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More "Predisposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not our concern. Our concern at present is with the fact that the social constitution of the home almost invariably shapes the fundamental social conceptions for life, just as its average temperament shapes manners and bearing and its moral tone begets moral predisposition. If the average sensual man of our civilization is noisy and undignified in his bearing, disposed to insult and despise those he believes to be his social inferiors, competitive and disobliging to his equals; ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... circumstances which point to a direct transmission from parent to child of a predisposition to melancholia. In Heine's, on the other hand, the question of heredity has apparently only an indirect bearing upon his Weltschmerz. To what extent was his long and terrible disease of hereditary origin, and in what measure may we ascribe his Weltschmerz ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... of strychnia or of narcotics, the explanation must of necessity, for the present, be more or less speculative. But how are we to account, even in the way of speculation, for the peculiar immunity, lack of predisposition and hereditary tendencies to disease exhibited by the Hebrew, who, since the history of the world, has been a civilized and rational being,—even for decades of centuries before the civilization of Europe? Living under the same forms of government, climate, and shelter, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... was a typical English country girl, strictly tailor-made in her appearance, with a predisposition towards stiff linen collars and neat ties. In figure she was slight almost to boyishness and she had no pretensions whatever to good looks, but there was nevertheless something frank and wholesome and sweet about her—something of the charm of a nice boy—that counterbalanced ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... novelist is assured that the "ex-Emperor" was pre-disposed to the "cruel complaint of which his father died." "The progress of the disease is slow and insidious," says he, which may be true enough, but predisposition can be either checked or accelerated, and the course adopted towards Napoleon was not calculated to retard, but encourage it. But in order to palliate the actions of the British Government and their blindly devoted adherents ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... had begun to read them into a different construction. Yet, on the other hand, in spite of any colorable excuses that may be pleaded for this prejudice, it is pretty plain that, after all, there is in human nature a deep-laid predisposition to an obstinate craze of this nature. Else why is it that, in every age alike, men have asserted or even assumed the downward tendency of the human race in all that regards moral qualities. For the physical ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... genius often is itself the creature of its own age: it is but that reaction of public opinion, which is generally the forerunner of some critical change, or which calls forth some want which sooner or later will be supplied. The predisposition for the various but neglected literature, and the curious but the scattered knowledge of the moderns, which had long been increasing, with the speculative turn of inquiry, prevailed in Europe when Bayle took his pen to give the thing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Harlan 'Medical Researches' page 593.) on hereditary disease and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, Omnes Graeci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... myself dishonoured, if not actually disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a "personal emotion" is ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed—in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure that ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... extends, the teacher was more successful than, with all her experience, her skill, and her zeal, she had presumed to anticipate. Matilda, without ear, or taste, or love for music, became a very fair mechanical musician. Without one artistic predisposition, she achieved the science of perspective—she attained even to the mixture of colours—she filled a portfolio with drawings which no young lady need have been ashamed to see circling round a drawing-room. She carried Matilda's thin mind to the farthest bound it could have reached ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the angels were endowed with grace according to the measure of their natural perfection,(435) we may well suppose that man receives grace likewise according to his natural constitution (gratia sequitur naturam)—a predisposition or aptitude which God ordained in His infinite wisdom to be the instrument through which His graces should operate either for personal sanctification or the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... began to deepen and creep towards him from the horizon edge; the day was done. It seemed to him a day lost. He had no doubt now but that he loved his cousin, and the opportunity of telling her so—of profiting by her predisposition of the moment—had passed. She would remember herself, she would remember his weak hesitancy, she would despise him. He rose and walked uneasily up and down. And yet—and it disgusted him with himself still more—he was again conscious of the feeling of ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... on idiosyncrasies of temperament that no one can foresee. But one may say that a Court does not lightly grant permission to presume death. There will be a rigorous inquiry—and a decidedly unpleasant one, I suspect—and the evidence will be reviewed by the judge with a strong predisposition to regard the testator as being still alive. On the other hand, the known facts point very distinctly to the probability that he is dead; and, if the will were less complicated and all the interested parties were unanimous in supporting the application, I ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... observes: "Every constitutional quality, whether good or bad, may descend, by inheritance, from parent to child. And a long-continued habit of drunkenness becomes as essentially constitutional as a predisposition to gout or pulmonary consumption. This increases, in a manifold degree, the responsibility of parents in relation to temperance. By habits of intemperance, they not only degrade and ruin themselves, but transmit the elements of like degradation and ruin to their posterity. ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... feature of early marriages that should receive serious consideration. A girl of eighteen or twenty has not reached that period of growth where certain inherited tendencies will show. If she has inherited a predisposition to consumption she may outgrow this period provided she is permitted to reach her full growth without subjecting her constitution to any strenuous physical or mental strain. If, however, this girl marries and becomes a mother, the incident effect upon her health ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... displayed a most decided poetic predisposition,—writing, when but ten years old, with surprising facility on every possible subject. No metre had any difficulties for her, and no theme seemed dull to her vivid intelligence,—her fancy being roused to action in a moment, by the barest hint given either by Nature or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... is to make one experience freely available in other experiences. The word "freely" marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future. Thus it also has the function of making one experience available in subsequent experiences. Within certain limits, it performs this function successfully. But habit, apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to intemperance. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... compound being, to make the likeness complete. And this, with the trains of revery and the cast of imagination which it must naturally breed, would be the one thing not easily supplied, for it is the predisposition which gives to all encircling qualities in Hawthorne their peculiar coloring and charm. That predisposition did not find its sustenance only in the atmosphere of sadness and mystery that hangs over the story of Salem; ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... severe the struggle for life generally is, the present volume graphically describes. Few will deny that such influences must have gravely affected the range and the association of individuals and species on the earth's surface. Mr. Darwin thinks that, acting upon an inherent predisposition to vary, they have sufficed even to modify the species themselves and produce the present diversity. Mr. Agassiz believes that they have not even affected the geographical range and the actual association of species, still less their forms; but that every adaptation ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... under health. The classification is somewhat arbitrary, but it will be understood. A man must consider himself as to his size, as to his strength, as to his endurance, as to his condition of body (which shows habits), as to his predisposition to health, as to disease, as to his moral health, as to his sobriety, as ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... breadth, which is already a sufficient ground for irreconcilable difference. Marlow who was lanky, loose, quietly composed in varied shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss, had a narrow, veiled glance, the neutral bearing and the secret irritability which go together with a predisposition to congestion of the liver. The other, compact, broad and sturdy of limb, seemed extremely full of sound organs functioning vigorously all the time in order to keep up the brilliance of his colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of his ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... voice of John Wickliffe began to make itself heard. The public mind of England was soon stirred to its inmost depths: and the influence of the new doctrines was soon felt, even in the distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long been a predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely assailed at once in England and in the German Empire, was in a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... go on collecting until the victualling is completed; she ceases to accumulate when that impulse is satisfied, irrespective of the result, which in this case happens to be worthless. No mental faculty, assisted by sight, informs her when she has enough, or when she has too little. An instinctive predisposition is her only guide, an infallible guide under normal conditions, but hopelessly lost when subjected to the wiles of the experimenter. Had the Bee the least glimmer of reason would she lay her egg on the third, on the tenth part of the necessary provender? Would she lay it in an empty cell? ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... the system, and conduces to beauty and symmetry of form. Scholars are more or less inclined to lean forward and place the elbow on the table or desk, for support and this is often done when their seats are provided with backs. Where there is a predisposition to curvature of the spine, no position is more unfavorable or more productive of deformities than this; for it is usually continued in one direction, and the apparent deformity it induces is a projection of the shoulders. If the girl is so feeble that she cannot sit erect, as represented ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... in leaden cisterns receive no sensible injury, yet the apparent salubrity must be ascribed to the great slowness of its operation, and the minuteness of the dose taken, the effects of which become modified by different causes and different constitutions, and according to the predisposition to diseases inherent in different individuals. The supposed security of the multitude who use the water with impunity, amounts to no more than presumption, in favour of any individual, which may or may not be ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... his grandmother, who happened to be on a visit to her son-in-law. The doctor said it was a kind of nondescript fever with cerebral and typhoid symptoms, to which young people not acclimatized to Marseilles were very liable on settling there. In Richard's case there had been a predisposition on account of the hard work he had gone through for the Agregation. He had looked as if he bore it easily while it lasted; but the strain had been more severe than he was aware of; and two years after his recovery he told me that ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... with no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... ghost had been met there. The same rule applies to the history of the past, and it is complicated by the great difference in different ages of the measure of probability, or, in other words, by the strong predisposition in certain stages of knowledge to accept statements or explanations of facts which in later stages we know to be incredible or in a high degree improbable. Few subjects in history are more difficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with the supernatural and the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... two leaves plucked from the same tree(2), so it may reasonably be presumed, that there are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the touch of the bystander evanescent, which may give to each individual a predisposition to rise to a supreme degree of excellence in some certain art or attainment, over ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... ago this predisposition for intellectual things would have made him sit with old people and learn their stories, but now boys like him turn to books and to papers in Irish that are sent ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... she exerts upon her members Look at this in its practical light. There is a family. God has given children to the parents. How fondly they cling to them, and look up to them for support and direction. They inherit from their parents a predisposition to evil or to good; they imitate them as their example, in all things, take their word as the law of life, and follow in their footsteps as the sure path to happiness. These parents are members of the church, and, as such, have dedicated their children to the Lord at the altar of baptism, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... predisposition to every species of crime and villainy, they were not likely to be improved or reclaimed by the example of the people with whom they were about to mix; nor was it probable that they would entertain much respect for laws which, from time immemorial, have principally ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... This predisposition has another effect upon the character of the legal profession and upon the general course of society. The English and American lawyers investigate what has been done; the French advocate inquires what should have been done: the former ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... docks,"—Aurora, lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,—"then Ben, then Joe, then—will you believe it?—Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had taken care of them all. I wasn't twenty-three when I was the last ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the divinity; the absolute manifestation of power—the reality of all the possible—and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity. The way to divinity—if the word "way" can be applied to what never leads to its end-is open to him ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... has never been proved. If there were such inheritances, they controlled and aided the first efforts to satisfy needs. Analogy makes it easy to assume that the ways of beasts had produced channels of habit and predisposition along which dexterities and other psycho-physical activities would run easily. Experiments with new born animals show that in the absence of any experience of the relation of means to ends, efforts to satisfy needs are clumsy and blundering. The ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... suffering bore always in a creature of a greatly higher family similar results, and that the hard buffets dealt him by fortune in the rough stream of life could be transmuted, by some blessed internal predisposition of his nature, into pearls of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... as his experiences change. In the two years following the publication of the first volume, Strindberg's experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive, active force ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... plain facts. There isn't, and there never has been, one word to say for it or any excuse, except morbid predisposition or self-inculcated inclination, to offer for swallowing it. Now go to your brewers, your wine merchants, your champagne touts, your fool undergraduates, your clubmen, your guzzling viveurs—and they'll all tell you the contrary. So will some physicians. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... is no astonishment there is that happening. To choose looking at the appetising ending is not a sign of predisposition. It does not defy accomplishment. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... Fothergill was man of business to the Duke of Omnium, who was the great owner of property in and about Silverbridge, and he was the most active magistrate in that part of the county. He was a sharp man, and not at all likely to have any predisposition in favour of a clergyman. The fifth was Dr Thorne, of Chaldicotes, a gentleman whose name has been already mentioned in these pages. He had been for many years a medical man practising in a little village in the further end of the county; but it had come to be his ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... to Cryptogamic Botany," it was proposed to unite them in one alliance, under the name of Mycetales, in the same manner as the late Dr. Lindley had united allied orders under alliances in his "Vegetable Kingdom;" but, beyond this, there was no predisposition towards the theory since propounded, and which, like all new theories, has collected a small but zealous circle of adherents. It will be necessary briefly to summarize this theory and the arguments by which it is supported ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... evil for evil's sake, removes conduct from the sphere of rational motive, as evinced in the ordinary course of human experience. Helvetius met this by contending that both in good and bad conduct men are influenced by their interest and not by mystic and innate predisposition either to good or to evil. He sought to bring morals and human conduct out of the region of arbitrary and superstitious assumption, into the sphere of observation. He thought he was pursuing a scientific, as opposed to a theological spirit, by placing interest at the foundation of conduct, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... human race, that we have never even been tempted to doubt it. In the eighth edition of the Popular Theology, (p. 144,) which has recently left the press, our views on this subject are thus summed up:— "The Augsburg Confession seems to combine, both these views, (i.e. both absence of holiness and predisposition to sin,) and the great body of Lutheran divines has regarded natural, or original, or innate depravity, as that disorder in the mental and bodily constitution of man, which was introduced by the fall of Adam, is transmitted by natural generation from parent to child, and the result of which is, ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... abnormal from hereditary predisposition, as e.g. the impulse to drink, but only through strengthening inhibition can these impulses be controlled,—their existence ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... to it are sold at this season." [94] We have little doubt that what the Chinese look for they see. We in the West characterize and colour objects which we behold, as we see them through the painted windows of our predisposition or prejudice. As a great novelist writes: "From the same object different conclusions are drawn; the most common externals of nature, the wind and the wave, the stars and the heavens, the very earth on which we tread, never excite in different bosoms the same ideas; and it is from our ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... life have stamped into his memory mechanism. A slum produces a mind which has only slum incidents with which to work, and a spoiled and protected child seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, simply because its past life has stored up no memory imprints from which a predisposition to vigorous life can be built. The particular things called the moral attributes of man's conduct are conventionally found by contrasting this educated and trained way of acting with the exigencies and social needs or dangers of the time. Hence, while his immoral ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... at large in an appendix to the present volume. In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness for alliteration, assonance, and even rhyme, in which natural predisposition we may trace the three degrees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to its culmination in the poetry of Pope. I would not be understood as questioning in these remarks that pious theory which supposes that children, if left entirely to themselves, would naturally discourse in Hebrew. ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Causes.—A predisposition: A peculiar sensitive area in the mucous membrane of the nose. An exciting cause circulating in the air, the dust or pollen of certain plants, such as rag-weed, hay and barley; the odor of certain flowers, such as roses and golden rod; ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the habit of biting large apples hastily—than an indication of scorn or juvenile superciliousness. The vulgar little boy is more remarkable for his obtrusive familiarity. It is my experience of his predisposition to this quality which has induced ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... particular death, if not actually more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined, locked back into a startling unity, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... philosophy of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... set out) Vertue appears founded only upon nice, or subtle Speculations. But some Men there are so far from approving of any Notion or Theorem being advanc'd with respect to Deists whereby, as such, they may be induc'd to the love of Vertue (which is the best predisposition to the entertainment of Christianity) that they are ready to treat as not being themselves Christians if not as Atheists, any one who in the view of gaining thus much upon these Men assert Vertue by any other Arguments than such as ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... the advanced stages of several contagious diseases. Some mineral poisons—such as iodin, arsenic, and phosphorus taken to excess—may cause hematuria, and finally the symptoms may be merely the result of a constitutional predisposition of the individual or family to bleeding. In some predisposed subjects, exposure of the body to cold or wet will ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... ancestral, their natural faith. A few earnest men may preach deism; the people will remain polytheists and pantheists for many generations. Then, again, the Sam[a]jas have to contend not only with the national predisposition, but with every heretical sect, and, besides these, with the orthodox church. But thus far their chief foe is, after all, their own heart as opposed to their head. As long as deistic leaders are ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... male; she is not less affectionate and faithful, and she is usually much cleaner in her habits in the house. If it is intended to breed by her, she should be very carefully chosen and proved to be free from any serious fault or predisposition to disease. Not only should her written pedigree be scrupulously scrutinised, but her own constitution and that of her parents on both sides should be ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... good and evil is found among persons of all classes and ages; and as this predisposition is especially strong at your age, when the sympathies are most tender, when the heart so candid and open is ready to receive and reciprocate those secret emanations that escape from the souls of loved ones; you require to take more than ordinary precautions, since ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... frequency. In Lord Londonderry it attracted notice for reasons of obvious personal interest, as well as its tragical catastrophe. But the complaint, though one of modern growth, is well known, and comes forward under a most determinate type as to symptoms, among the mercantile class. The original predisposition to it, lies permanently in the condition of London life, especially as it exists for public men. But the immediate existing cause, which fires the train always ready for explosion, is invariably some combination of perplexities, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... national astrologer. Again, in May 1870, when Saturn was stationary in the ascending degree, the Prince ought to have been injured by a horse, and also to have received a blow on the left side of the head, near the ear; but reprehensibly omitted both these ceremonies. A predisposition to fever and epileptic attacks was indicated by the condition of the House of Sickness. The newspapers described, a few years since, a serious attack of fever; but as most persons have some experience ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... however, with dysentery that the practitioner is most loth to cope,—a disease that betrays thousands of cattle. This, also, may be either acute or chronic. Its causes are too often buried in obscurity, and its premonitory symptoms are disregarded or unknown. There appears to be a strong predisposition in cattle to take on this disease. It seems to be the winding-up of many serious complaints, and the foundation of it is sometimes laid by those that appear to be of the most trifling nature. It is that in cattle which glanders ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... if he be not naturally possessed of a presentiment, or an apperception of a God, as the cause and reason of the universe. "If education be not already preceded by an innate consciousness of God, as an operative predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to act upon."