is silence; 4. After all transpositions; for example: To live, one must work. Here the preposition to takes the value of its natural antecedent, work; that is to say, six degrees, since by inversion it precedes it, and the gesture of the sentence bears wholly on the preposition; 5. Before and after incidental phrases; 6. Wherever we wish to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... 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

... was a very 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 ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... a notable inversion of old ideas; before the change the ecclesiastical authority had been civil, but because of the change the civil authority became ecclesiastical. If theocracy means the rule of the church or the sovereignty of the clergy in the state, then the ancient constitution ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early in her ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... have nothing to fear; if they have nothing to lose, they have nothing to lament; and if they have done nothing to be ashamed of, they have every thing to hope for. . . . SENTENTIOUSNESS, let us inform 'S.' of Cambridge, and antitheses, do not consist of short sentences and inversion of words merely; and even the most felicitous examples in each case often sacrifice the sound to the sense. Here is an instance which is unobjectionable: 'I knew the old miser well. He amassed a fortune by raising hemp; and if he had had his deserts, would have died ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... 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, knowing it to be wrong, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... 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 ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... the reason for this inversion of arrangements, and she was silent a little while; ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner

... stems a brushy appearance. About the upper portion of the stem, and especially upon the extreme top, are numerous white, wiry hairs, 6 in. or more long, and gathered sometimes into locks. To this character, the plant owes it name Old-Man Cactus; but, by a curious inversion of what obtains in the human kind, old plants are less conspicuous by their white hairs than the younger ones. Some years ago, there were three fine stems of this Cactus among the cultivated plants at Kew, the highest of which ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson

... system are very good; but Dr. Herz has endeavored to simplify it still further, and with this object in view has experimented on several arrangements. For example, to obtain inversion a contact was simply placed on each side of the vibrating plate. Although the movements of this latter are not, as we know, of the nature of ordinary sonorous vibrations, it was thought that they might ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... been punished 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that he goes ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... case of the Stanza structure and the Antistrophic structure there are various modifications and elaborations—duplication, inversion, interruption, etc.: these it will be sufficient to explain in connection with the examples ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various

... had laid down 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

... Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less God."—Zion's ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... to be placed in the concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, not only does not diminish in any thing like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and afterward connect them with the principles of human ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... as transient for the higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development of these lower Radiates is but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... while the styles of George Meredith and of Henry James show how difficult it is for a subtle intellect to move freely within the limitations of English prose. Indeed, "it is a remarkable fact," as Sainte Beuve noticed, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Repeated attempts, however, have been made to capture our language, and to transport it into aristocratic atmospheres; and of these attempts the first is associated ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... link between the two countries is found in the fact that in this period there was erected in Egypt the building which came to be looked on as the parallel to the Cretan Labyrinth, and which, with a curious inversion of the actual facts, was long supposed to be the original from which the Cretan Labyrinth was derived. The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... earth is round is used like a noun as the subject of has been proved. The conjunction that [Footnote: "That was originally the neuter demonstrative pronoun, used to point to the fact stated in an independent sentence; as, It was good; he saw that. By an inversion of the order this became, He saw that (namely) it was good, and so passed into the form He saw that it was good, where that has been transferred to the accessory clause, and has become a mere sign of grammatical subordination."—C. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... 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 ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... This is the case with Hungary, Russia, the Danubian 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 ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... would be no reason to complain; but in translating Homer he seems to have thought it necessary to use a different style from that of his original work. Almost every sentence is stiffened by some clumsy inversion; stately phrases are used when simpler ones were at hand, and would have rendered the meaning of the original better. The entire version has the appearance of being hammered out with great labor, and as a whole it is cold and constrained; scarce any thing seems spontaneous; ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... is so complete that evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers than his ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... passion for inverting the names of things. You must not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say, instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a gratuitous insult to a number ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... judgeship which had become vacant by the resignation of Sir Anthony Cleasby. A notorious journalist asserted that the promise had been made on consideration of his writing in the papers on behalf of the Indian Government. The statement is only worth notice as an ingenious inversion of the truth. So far from requiring any external impulse to write on Lytton's behalf, Fitzjames could hardly refrain from writing when its expediency was doubtful. When the occasion for a word in season offered itself, hardly any threats or promises could have induced him to keep ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... gave a 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 ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... common-sense, the mental soundness, the humane instinct and the sympathy with nature, which give fertility and wholeness to the political philosophy of men like Burke, are absent in Machiavelli. In spite of its vigor, his system implies an inversion of the ruling laws of health in the body politic. In spite of its logical cogency, it is inconclusive by reason of defective premises. Incomparable as an essay in pathological anatomy, it throws no light upon the working of a normal social ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... six and a half pairs of eyes, and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have—what is it?—prejudice, common-sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and—never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... says that sometimes the glowing fire in the grate stares at you from behind its bars, as if it could read pictures in you, you cannot help laughing. If he had given you the protasis, "You gaze into the fire as if you could read pictures in it," even you could have invented the inversion. Topsy-turveydom is, I repeat, no laughing matter. It is an art—and must be studied. When Besant's School of Literature is ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... 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 the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... almost pure solution of sulphate of copper having a slow motion from top to bottom. This renewal of the liquid is so much the more necessary in that the saturated solution of sulphate of copper has a density of 1.166, and the sulphate of zinc one of 1.445, There would occur, then, a mixture through inversion of densities if the solution were allowed to reach a too great amount of saturation, did not the siphon prevent such a phenomenon by sucking up the liquid into the part where the mixture tends to take place. The chemical action that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... rising into excellence and importance at a time when poetry was on the decline, acquired such superiority that verse, instead of being its mistress, became its handmaid. The first occasion of this inversion was in the year 1594, when Rinuccini, a Florentine poet, associated himself with three musicians to compose a mythological drama. This and several other pieces by the same author met with a brilliant reception. Poetry, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... account both for those sexual differences of mind 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

... strange inversion of time. Here winter was, cold streets, steely snow, garbage frozen to stone.... And in Europe was sane June. Purple flower of the heather in Ulster, and white flower of the bogs, and in the little bays of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... 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 ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... so far as they have accepted or reflected the moral convictions; but it is an 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 that we reject the one possible basis of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... 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; the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likeness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... work, but which relates a separate incident that occurred some years after the conclusion of the principal narrative, introduces us to the death-bed of Ivan III., at whose court the whole of the subsequent scenes occur; and is calculated from this inversion of time, and the recurrence of similar names, and even of the same persons, to create little confusion in the mind of the reader who is ignorant of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... of this high class (Royal Highnesses, &c.) are said to 'entertain' visitors, but that is an inversion of the actual fact; their object is to be entertained. And quite right too. Nothing can surely be more delightful than to have one's house full of friends at will, and then be able to turn them out at a moment's notice (as a life-boat gets rid of superfluous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various

... 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, powder, diplomacy, had brought ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... 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 ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... 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; ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... of 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... having 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 ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... court of Vienna was the paradise of old women, and that there is no other place in the world where a woman past fifty excites the least interest. Had her travels extended to the interior of North America, she would have seen another instance of this inversion of the common mode of thinking. Here a woman never was of consequence, till sire had a son old enough to fight the battles of his country. From, that date she held a superior rank in society; was allowed to live at ease, and even called to consultations on national affairs. In savage ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... blocks sat the black tea kettle. As a reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line. So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... quarrel. She ended by throwing herself on her bed and bursting into a fit of sobbing that not only horrified but astounded little Jim. To see his mother sobbing wildly while he was quiet and grave was a complete inversion of all his former experiences. As if to carry out the spirit of the situation, he proceeded to act the part of comforter by stroking his mother's brown hair with his fat little hand until the burst of ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne

... merest tyro in philology can now 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... but it is an 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 ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... Krafft-Ebing, published a Psychopathia Sexualis, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that sexual inversion is sometimes due ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle cxu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... of 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 was ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really, in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... psalmist is a 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