[92] A mere verbal revelation can not communicate the knowledge of God, if man have not already the idea of a God in his mind. A name is a mere empty sign, a meaningless symbol, without a mental image of the object which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... lived kept him staunch to the principles of that system of the Church to which he had always belonged. Since his severance from Mr Newman, no one had had so strong an influence over him as the head of his college. During the time of his expected apostasy, Dr Gwynne had not felt much predisposition in favour of the young fellow. Though a High Churchman himself within moderate limits, Dr Gwynne felt no sympathy with men who could not satisfy their faiths with the Thirty-nine Articles. He regarded the enthusiasm ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to certain types of mood than are others. The organization of our nervous system which we get through heredity undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling tone into which we most easily fall. We call this predisposition temperament. On the effects of temperament, our ancestors must divide the responsibility with us. I say divide the responsibility, for even if we find ourselves predisposed toward a certain undesirable type of moods, there is no reason why we should give up to them. Even in spite of hereditary ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... intercourse may be far more congenial and profitable than where the teacher receives for hire all sorts of pupils as they are sent him by their guardians. Here be need only choose those who have a predisposition for what he is best able to teach; and, as I would have the so-called higher instruction as much diffused in this way as the lower, there would be a chance of awakening all the power that now ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sickness, for instance, or those of surgery, resulting from accident. And yet even there it does apply, for the condition of the mind may predispose to infection, and to recovery or collapse in the instance of the sufferer from injuries. But these questions of predisposition and consequence are too great to argue here, though even the most rule-of-thumb village practitioner, with a black draught in one hand and a pot of ointment in the other, will agree that they admit ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... above all, susceptible to personal vanity, she was not without ardent affections and keen sensibilities. Her marriage had been one of love,—that is to say, on her part, the ordinary love of girls, who love not through actual and natural feeling so much as forced predisposition. Her choice had fallen on one superior to herself in birth, and far above all, in person and address, whom she had habitually met. Thus her vanity had assisted her affection, and something strange and eccentric in the temper ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... weak logical faculties, wonderful imaginative sensibility with a complete absence of self-control, and other defective conformations of mind, supply the raw materials for a luminary of the second order, and imply a predisposition to certain faults, which are natural complements to the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... directly from one chamber to others, whether he took any, and what precautions. It is important to know that several women were exposed to infection derived from the patient, so that allowance may be made for want of predisposition. Now if of negative facts so sifted there could be accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of communication here recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are bound to guard and watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold, though the ninety and nine may be sure of escaping ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... dangerously, in spite of all the care of her mother, to the development of her imagination, in case indeed she possessed that terrible and fatal gift. She passed her days in unbroken solitude, or broken only by affections which softened her heart, and in a scene which itself might well promote any predisposition of the kind; beautiful and picturesque objects surrounded her on all sides; she wandered, at it were, in an enchanted wilderness, and watched the deer reposing under the green shadow of stately trees; the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... generally practised. No ordinary shoe, except a few devised for the purpose, such as the Charlier or the tip, allows the frog to come in contact with the ground. This we take to be the main factor in the causation of contracted heels, especially with a predisposition already present in the foot itself. In the words of Lungwitz: 'Regarded from this point of view, there is no greater evil than shoeing. It abolishes the necessary counter-pressure, and thus interferes with expansion. Bars, sole, and frog cannot ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... are native in some by spiritual or hereditary succession, which fact is evident from their genitures as interpreted by astrology. Many planets in flexed signs and a satellitium in the nadir or lower angle of the horoscope is a certain indication of extreme nervous sensibility and predisposition to telaesthenic impressions, though this observation does not cover all the instances before me. It is true, however, where it applies. The dominant influence of the planet Neptune in a horoscope is also to be regarded ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... but it spread in popular usage until it was regarded as generally descriptive of any business so large that it affected the course of the whole trade of which it was a part. The logical outcome of the trust was monopoly, and trusts appeared first in those industries in which there existed a predisposition to monopoly, an excessive loss through competition, or a ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... victims of this kind of predisposition, are females of the middle and higher ranks, especially those of a nervous constitution and good natural abilities; but who, from an ill-directed education, possess nothing more solid than mere accomplishments, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... expected great pecuniary assistance from those resident near the establishment, and more directly interested in its prosperity. They would as soon as possible establish a system of collegiate education, and there was a predisposition to engraft upon the College the well-known and respectable Medical Institution now in existence in the city. The door of the building was at length open, and it was the duty of all to proceed with vigour. They ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably associated ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the great thoroughfares, they are often narrow and in a way ill kept, but this is due more to their confined area than to any carelessness or predisposition on the part of the authorities ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... me of my sleep. What undertaking can have brought him to Paris? It was not to meet me that he came, for he was ignorant of my journey. This young man terrifies me, my lord; there lies in him a sanguinary predisposition." ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... strong predisposition on the part of the Jamaica planters to defraud their labourers of their wages. They hoped that by yielding, before they were driven quite to the last extremity, by the tide of public sentiment in England, they should escape from all ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... this is of the utmost possible importance, that the value of this type does not consist in the mere shutting of the ornament into a certain space, but in the acknowledgment by the ornament of the fitness of the limitation—of its own perfect willingness to submit to it; nay, of a predisposition in itself to fall into the ordained form, without any direct expression of the command to do so; an anticipation of the authority, and an instant and willing submission to it, in every fibre and spray: not merely willing, but ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... was to displace its gods. "It was more than a mere worldly impulse," says a famous northern divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek, like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonderful facility with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... things being equal, is not half as likely to compromise his character as one who approximates to shabbiness. Lawrence Sterne used to say that when he felt himself giving way to low spirits and a sense of depression and worthlessness,— a sort of predisposition for all sorts of little meannesses,—he forthwith shaved himself, brushed his wig, donned his best dress and his gold rings, and thus put to flight the azure demons of his unfortunate temperament. There is somehow ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... children of those who use it freely, a predisposition to intemperance, insanity, and various diseases of both body and mind, which, if the cause is continued, becomes hereditary, and is transmitted from generation to generation; occasioning a diminution of size, strength, and energy, a feebleness of vision, a feebleness ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... his return with impatience. With this doubt insinuated by Jack, it began to seem almost incredible that Olivia's exquisitely healthy frame should have succumbed suddenly under a malady to which she had no predisposition whatever. Moreover, her original soundness of constitution had been strengthened by ten months' residence in the pure, bracing air of Sark. Yet what was I to think in face of those undated documents, and of her own short letter to her husband? The one I knew ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... has not been recorded. Enough that half an hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other evidence of mental and moral disturbance. His cordiality and oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress in the doorway, who waved to him a silent but half ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... but Gaetano compensated for all his horse-driving brethren. To be sure, vettura driving is not like cabbing, and Gaetano was in the habit of getting out often and walking up the hills, thus exercising his liver. But he must have been born with a strong predisposition to goodness, which he ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... intellect that was invigorated but not enslaved by knowledge; and to contemplate the systems of the past, without being dazzled by the reverence that had surrounded them. He was the first great representative of the modern secular and rationalistic spirit. The strong predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... life is culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. There may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity. He is ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... disposition to act: otherwise one will do anything from anything, quidvis ex quovis, and there will be nothing too absurd for us to imagine. But this disposition will have already broken the charm of mere indifference, and if the soul gives itself this disposition there must needs be another predisposition for this act of giving it. Consequently, however far back one may go, one will never meet with a mere indifference in the soul towards the actions which it is to perform. It is true that these dispositions incline ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... much like a slap in the face. With every possible predisposition to look favorably on its teachings, I was unable to find anything in them but the prejudiced judgments of a one-sided thinker, fond of brilliant general propositions which really had nothing serious to rest upon either in fact or reason. The following ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... rhapsodist talking interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... prisons were found too small to contain them. A girl named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac and subject to fits, imagined that an old Irish woman, named Glover, had bewitched her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was apparently a predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were so stiff that they could not be moved; while at others, said the neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones appeared ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... charmingly ingenuous, unsophisticated girl, frank and open as the day; furthermore, she had been so long accustomed to hear Jack spoken of admiringly by Carlos that she had insensibly acquired a strong predisposition in his favour; and, finally, and quite contrary to rule, when at length she met him in the flesh she instantly decided that this stalwart, handsome young Englishman was all that Carlos had represented him ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... is ablaze, and it's a serious matter to stop it. Now, in our case, we've only the little kindling corner to smother, and the New Mexico air is water and blanket—a whole fire department, if need be. The doctor assures me that with mother's good constitution, and the absence of any hereditary predisposition to this sort of thing, we've only to give her the ten or twelve months of rest and reenforcement—the winter in New Mexico, the summer in Colorado—to nip the whole thing in the bud. I believe him, and you must believe him—and me. More than all, you must not show the slightest change of front ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... take note that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to fatness, leanness, boniness, muscularity and nervousness, and this predisposition is so much a part of the warp and woof of the individual that he can not disguise it. The urge given him by this inborn mechanism is so strong as to be practically irresistible. Every experience of his life calls forth ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Pedro, or Incarnacion's implied suspicions that Pedro was concerned in Peyton's death, than of this sentimental possibility. He knew that Pedro had been hated by the others on account of his position; he knew the instinctive jealousies of the race and their predisposition to extravagant misconstruction. From what he had gathered, and particularly from the voices he had overheard on the Fair Plains Road, it seemed to him that Pedro was more capable of mercenary intrigue than physical revenge. He was not aware of the irrevocable affront put upon Pedro by Peyton, and ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Othello and Posthumus is an error of judgment, in Leontes is a vice of the blood; he suspects without cause, condemns without proof; he is without excuse—unless the mixture of pride, passion, and imagination, and the predisposition to jealousy with which Shakspeare has portrayed him, be considered as an excuse. Hermione has been openly insulted: he to whom she gave herself, her heart, her soul, has stooped to the weakness and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... present channels. The strong emotions of the mind are not to be turned off and on, to this subject and to that. If you begin early with a human being, you may impress a particular direction upon the feelings, you may even cross a natural tendency, and work up a taste on a small basis of predisposition. Place any youth in the midst of artists, and you may induce a taste for art that shall at length be decided and strong. But if you were to take the same person in middle life and immure him in a laboratory, that he might become an enthusiastic chemist, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... exposition of the phases of the eye explains everything. A small eye is a sign of strength; a large eye is a sign of languor. A small oblique eye (the Chinese eye), when associated with lateral development of the cranium, and ears drawn back, indicates a predisposition to murder. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... their children, who can affect surprise if they develop licentious tendencies? Are not such parents largely to blame? Are they not criminals in a high degree? Have they not fouled their own nest, and transmitted to their children predisposition to ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... insane before he wrote it," said the young marchioness: "only insanity could excuse such presumption. Men don't go mad from disappointed love, or women either, I believe, unless there's a predisposition to madness. He must have had that, and any other accident in his life would have brought it out as well as his foolish fancy for me. If he had been thrown from his gig, or had two or three of his patients die on his hands at once, the effect would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... human beings, the pure thyroid type is easily distinguished from the pure adrenal type, and both of these from the pure pituitary type. Each is stamped with a significant figure, height, skin, hair, temperament, ambition, social reactions and predisposition to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... produce in one class of cases mental disorders, and not in another, indicates either that some predisposition to these disorders existed, or that the habit of self-pollution was merely an expression of mental alienation (insanity). The images which pervade the minds of boys possessed of the highly-developed ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... trouble." Long after we had known Charlie his mother began to fail. She too had consumption. Family parties were planned for 290 families. Weights were taken and careful examination made, the physician explaining that predisposition means defective lung capacity or deficient vitality. Of 379 members, supposedly free from tuberculosis, sixteen were found to have well-marked cases. (Of twenty Boston children whose parents were in a tuberculosis class, four had tuberculosis.) In one instance the father was astonished to learn ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... determination, can become a competent journalist of sorts if she chooses to put herself into hard training for a year or two—and this irrespective of natural bent. Yet even so, I would recommend you, unless you are assured of a genuine predisposition towards it, to find another and less exhausting, less disappointing occupation than journalism. For it will surely prove both exhausting and disappointing to those whose hearts are ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... will wear clothing that they know tends to break down their health; tight corsets that compress the lungs and spoil the natural shape of the body; tight shoes that interfere with the circulation of blood, and make their noses and hands red, and give them predisposition to colds and coughs and nervous headaches, all of which put to severe tests the patience and affection of those around them. Good health is always attractive; ill-health, invalidism, nervousness, are very ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... the presence of the Shechinah, and it would not be respectful so to do anywhere but in the open air. It depends very much upon circumstances when and where the new moon is to be consecrated, and also upon one's own predisposition, for authorities differ. We will close these remarks with the conclusion of the Kitzur Sh'lu on the subject, which, at p. 72, col. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing—more nauseous than any physic. Even now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its "kick." And ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... dead. Besides, though Frederick was constantly revolving the dream in his soul and kept recalling Hamlet's words, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he did not want to strengthen Mrs. Liebling's superstition, which showed itself in a predisposition ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... M. Maury is the first to allow that there is a fundamental opposition between the Biblical tradition and the legend of Brahminical India or of Hesiod. In this last, as he himself remarks, we see "no trace of a predisposition to sin transmitted by inheritance from the first man to his descendants, no vestige ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... found ourselves in forms of society not in harmony with our religious views, we were accustomed, in various ways, to meet with a similar predisposition. As a psychological study this has always interested me, just as one is interested in the attitude of mind exhibited by the Old School physician towards the Homoeopathist with whom he graduated at the Harvard Medical School. Possibly that graduate ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... interior of the hills, and its outer facade continued almost without term along their flanks—the solid mass of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props instead of columns. Hence the predisposition to attempt in the built temple the expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous architrave above the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... much of temperaments, but without sufficient precision. By temperament of the system should be meant a permanent predisposition to certain classes of diseases: without this definition a temporary predisposition to every distinct malady might be termed a temperament. There are four kinds of constitution, which permanently deviate from good health, and are perhaps sufficiently marked ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... collective. Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing progress we see now making in the externals of life. We must first free our bodies from disease and predisposition to disease. We must perfect these bodies and make them fine instruments of the mind and the spirit. Only thus, when the body becomes an aid instead of a hindrance to human expression may we attain any ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... universe"—a perception which, in his case, was accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus grasped the notion that the whole universe is one spirit, he absorbed from Plato a theory which accorded perfectly with his predisposition—the theory that all the good and beautiful things that we love on earth are partial manifestations of an absolute beauty or goodness, which exists eternal and unchanging, and from which everything that becomes and ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... human race, for it supposes a predisposition for food, for the place of meeting, ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... sort; and Ernest was even now trying to follow in his brother's steps, in this particular. Only the youngest boy, Ronald, still remained quite unprovided for. Ronald was a tall, pale, gentle, weakly, enthusiastic young fellow of nineteen, with so marked a predisposition to lung disease that it had not been thought well to let him run the chance of over-reading himself; and so he had to be content with remaining at home in the uncongenial atmosphere of Epsilon Terrace, instead of joining his two elder ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the inheritance of disease as such there is little room for misunderstanding: no biologist now believes a disease is actually handed down from parent to child in the germ-plasm. But what the doctors call a diathesis, a predisposition to some given disease, is most certainly heritable—a fact which Karl Pearson and others have proved by statistics that can not be given here.