... there are the mysteries of suspension and inversion, by means of which even the second is received into favor in the bosom of harmony. A musician once explained all these things to me, but that was later. And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of heat arises from this action of vomiting; which always occurs, when the secerning system is stimulated into action. Secondly, the motions of the absorbent vessels are as liable to inversion as the stomach itself; which last, with the oesophagus, may be considered as the absorbent mouth and belly of that great gland, the intestinal canal. Thirdly, the class of sorbentia, as bitters and metallic salts, given in large doses, become invertentia, and vomit, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... 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 way if they ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... the scheme of 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 ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... higher numbers the inverse order is very rarely used; though even here an occasional exception is found. The Taensa Indians, for example, place the smaller numbers before the larger, no matter how far their scale may extend. To say 1881 they make a complete inversion of our own order, beginning with 1 and ending with 1000. Their full numeral for this is yeha av wabki mar-u-wab mar-u-haki, which means, literally, 1 80 100 x 8 100 x 10.[54] Such exceptions are, however, ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... to see that asceticism is an absolute inversion of the Divine order, since it seeks life through death instead of finding death through life. No degree of mortification can ever bring us to sanctification. We are to "put off the old man with his deeds." But how? By "putting ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... another may often omit something stated by the first author. But, surely, he is not very likely to invert the order of the materials before him, especially when no obvious purpose can be served by such an inversion. Another instance of inversion is this: in Mark ix. 12, 13 the rejection of the Son of Man is mentioned by our Lord between two statements of His about Ehas, in Matt. xvii. 12 it is mentioned after both ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... are actually in"). The dream exhibits my friend as behaving like a general paralytic, and thus riots in absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically. "Of course he is a madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands all about it. But shouldn't it be the other way round?" This inversion obviously took place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whilst any one, however young, can to-day easily attack the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... the concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, not only does not diminish in any thing like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and afterward connect them with the principles of human nature by a priori reasonings, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... was, looked far less substantial than the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... 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

... it Him; and He entered in and supped with them, and then, in the middle of it, the relations were inverted, and they that had been showing the hospitality became the guests, and the table that had been theirs became His. 'And He took the bread and gave it to them.' You have the same inversion of relation in that first miracle that He wrought at Cana of Galilee, where invited as a guest, at a point in the entertainment He provides the supplies for the further conduct of it. You remember the words which contain the spiritual application of the same thought—'Behold, I stand at the door ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... 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 ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... river go." Though time present, past, and future is 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. In striking a rock the natural conception is not ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... Faustus gave a 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 ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... 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 ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... 62. 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 ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... which are 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 three ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... 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 or about ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... that only the author of the one passage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... thereof, is used with good success. To all which he subjoins a particular {212} accompt of the Iliac Passion (esteem'd by him to be sometimes a Symptome also of Feavers;) not only discoursing of its cause (a preposterous inversion of the Intestins, proceeding either from Obstruction, or Irritation,) but adding also a very plain way of Curing the same; and that not by the use of Quick-silver or Bullets (by him judged to be frequently noxious) ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... '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 doing with an imperceptible ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... plausible, but really fallacious inversion of the Pantheistic view of the Universe, I repeat that the latter is the precise opposite of Atheism. So far from tolerating any doubt as to the being of God, it denies that there is anything else. For all objects of sense and thought, including individual consciousness, whether directly observed ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... 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 ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... by the art and power with which the superstition of the enemy invested them. These oppressed yet dreaded fugitives obtained, naturally enough, the character of the German spirits called Kobold, from which the English goblin and the Scottish bogle, by some inversion and alteration ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... of import. And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... 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 seemed to hint in a roundabout way ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... mirage displayed itself in its numerous modifications. This phenomenon is so common in every zone, that I mention it only because we stopped to measure with some precision the breadth of the aerial distance between the horizon and the suspended object. There was a constant suspension, without inversion. The little currents of air that swept the surface of the soil had so variable a temperature that, in a drove of wild oxen, one part appeared with the legs raised above the surface of the ground, while the other rested on it. The aerial distance was, according ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... for the removal of foreign bodies from the larynx. In such cases, while the same relative position of the head to the plane of the table is maintained, the whole table top is so inclined as to elevate the feet and lower the head, known as Jackson's position. This semi-inversion of the patient allows the foreign body to drop into the pharynx if it should be dislodged, or slip from the forceps ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... definite a 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

... first bad inversion permitted, for "to combine bricks with cement." In my Swallow lecture I had no time to go into the question of her building materials; the point is, however, touched upon in the Appendix (pp. ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, 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 ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... into decline with the decay of literature. Music, rising into excellence and importance at a time when poetry was on the decline, acquired such superiority that verse, instead of being its mistress, became its handmaid. The first occasion of this inversion was in the year 1594, when Rinuccini, a Florentine poet, associated himself with three musicians to compose a mythological drama. This and several other pieces by the same author met with a brilliant reception. Poetry, written only in order to be sung, thus assumed a different ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... 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 Americans, to-day the French ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... of mechanical effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... seven and under 18. Old women can hear better than old men. At a distance of 4 to 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 a ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... was upon the student fraction of his congregation that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... increase in altitude. But sometimes a condition will occur where at some level, instead of the temperature and/or relative humidity decreasing with altitude, it will begin to increase. This layer of warm, moist air is known as an inversion layer, and it can do all kinds of crazy things to a radar wave. It can cause part of the radar wave to travel in a big arc and actually pick up the ground many miles away. Or it can cause the wave to bend down just enough to pick up ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... widow contracted an alliance with an Indian whose Christian name was Barnet, which name, in process of time, came to be corrupted into Brant. The little boy, who had been called Joseph, thus became known as "Brant's Joseph," from which the inversion to Joseph Brant is sufficiently obvious. No account of his childhood have come down to us, and, little or nothing is known of him until his thirteenth year, when he was taken under the patronage of that Sir William Johnson, who has by some ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... systematic movement by those who took part in it, it is in 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

... a vague young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. "And what good are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded, you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between everybody, you'd ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... 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 a programme which looked like formal irony on the kingly ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... A form of gravity battery into whose centre a globular flask, B, is inverted, which is filled before inversion with copper sulphate, of which 2 lbs. are used, and water, so as to remain full. This acts as a reservoir of copper sulphate, which it constantly supplies. The glass jar is closed with a ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... 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. A passage ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... Fern, the 'Reveries' of Ik Marvel, or the history of Mr. Bancroft; and yet, in the period that has since elapsed, the cost of publication has fallen probably twenty-five per cent. We have here an inversion of the usual order of things, and it is with these facts before us that you claim to have your monopoly extended over another thirty millions of people; in consideration of which, our people are to grant to the authors of foreign countries ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey

... legitimate principles on which the position of a Church in a State can be regulated, but the distance between them is immeasurable, and the transition extremely difficult. To pass from religious unity to religious liberty is to effect a complete inversion in the character of the State, a change in the whole spirit of legislation, and a still greater revolution in the minds and habits of men. So great a change seldom happens all at once. The law naturally ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... Africa that we were most of all opposed and most of all distrusted, and by a singular inversion it is in South Africa that the most brilliant and memorable results have been achieved. Indeed, I think that the gift of the Transvaal and Orange River Constitutions and the great settlement resulting therefrom will be by itself as ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... solution in the usual way. The yields of furfuraldehyde would appear to have no definite relation to the other chemical data about a gum, such as the potash and baryta absorptions or the sugar produced on inversion. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... 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 by syllables, the pronunciation of ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... true that this inversion of the usual process of proposing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy; but it would be interesting to learn the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... is the contrast between the character and method of the proceedings which originated and now sustain the Rebellion, and those which initiated and carried through the Revolution! The Rebellion exhibits to us a complete inversion of the course of measures which inaugurated the Revolution. "Secession" was the invention of ambitious leaders, who overrode the forms of law, and have not dared to submit their votes and their doings to primary meetings of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... meant peace between the warring powers, and strong likelihood of peace in the world for all time to come. It also meant other things. It meant the complete inversion of the American policy and the welcoming of science as the servant of mankind's larger needs and not merely a flunky to ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings

... dress we take to be the following—utility in all cases, ornament when practicable. The first should ever precede, and serve as the basis to the second; and it is the inversion of their due positions that causes so many applications of the utile and the dulce to end in sheer absurdity. The usefulness of any article or system of dress depends entirely upon climate, modified of course by the occupation or pursuits of the wearer; the beauty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... 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 ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... trace of that splendidly audacious suggestion that Coleridge was the first "whose muse had soared" within the new dome—unless we find a blind one in the closing lines, supposing them to have been converted by the simple process of inversion. Instead of Coleridge being the first whose muse had soared in the new Drury, Drury was the first place in which his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... 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. Now, learning on credible authority that Sir Charles's name was still one to conjure ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... tribe, 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 the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when the clouds ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston

... presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... series, "Fathers and Children," stirred up a storm the suddenness and violence of which it is not easy, nowadays, to understand. The figure of Bazarov, the first "Nihilist"—thus baptized by an inversion of epithet which was to win extraordinary success—is merely intended to reveal a mental condition which, though the fact had been insufficiently recognized, had already existed for some years. The epithet itself had been in constant ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... these break-of-day 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