[58] And any individual who has inherited this diathesis, this lack of resistance to a given disease, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... because she does not wish to live. People who write novels call it dying of a broken heart; but it does not make much difference about the name. Your child is acutely sensitive, and has an extremely delicate constitution—predisposition to consumption. Separation from the young man she desires to marry has prostrated her to such an extent that she is practically dying. Under existing circumstances she will not live two months, and, to be brutally frank, you will have killed her. I understand that the young man ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Napoleon quickly observed this peculiar predisposition to a military life in his subjects, and took advantage of it to fool them to the top of their bent. The victories achieved beneath his banner reflect scarcely less honour on them than on him, and the memory of them associates his name in their hearts by the strongest bonds of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... of derangement of mind while I knew him; but he inherited from his grandmother a predisposition to insanity, which I apprehended might become developed by any very strong feelings of excitement; and I urged him to return and settle at Sirdhanah, when he had seen all he wished to see ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... rare, usually hereditary, disease or condition, characterized by the formation of vesicles and blebs on any part subjected to slight rubbing or irritation. No scarring is left, and no pigmentation noted. The predisposition to these lesions persists indefinitely. The general health is not involved. The nature ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... which is her present condition. And now we have to give an outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do, which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural predisposition, to duty, to service. There she displayed that acceptance of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a masculine habit of thinking. But she brought to the achievement of this determination ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... character, so far as possible. The messenger of the kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to be, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is, predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in the house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If ye have judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The less Christ's messengers ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... them, in cannon-shot at last, and convince them that they ought to trade? 'Hostile tariffs' will arise to shut us out, and then, again, will fall, to let us in; but the sons of England—speakers of the English language, were it nothing more—will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition to trade with England. Mycale was the Pan-Ionian—rendezvous of all the tribes of Ion—for old Greece; why should not London long continue the All Saxon Home, rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,' arriving, in select samples, from ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... more before I leave this aspect of the subject. As the majority of inebriates are sufferers from a disease which is partly the result of hereditary predisposition, it is foolish for any woman to marry a drunkard in the belief that she can reform him. If women would realize that alcoholism is a disease and not a vice, they would understand that, while the spirit which prompts their devotion and self-sacrifice is ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... dispositions unfriendly, both on one side and on the other, to a fair discussion and accurate judgment of its merits. In some, it has been too evident from their own publications, that they have scanned the proposed Constitution, not only with a predisposition to censure, but with a predetermination to condemn; as the language held by others betrays an opposite predetermination or bias, which must render their opinions also of little moment in the question. In placing, however, these different characters on a level, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... class of persons who are summoned to the enjoyments of taste by a physical and organic predisposition. I have always believed in physiognomy and phrenology. Men have inborn tendencies; and since there are some who come into the world seeing, hearing, and walking badly, because they are short-sighted, deaf, or crippled, why should there not be others who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... new state. And the answer is, that we are to fear God, and honour our parents, and to cultivate virtue and justice; these are to be our first principles. Laws must be definite, and we should create in the citizens a predisposition to obey them. The legislator will teach as well as command; and with this view he will prefix preambles to his ...
— Laws • Plato
... There was a sinister droop to the eyelids, a suggestion of cruelty about the mouth; but there was more of good-nature and passive strength than either in the general expression. One could see that some genial influence had dominated what was inherently cruel and sinister in him. Still the sinister predisposition was there. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... power of our wits to explain; but that is only to say our wits are limited. I hold, however, that very few things happen which do not yield an explanation, sooner or later, if approached by those best trained to examine them without predisposition or prejudice. And I earnestly hope that this tragic business will give ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... hear it said: "I exercise daily in the open air. I take cold baths, in order to overcome a predisposition to 220:3 take cold; and yet I have continual colds, catarrh, and cough." Such admissions ought to open people's eyes to the inefficacy of material hygiene, 220:6 and induce sufferers to look in other ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... known. Some suspicion of the worthlessness of her lover, some enlightenment as to his perfidy, or his unaccountable disappearance alone, may have occasioned its manifestation. But there is great reason to believe that she had a natural predisposition to it. And having never been taught to provide for her own mental sustenance, and so nourish a necessary independence, she had been too ready to squander the wealth of a rich and lovely nature upon an unworthy person, and the reaction had been madness and death. But anything ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... particles of which chipped off and mingled with what you drank. These particles were hard and sharp, like pure glass, and they cut and lodged in the intestines, causing, with other things, an excessive predisposition to appendicitis—a frequent disease in the penitentiary. This was also promoted by the bread, which was made of the poorest grade of white flour, without nourishing quality, the value per loaf being about two cents; the flour was ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... duties. The children would be pleased to be able to render their new instructor some service, and would go to the school-room on the next morning with a feeling of acquaintance with him, and a predisposition to be pleased. And if by chance any family should be thus called upon that had heretofore been captious or complaining, or disposed to be jealous of the higher importance or influence of other families, that spirit would be entirely softened and ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... her predisposition to be pleased, the prospect was depressing. The season was late and patches of discolored snow lay here and there, and were piled up along the fences. The garden and trees had a neglected look. The vines that clambered up the porch had been untrimmed of the last year's growth, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... ascribed by many to a deadly potion administered in his medicine. The death of Charles the Second could scarcely fail to occasion similar rumours. The public ear had been repeatedly abused by stories of Popish plots against his life. There was, therefore, in many minds, a strong predisposition to suspicion; and there were some unlucky circumstances which, to minds so predisposed, might seem to indicate that a crime had been perpetrated. The fourteen Doctors who deliberated on the King's ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... varied preliminary symptoms of melancholy, mania, paralysis, ideas of persecution, etc., etc., are developing. As to the question of responsibility, each case is either more or less doubtful, and can only be tested on its separate merits. There is, however, abundant evidence to prove that this predisposition to inebriety, even after long indulgence, can, by a skillful process of medication, accompanied by either voluntary or compulsory restraint, be subdued; and the counterbalancing physical and mental powers can at the same time be so strengthened and invigorated as in the future ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... insanity, even when no other etiological element could be found, and alcohol had to be looked upon as the sole cause of the mental disease. Maudsley laid especial stress upon the observation, that intemperance, without hereditary predisposition, was one of the most powerful agencies in the production of aberration of the mind. Even Beckwith, who could not coincide with others as to the great importance of intemperance as an etiological element, says distinctly, that intemperance was, by far, the most potent of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... tendency; aptness, aptitude; proneness, proclivity, bent, turn, tone, bias, set, leaning to, predisposition, inclination, propensity, susceptibility; conatus[Lat], nisus[Lat]; liability &c. 177; quality, nature, temperament; idiocrasy[obs3], idiosyncrasy; cast, vein, grain; humor, mood; drift &c. (direction) 278; conduciveness, conducement[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... restrained by his profound piety. Next to his devotion, Glastonbury was remarkable for his taste. The magnificent temples in which the mysteries of the Deity and saints he worshipped were celebrated developed the latent predisposition for the beautiful which became almost the master sentiment of his life. In the inspired and inspiring paintings that crowned the altars of the churches and the cathedrals in which he ministered, Glastonbury first studied art; and it was as he glided along the solemn shade of those ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... concluding peremptory psalm struck up. Show over by one."—In this sportive strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider the subject as a jest. But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention the solution which the Gravedigger in Hamlet gives of his fellow-workman's ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... her at this social function or at that, and was glad that she should go. Men would say, "There's a catch for you—old Gessner's daughter; he must be worth a million if he's worth a penny." Her culpable predisposition toward that pleasant and smooth-tongued rascal, Willy Forrest, annoyed him for the time being but was soon forgotten. He believed that the man would not dare to carry pursuit farther, and if he did, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... my students I find that a spirit of unselfish devotion and a desire to be of assistance are likely to be uppermost. That is to say, I sustain towards my students an attitude of helpfulness, a predisposition to react towards them in such a way that their interests may be furthered. In fact, I find that we all take particular attitudes towards the people we know and towards every task of our lives. These attitudes are very significant, and yet they are often developed ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of Strasburg, and became Abbot of Noirmoutiers and La Chaise. He led a gay, luxurious, and extravagant life rather than performed his clerical duties; he had political ambitions, but he was never able to overcome the predisposition against him with which Marie Antoinette had come to France. He was a dupe of Cagliostro, and of Mme. de Lamotte-Valois, the adventuress who, in 1782, drew him into the intrigue of the diamond necklace, for which he was sent to the Bastille, and which gave him the name of le cardinal ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... sphere of morality. By statistic methods of sociology the social problems of immorality and crime have been opened up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their surroundings. Morel's theories concerning degeneration and the resulting theories of Lombroso concerning criminals have undoubtedly brought light into this chaos, wherein opinion as to human goodness and wickedness was ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. Iago's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him; they do not correspond with ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... and convince them that they ought to trade? 