... God. We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the spirit of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... in the sense of the equation derived above, viz. k t^{-1} log [a/(a-x)], be determined for the inversion of cane-sugar by an acid of given concentration, the following values ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... man of your levity hits the nail on the head sometimes," said Carne, "though the blow cannot be a very heavy one. Nature has not fashioned me for enjoyment, and therefore affords me very little. But some little I do expect in the great inversion coming, in the upset of the scoundrels who have fattened on my flesh, and stolen my land, to make country gentlemen—if it were possible—of themselves. It will take a large chimney to burn their title-deeds, for the robbery has lasted for a century. But I hold the great Emperor's process signed ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... with the more subtle devices of fugal treatment; although but one of these is employed in the fugue just studied, which is comparatively simple in structure. I. Inversion; the melodic outline is turned upside down while identity is retained by ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... is that total of wealth which 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 wealth which is produced by labour ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... grow constantly colder with elevation above the earth's surface. It is strong evidence of considerable efficiency in the instruments, and of careful attention on the part of the observer, that Lussac was able to record the temporary inversion of the law of change of temperature above-mentioned. Had he possessed modern instrumental equipment he would have brought down a yet more remarkable account of the upper regions which he visited, and learned that the variations of heat and ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always 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

... five "correct" colors of the Chinese, while green is one of the "intermediate" colors that are less esteemed. Here we have the yellow used merely as a lining to the green, or employed in the lower, or less honorable, part of the dress;—an inversion of propriety, and intimating how a favorite had usurped the place of the rightful ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... parental authority, and take the law from their children's mouths; for they had no other means of finding out what was good American form. The result was that laxity of domestic organization, that inversion of normal relations which makes for friction, and which sometimes ends in breaking up a family that was ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... bore the seared outward aspect of an entirely different mental condition from that with which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The impression was so strong on him as he turned over the manuscript, that he shuddered. ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... 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 of temperament. 56. The Jewish computation for fifty years. 57. Saturn ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... time to effect their deliverance and to leave the road clear? I very much fear that logic has carried your deductions beyond the bounds of reality. Rationally speaking, my dear sir, nothing could be more accurate than your inferences; and yet we must forgo the theory of the strange inversion which you suggest. None of the Bramble-bees with whom I have experimented behaves after that fashion. I know nothing personal about Odynerus rubicola, who appears to be a stranger in my district; but, as the method of leaving must be almost the same when the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... 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 discover ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... simple ophthalmia, we have often witnessed, but the chronic form, of which we more particularly speak, is more rare. We have seen three cases of the latter, and, no doubt, might have found many more if our opportunities of studying canine pathology were equal to those of the English writers. The inversion of the eyelids upon the globe is accompanied with pain and irritation, swelling and inflammation, both of the lids and eye, which ultimately renders the dog almost useless, if not ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... flax-spinning mills, 70.5 per cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... letter to Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... 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 ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... Patrie. Some few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the greater part remained. They have excluded from French—as some think to the impoverishment of that language—most elements of the Gothic—the inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative, the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the Englishman than is the new—all these were destroyed by the group of men of whom ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... the latent longing to be conformed to the good. There is the sense that he fulfils himself then only when he is obedient to the good. One of the great facts of spiritual experience is this gradual, or even sudden, inversion of standard within us. We do really cease to desire the things which are against right reason and conscience. We come to desire the good, even if it shall cost us pain and sacrifice to do it. Paul could write: 'When I would do good, evil is present ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... literature. His lack of curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers than his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... be purified by washing with saline solution or eusol, and the surrounding skin painted with iodine, after which the edges are approximated by sutures. The raw surfaces must be brought into accurate apposition, care being taken that no inversion of the cutaneous surface takes place. In extensive and deep wounds, to ensure more complete closure and to prevent subsequent stretching of the scar, it is advisable to unite the different structures—muscles, fasciae, and subcutaneous tissue—by separate series of buried sutures of catgut ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... created thus—his body of earth, his blood of the sea, his face of the sun, his breath of the wind, etc. This is also found in a Frisian tale (Vigfusson-Powell, Corpus Poet. Bor. i. 479), and both stories present an inversion of well-known myths about the creation of the universe from the ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... curious 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 ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... appearance. About the upper portion of the stem, and especially upon the extreme top, are numerous white, wiry hairs, 6 in. or more long, and gathered sometimes into locks. To this character, the plant owes it name Old-Man Cactus; but, by a curious inversion of what obtains in the human kind, old plants are less conspicuous by their white hairs than the younger ones. Some years ago, there were three fine stems of this Cactus among the cultivated plants at Kew, the highest of which measured 181/2 ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson

... proposed for the fatal effects of parcellaire division may be reduced to two, which really are but one, the second being the inversion of the first: to raise the mental and moral condition of the workingman by increasing his comfort and dignity; or else, to prepare the way for his future emancipation ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... 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 ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; and these are carried out of the country without producing anything to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... 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 to ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... during the time when she was living in the studio. Some curious inversion of pride kept her silent on the subject of the change in her life. Albertina would have turned up her nose at the studio, Eleanor knew. Therefore, she would not so much as address an envelope to that young lady from an interior ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... Christ stands for the tendency to give, and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the deathward—deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet—curious inversion of earlier experience—the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... power of certain particles upon the nerves, that the stomach will be thrown into convulsions that almost threaten an inversion, by taking only four ounces of a wine in which so small a portion of glass of antimony as one scruple is infused in eight pounds of the former. And what is still more remarkable is, that the glass of antimony remains not only undissolved, ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith

... This inversion sometimes creates ambiguity in poetry, e.g. "The son the father slew," and must ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott

... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... 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 ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... injury sustained by the human body, without being 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.) ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... is generally designated. Nevertheless, as it is united with the body from which 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 ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... be used in any but its second inversion, the fifth being omitted.[2] The seventh requires no preparation. Other chords of the seventh are better not used until second species ...
— A Treatise on Simple Counterpoint in Forty Lessons • Friedrich J. Lehmann

... obligation of contracts; but Congress may establish uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies." Could any man have doubted, in that case, that the meaning was, that the States should not pass laws discharging debts without payment, but that Congress might establish uniform bankrupt acts? And yet this inversion of the order of the clauses does not alter their sense. We contend, that Congress alone possesses the power of establishing bankrupt laws; and although we are aware that, in Sturges v. Crowninshield, the court decided that such an ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... propounds the 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 for ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... intrepidity, with which you pursue them. Now if the former member be thrown last, they will run thus, that even those cannot but approve the steadiness and intrepidity, with which you pursue them, who would misrepresent your generous designs for the public good. Here the sense is much obscured by the inversion of the relative them, which ought to refer to something that went before, and not to the words generous designs, which in this situation of the members are placed after it. WARD'S Rhetoric. Vol. 1, p. 338, 339.] the beauty of it would then ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... see the reason for this inversion of arrangements, and she was silent a little while; studying it, ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner

... an awakened dreamer—he lives in his dream. (Of this we might cite seemingly authentic examples: Shelly, Alfieri, etc.) Psychologically, this means that there is in him a double inversion ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... combustion and clogs up the smoke exhausts. You can also use acids to corrode boiler tubes; acid 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, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... higher cuttle-fish consists of two parts, placed one behind the other like two lenses, both having a very different structure and disposition to what occurs in the vertebrata. The retina is wholly different, with an actual inversion of the elemental parts, and with a large nervous ganglion included within the membranes of the eye. The relations of the muscles are as different as it is possible to conceive, and so in other points. Hence it is not a little difficult to decide how far ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... subservient to the sterner spirit of his wife, 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. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... its growth: for the stage which I have spoken of as transient for the higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... relentless student of mental pathology is very likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... ascending where the leader descends and vice versa. Its expressive power depends upon 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness. But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... the pronunciation and orthography of words. 2. By omitting many inflections, especially of the noun, and consequently making more use of articles and auxiliaries. 3. By the introduction of French derivatives. 4. By using less inversion and ellipsis, especially in poetry. Of these, the second alone, I think, can be considered as sufficient to describe a new form of language; and this was brought about so gradually, that we are not relieved from much of our difficulty, as to whether some compositions ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... his country's pride, &c. Construe: When the priest, the slave, and the liberticide, trampled his country's pride, and mocked [it] with many a loathed rite of lust and blood. This of course refers to the condition of public affairs and of court-life in the reign of Charles II. The inversion in this passage is not a very serious one, although, for the sense, slightly embarrassing. Occasionally Shelley conceded to himself great latitude in inversion: as for instance in the Revolt of ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... all the title and pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... lines) of the determinant, and then taking for the 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... called enzymes, or ferments, that appear in living 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 Moore's term, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... The 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 ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... just spoken by the rulers on themselves, but with the inversion of its clauses. All disguise is at an end. The fatal 'you' is pronounced. The husbandmen's calculation had been that killing the heir would make them lords of the vineyard; the grim fact was that they cast themselves out when they cast him out. He is the heir. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... in most other parts of Australia, seldom hunt without making perpetual grass or spinifex fires, and the traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires there are sure to be natives, the present case being no ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... 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, ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler









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