'Hostile tariffs' will arise to shut us out, and then, again, will fall, to let us in; but the sons of England—speakers of the English language, were it nothing more—will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition to trade with England. Mycale was the Pan-Ionian—rendezvous of all the tribes of Ion—for old Greece; why should not London long continue the All Saxon Home, rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,' arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... shall have in the international circle raised moral considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to close the eyes to the entire problem ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... secret meeting with Pedro, or Incarnacion's implied suspicions that Pedro was concerned in Peyton's death, than of this sentimental possibility. He knew that Pedro had been hated by the others on account of his position; he knew the instinctive jealousies of the race and their predisposition to extravagant misconstruction. From what he had gathered, and particularly from the voices he had overheard on the Fair Plains Road, it seemed to him that Pedro was more capable of mercenary intrigue than physical revenge. He was not aware of the irrevocable affront put ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... susceptibility to the action of strychnia or of narcotics, the explanation must of necessity, for the present, be more or less speculative. But how are we to account, even in the way of speculation, for the peculiar immunity, lack of predisposition and hereditary tendencies to disease exhibited by the Hebrew, who, since the history of the world, has been a civilized and rational being,—even for decades of centuries before the civilization of Europe? Living under the same forms of government, climate, and shelter, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... beneficial, especially when it leads one into the fresh air, the sunshine, and the country. A particular kind of exercise is to be recommended for those whose chests are narrow, whose shoulders stoop, and who have a hereditary predisposition to consumption. If it is systematically practised along with other means of health, we would guarantee any child, no matter how many relatives have died of this disease, against its invasion. It is voluntary inspiration. Nothing ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... problems of immorality and crime have been opened up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their surroundings. Morel's theories concerning degeneration and the resulting theories of Lombroso concerning criminals have undoubtedly brought light into this chaos, wherein ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... predispositions influence very strongly the early formation of habits of thought. But the fact remains that the character is built by long-continued habits of thought. If the mature edifice of character usually shows in an exaggerated form the peculiarities of the original predisposition, this merely indicates a probability that the slow erection of the edifice has proceeded at haphazard, and that reason has not presided over it. A child may be born with a tendency to bent shoulders. If nothing is done, if on the contrary ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... higher intuitions called by the collective name of conscience gradually and later in life. They first take the form of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble, and that the sense of obligation needs the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of human nature, the book is peculiarly rich in material. The career of David and still more that of Saul—David with his weakness and his magnanimity, and Saul, a noble character, ruined by jealousy and failure combined working upon a predisposition to melancholy—present a most fascinating psychological study. The ethical interest, too, though seldom obtruded, is always present. In the parable of Nathan, it receives direct and dramatic expression; but the whole story of David's reign is haunted by a ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... because she had been hypnotized. In none of these cases, however, was there any really satisfactory evidence that hypnotism existed. In all the cases reported there seemed to be no doubt of the weak character and predisposition to crime. In another class of cases, namely those of criminal assault upon girls and women, the only evidence ever adduced that the injured person was hypnotized was the statement of that person, which cannot really be called evidence ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... 'That where one side is doubtful and one is safe, we are as morally bound to take the safe side as if a voice from heaven said, "This is the way, walk ye in it."' And is not total abstinence the only safe side for the abstainer himself? Some men have a strong predisposition for intoxicating drinks, and they must abstain or be ruined. Naturalists tell us that in order to tame a tiger he must never be allowed to taste blood. Let him have but one taste and his whole nature is changed. And the men to whom I refer are humane, upright, chaste, kind to their children and ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing—more nauseous than any physic. Even now I ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... far as possible. The messenger of the kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to be, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is, predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in the house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If ye have judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The less Christ's messengers ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... enters prominently. The audience, at first in a passive state, must be awakened, and taken on with the speaker. Probably it must be instructed, perhaps amused. The speaker must make his own occasion. He has no help from the circumstance of predisposition among his auditors. He must compel, or he must win; he must charm or thrill; or he must do each in turn. Animation, force, beauty, dramatic contrast, vividness, variety, are the qualities that will more or less serve, according to the style of the composition. Aptness in the story or anecdote, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... "merit." Considering the common teaching of theologians that the angels were endowed with grace according to the measure of their natural perfection,(435) we may well suppose that man receives grace likewise according to his natural constitution (gratia sequitur naturam)—a predisposition or aptitude which God ordained in His infinite wisdom to be the instrument through which His graces should operate either for personal sanctification or ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... of literature prove fruitful in other fields. If Puritanism was thus infertile, it nevertheless prepared the soil. It impressed upon New England the stamp of the mind; the entire community was by its means intellectually as well as morally bred; and to its training and the predisposition it established in the genius of the people may be ascribed the respect for the book which has always characterized that section, the serious temper and elevation of its later literature and the spiritual quality of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... notice for reasons of obvious personal interest, as well as its tragical catastrophe. But the complaint, though one of modern growth, is well known, and comes forward under a most determinate type as to symptoms, among the mercantile class. The original predisposition to it, lies permanently in the condition of London life, especially as it exists for public men. But the immediate existing cause, which fires the train always ready for explosion, is invariably some combination of perplexities, such as are continually gathering into dark ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... two exceptions to this, however, one being the case of a child with a physical defect in the organs of speech and the other that of a child who has inherited from the parents a predisposition to stammer or stutter. These exceptions, however, are so rare as to hardly require consideration. In the first (that of a physical defect) it is hardly probable that an organic defect would manifest itself in ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... his conscience upon that score. He heard of her at this social function or at that, and was glad that she should go. Men would say, "There's a catch for you—old Gessner's daughter; he must be worth a million if he's worth a penny." Her culpable predisposition toward that pleasant and smooth-tongued rascal, Willy Forrest, annoyed him for the time being but was soon forgotten. He believed that the man would not dare to carry pursuit farther, and if he did, the remedy must ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... the consultation was over, not one of the doctors gave me the least hope; they all believe that Louise will die with the fall of the leaves. The dear child's constitution has wonderfully helped the success of her plan. It seems she has a predisposition to this complaint; and though, in the ordinary course, she might have lived a long time, a few days' folly has made the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... time that I began to gather the true source and import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the temperaments and experiences (more especially ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... ancestral energies which have been associated by the conjugation of the two procreative germs. In such a case it is comparatively easy to prove that this is a pathological symptom independent of the will of the individual. But a continuous series of degrees in the intensity of a hereditary predisposition to a certain sexual anomaly, or to other anomalies or peculiarities apt to provoke this anomaly, insensibly connects the purely hereditary pathological appetite with that which is simply the effect of acquired vicious habits. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... its own end, and announcing the advent of a system which was to displace its gods. "It was more than a mere worldly impulse," says a famous northern divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek, like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonderful facility with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of these American writers have been quoted. In regard to hereditary transmission, Dr. Caldwell observes: "Every constitutional quality, whether good or bad, may descend, by inheritance, from parent to child. And a long-continued habit of drunkenness becomes as essentially constitutional as a predisposition to gout or pulmonary consumption. This increases, in a manifold degree, the responsibility of parents in relation to temperance. By habits of intemperance, they not only degrade and ruin themselves, but ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... possess, therefore, in the creative power of generous hope, a preparation for illusory and exaggerated admiration of the age in which he lives: and this predisposition will meet with many favouring circumstances, when he has grown up under a system of education like ours, which (as perhaps all education must that is placed in the hands of a distinct and embodied class, who therefore bring to it the peculiar and hereditary prejudices of their order) has ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in earlier days the backbone of committees, and the leading exponent of the godly activities of St. Matthew's. She was regarded by the heretofore rulers of these various provinces with a mixture of respect, contempt, and apprehension. She was an incalculable force, with a predisposition towards novelty, and novelty, especially if founded on theory, is abhorrent to such as old Johnny Galvin the steward, or Peter Flood the gardener, or, stiffest in her own conceit of all, Mrs. Twomey ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... it. It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... more predisposed to certain types of mood than are others. The organization of our nervous system which we get through heredity undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling tone into which we most easily fall. We call this predisposition temperament. On the effects of temperament, our ancestors must divide the responsibility with us. I say divide the responsibility, for even if we find ourselves predisposed toward a certain undesirable type of moods, there is no reason why we should give up to them. Even in spite of hereditary ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... noted circumstances which point to a direct transmission from parent to child of a predisposition to melancholia. In Heine's, on the other hand, the question of heredity has apparently only an indirect bearing upon his Weltschmerz. To what extent was his long and terrible disease of hereditary origin, and in what measure may we ascribe his Weltschmerz ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... affections of the brain, as fever and hydrocephalus, nausea and vomiting are almost never-failing symptoms. It is not denied, that headach may be produced through the medium of the stomach; but seldom, unless there is previously disease in the head, or at least a strong predisposition to it. In persons habitually subject to headach, the arteries of the brain become so irritable, that the slightest cause of disturbance, either mental or bodily, will suffice to bring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... air, being among the most frequent causes of the complaint, it is necessary, as far as possible, to counteract them. Should a strong predisposition to cholera be suspected, the best plan will be to send the child into the country during the summer. Both as a preventive and a remedy, country air is decidedly the most effectual, to which we can resort. But in most instances, it would be exceedingly inconvenient, sometimes impossible ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed—in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... worthlessness of her lover, some enlightenment as to his perfidy, or his unaccountable disappearance alone, may have occasioned its manifestation. But there is great reason to believe that she had a natural predisposition to it. And having never been taught to provide for her own mental sustenance, and so nourish a necessary independence, she had been too ready to squander the wealth of a rich and lovely nature upon an unworthy person, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... arising from Gerald's recent immersion was a sense of pain in that part of his arm which had been bitten by the rattle snake, on the day of the pic-nic to Hog Island, and it chanced that this morning especially it had a good deal annoyed him, evincing some slight predisposition to inflammation. To subdue this, Henry applied, with his own hand, a liniment which had been recommended, and took occasion, when he had finished, to remark on the devotedness and fearlessness Miss Montgomerie had manifested ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... won't say that just yet, Sir James; we must see. And we must guard against any undue predisposition to consider the robberies in a lump. Here we are at the lodge gate again. Is that your gardener—the man who left the ladder by the lawn on the first occasion you ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... divinity; the absolute manifestation of power—the reality of all the possible—and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity. The way to divinity—if the word "way" can be applied to what never leads to its end—is open to him in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to seed as the strolling manager of a caravan of tumblers; and it is not improbable that Sidonia would have secured his services, even if he had not become acquainted with the Baroni family. But they charmed him. In every member of it he recognised character, and a predisposition which might even be genius. He resolved that every one of them ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... indignation as often as I recur to it; and in Professor Wilson, I have long satisfied myself that it takes its rise from a more comprehensive weakness, the greatest in fact which besets his mind, viz. a general tendency to bend to the prevailing opinion of the world, and a constitutional predisposition, to sympathise with power and whatsoever is triumphant. Hence, I could not but regret most poignantly the capital opportunity I had forfeited of throwing in a deep and stinging sarcasm at his idol, just ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... were found too small to contain them. A girl named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac and subject to fits, imagined that an old Irish woman, named Glover, had bewitched her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was apparently a predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were so stiff that they could not be moved; while at others, said the neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones appeared softened into sinews. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... accumulate when that impulse is satisfied, irrespective of the result, which in this case happens to be worthless. No mental faculty, assisted by sight, informs her when she has enough, or when she has too little. An instinctive predisposition is her only guide, an infallible guide under normal conditions, but hopelessly lost when subjected to the wiles of the experimenter. Had the Bee the least glimmer of reason would she lay her egg ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... described already resides in heaven for a century of Kalpas with the unexhausted remnant of his past acts (to be exhausted by enjoyment or endurance as the case may be), and with the seven (viz., the five senses of knowledge and mind and understanding) purged of all stains in consequence of their predisposition or proneness towards the attribute of Sattwa. At the expiry of that period, such a person has to come to the world of men where he attains to great eminence.[1379] Turning back from the world of men, he departs for attaining to new forms of existence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... excite dispositions unfriendly, both on one side and on the other, to a fair discussion and accurate judgment of its merits. In some, it has been too evident from their own publications, that they have scanned the proposed Constitution, not only with a predisposition to censure, but with a predetermination to condemn; as the language held by others betrays an opposite predetermination or bias, which must render their opinions also of little moment in the question. In placing, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... occurrence of bloody urine in the advanced stages of several contagious diseases. Some mineral poisons—such as iodin, arsenic, and phosphorus taken to excess—may cause hematuria, and finally the symptoms may be merely the result of a constitutional predisposition of the individual or family to bleeding. In some predisposed subjects, exposure of the body to cold or wet will ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... light. One can see the rhapsodist talking interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man, with ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... disorders occur ten times as frequently in prison as in freedom. The criminal, who in most instances is already burdened with a more or less strong predisposition to mental disorder, upon being placed in prison finds himself at once in a most favorable environment for a mental breakdown. It is true, imprisonment acts more deleteriously upon the psyche of the criminal by passion, the accidental criminal, but even the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... which Lombroso describes as typical. Manouvrier regards the social life of a person from childhood as being the most important factor in moulding character. He emphatically denies that there is in the embryo a predisposition to crime. Dr Magnan likewise refuses ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... and evil is found among persons of all classes and ages; and as this predisposition is especially strong at your age, when the sympathies are most tender, when the heart so candid and open is ready to receive and reciprocate those secret emanations that escape from the souls of loved ones; you require to take more than ordinary precautions, since ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... blue eyes. The poor lad went to her and kissed her, and she clung to him. For the first time Tom thought of his father with some reproach. His natural inclination to blame, hitherto kept entirely in abeyance toward his father by the predisposition to think him always right, simply on the ground that he was Tom Tulliver's father, was turned into this new channel by his mother's plaints; and with his indignation against Wakem there began to mingle some indignation ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who have sold goods ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... and severe the struggle for life generally is, the present volume graphically describes. Few will deny that such influences must have gravely affected the range and the association of individuals and species on the earth's surface. Mr. Darwin thinks that, acting upon an inherent predisposition to vary, they have sufficed even to modify the species themselves and produce the present diversity. Mr. Agassiz believes that they have not even affected the geographical range and the actual association of species, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... felt myself dishonoured, if not actually disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a "personal emotion" ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... would increase the number of defective children, for the method chosen could hardly be expected to discern all the seriously neurotic children. The information gathered indicates that epilepsy and the neurotic predisposition to insanity need to be investigated as well as amentia,[5] and that the epileptics and neurotics, even among rural children, are more numerous than is usually supposed. Of course an investigation of the adults would still more increase ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... immediate consequences of the mistakes it might commit in international politics. For every continental people in Europe is in some measure dependent on the good-will of the United States, and therefore anxious to deserve it by cultivating the most friendly relations with its chief. This predisposition on the part of his wards was an asset that could have been put to good account. It was a guaranty of a measure of success which would have satisfied a generous ambition; it would have enabled him to effect ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... those of surgery, resulting from accident. And yet even there it does apply, for the condition of the mind may predispose to infection, and to recovery or collapse in the instance of the sufferer from injuries. But these questions of predisposition and consequence are too great to argue here, though even the most rule-of-thumb village practitioner, with a black draught in one hand and a pot of ointment in the other, will agree that they admit of a ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... typical English country girl, strictly tailor-made in her appearance, with a predisposition towards stiff linen collars and neat ties. In figure she was slight almost to boyishness and she had no pretensions whatever to good looks, but there was nevertheless something frank and wholesome and sweet about her—something of the charm of a nice boy—that counterbalanced her undeniable ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... after we had known Charlie his mother began to fail. She too had consumption. Family parties were planned for 290 families. Weights were taken and careful examination made, the physician explaining that predisposition means defective lung capacity or deficient vitality. Of 379 members, supposedly free from tuberculosis, sixteen were found to have well-marked cases. (Of twenty Boston children whose parents were in a tuberculosis class, four had tuberculosis.) In one instance the father was astonished ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... hitherto only been destructive; when philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect generalization caught up by a predisposition? what is Comte's great division of the eras, but a theory, and facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what it will. Intellect can destroy but it cannot make alive again,—call in the creative faculties, call ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... for your attending this party; and very urgent reasons why you should stay at home. Your cough is still troublesome, and a little exposure might give it permanency. You know that from your father you inherit a predisposition ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... not naturally possessed of a presentiment, or an apperception of a God, as the cause and reason of the universe. "If education be not already preceded by an innate consciousness of God, as an operative predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to act upon."[92] A mere verbal revelation can not communicate the knowledge of God, if man have not already the idea of a God in his mind. A name is a mere empty sign, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... present condition. And now we have to give an outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do, which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural predisposition, to duty, to service. There she displayed that acceptance of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a masculine habit of thinking. But she brought to the achievement of this determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more frequently masculine than ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... staunch to the principles of that system of the Church to which he had always belonged. Since his severance from Mr Newman, no one had had so strong an influence over him as the head of his college. During the time of his expected apostasy, Dr Gwynne had not felt much predisposition in favour of the young fellow. Though a High Churchman himself within moderate limits, Dr Gwynne felt no sympathy with men who could not satisfy their faiths with the Thirty-nine Articles. He regarded the enthusiasm ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... all, borne out by "ascertained facts." But it may well be that the latter have not the slightest intention of denying the truth or value of those facts. For instance, they see that a definite mental aptitude or predisposition is "inherited" in a family, and that certain gifts accumulated and combined in one descendant result in a remarkable personality. They are perfectly willing to acquiesce when it is said that the most celebrated name seldom stands at the beginning but at the end of a line of descent. But ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,—a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... very readily assented, remarking, at the same time, that a well-wrought theory had generally more effect on opinion than fifty facts; a result that he attributed to the circumstance of monikins having a besetting predisposition to save themselves ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... simplicity. Apparently his passions were not violent; perhaps they were restrained by his profound piety. Next to his devotion, Glastonbury was remarkable for his taste. The magnificent temples in which the mysteries of the Deity and saints he worshipped were celebrated developed the latent predisposition for the beautiful which became almost the master sentiment of his life. In the inspired and inspiring paintings that crowned the altars of the churches and the cathedrals in which he ministered, Glastonbury first studied art; and it was as he glided along the solemn shade of those Gothic aisles, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... they abstain from ever tasting the insidious poison. Temperament has much to do with the matter of drink, and could it be known and properly guarded against, I believe that a majority of those having the strongest predisposition to drink, if steps were taken in time, could be saved from its inevitable end, which is madness and death. I would here say to parents that it is their solemn duty to study well the disposition and temperament of their children ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... man's physical attributes under health. The classification is somewhat arbitrary, but it will be understood. A man must consider himself as to his size, as to his strength, as to his endurance, as to his condition of body (which shows habits), as to his predisposition to health, as to disease, as to his moral health, as to his sobriety, as to his ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... exploits of their forefathers, recording their laws and moral precepts, or hymning the praises of their deities. But, where the feelings are frequently stretched to the highest pitch, by the vicissitudes of a life of danger and military adventure, this predisposition of a savage people, to admire their own rude poetry and music, is heightened, and its tone becomes peculiarly determined. It is not the peaceful Hindu at his loom, it is not the timid Esquimaux in his canoe, whom we must expect to glow at the war song of Tyrtaeus. The music and the poetry ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... when it does occur, usually attacking individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of circumstances, unnecessary to be ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact they had not really seen him? Men have been very positive and very sincere about things wherein we should have conceived mistake impossible, and yet they have been utterly mistaken. A strong predisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, a hundred other causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare not assume forthwith that the first disciples of Christ were superior to influences which have misled many who have had better chances of withstanding them. Visions and ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... that development, so his mental progress is related to the mind progress of his ancestry. They go still further and assume that the subject-matter of the leading epochs is so well adapted to the changing phases and impulses of child life that there is a strong predisposition in children in favor of this course, and that the series of historical object lessons stirs the strongest intellectual ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... was a strong predisposition on the part of the Jamaica planters to defraud their labourers of their wages. They hoped that by yielding, before they were driven quite to the last extremity, by the tide of public sentiment in England, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... proceeded to explain in his imperturbable drawl; "Angelica discovered that I was born with a hee-red-it-air-ee predisposition to be a muff. We mostly are on father's side of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to know the cause of the South Sea elephantiasis. One theory is that it is caused by the drinking of polluted water. Another theory attributes it to inoculation through mosquito bites. A third theory charges it to predisposition plus the process of acclimatization. On the other hand, no one that stands in finicky dread of it and similar diseases can afford to travel in the South Seas. There will be occasions when such a one must drink water. There may be also occasions when ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... believes that a disease may be hereditary at all, must admit that certain individuals possess certain tendencies which render them especially liable to certain diseases, as consumption or scrofula; yet it is not easy to say precisely in what this predisposition consists. It seems probable, however, that it may be due either to some want of harmony between different organs, some faulty formation or combination of parts, or to some peculiar physical or chemical condition of the blood or tissues; ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... easy to perceive that he preferred Monge, and that he was led to that preference because Monge, endowed with an ardent imagination, without exactly possessing religious principles, had a kind of predisposition for religious ideas which harmonised with the notions of Bonaparte. On this subject Berthollet sometimes rallied his inseparable friend Monge. Besides, Berthollet was, with his cold imagination, constantly devoted to analysis and abstractions, inclined towards ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, I would suppose that in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this matter. "You are wise men," that Spirit might say—and I, being a suspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to plumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, I fancy, might even plume himself), "and to beget your wisdom is chiefly why the world was made. You are so good as to propose an acceleration of that tedious multitudinous ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... The object was not to educate him above his station and then make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the Civil Service. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for which he may have shown some predisposition. ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... responsibility of the individual to society, Kielland chooses to emphasize the responsibility of society to the individual. The former selects a hero with vicious inherited tendencies, redeemed by wise education and favorable environment; the latter portrays a heroine with no corrupt predisposition, destroyed by a corrupting environment. Elsie could not be good, because the world was once so constituted that girls of her kind were not expected to be good. Temptations, perpetually thronging in her way, broke down ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... whether he attended others while this case was in progress, whether he went directly from one chamber to others, whether he took any, and what precautions. It is important to know that several women were exposed to infection derived from the patient, so that allowance may be made for want of predisposition. Now if of negative facts so sifted there could be accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of communication here recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are bound to guard and watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold, though the ninety and nine may be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... following the principles of neo-Darwinism, regards instinct as a sum of accidental differences preserved by selection: such and such a useful behavior, naturally adopted by the individual in virtue of an accidental predisposition of the germ, has been transmitted from germ to germ, waiting for chance to add fresh improvements to it by the same method. The other type regards instinct as lapsed intelligence: the action, found useful by the species or by certain of its representatives, is supposed to have engendered ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... unmated and lose six months than mate her in this way because a suitable stud dog was not at the time available. I believe that this inbreeding is productive of excessive nervousness, weakness in physical form, the impairment of breeding functions, and the predisposition to ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined, locked back into a startling unity, and restored ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... is undernourished, it becomes disorganized and undeveloped. This is apt to be expressed in uncertain emotional states, quick tempers, and a predisposition to convulsions. The heart, if undernourished, lays its foundation for future heart disease, and the whole system will be ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... matter to stop it. Now, in our case, we've only the little kindling corner to smother, and the New Mexico air is water and blanket—a whole fire department, if need be. The doctor assures me that with mother's good constitution, and the absence of any hereditary predisposition to this sort of thing, we've only to give her the ten or twelve months of rest and reenforcement—the winter in New Mexico, the summer in Colorado—to nip the whole thing in the bud. I believe him, and you must believe him—and ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... practitioner is most loth to cope,—a disease that betrays thousands of cattle. This, also, may be either acute or chronic. Its causes are too often buried in obscurity, and its premonitory symptoms are disregarded or unknown. There appears to be a strong predisposition in cattle to take on this disease. It seems to be the winding-up of many serious complaints, and the foundation of it is sometimes laid by those that appear to be of the most trifling nature. It is that in cattle which glanders and farcy are ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... like convulsions, always slightly feverish. She would put a certain amount of passion into everything, I should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... of these scientific murderers is not, in both cases, an inborn predisposition, inseparable from the animal, but an acquired habit, then I rack my brain in vain to understand how that habit can have been acquired. Shroud these facts in theoretic mists as much as you will, you shall never succeed in veiling the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... cases will commonly be found associated with organic predisposition to insanity or cerebral disease . . . . Modifications of the malady are seen allied with genius. The biographies of Cowper, Burns, Byron, Johnson, Pope, and Haydon establish that the most exalted intellectual conditions ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... misunderstood in this matter that I must insert a caution against an inference which may be drawn from these words, viz. that school life is the origin of immorality among boys. The real origin is to be found in the common predisposition to vicious conceptions, which is the result of neglect. Nature provides in almost every case an active curiosity on this subject; and that curiosity must be somehow allayed; and if it were not allayed at school, false and depraved ideas would ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... time until the pair are forever united at the altar, it grows, and with marriage it begins to bring forth the unpeaceable fruits of endless dissensions. I sometimes wonder if the new life could be begun with a predisposition towards amity, what ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the great advantage Satan hath of a Christian, he hath a friend within every Christian, that betrays him often. You know the most part of temptations from without could have no such force or strength against us if there were not some predisposition in the flesh, some seeds of that evil within, if they were not presented to some suitableness to our senses, and they being once engaged on Satan's side, they easily draw the whole man with them, under a false colour and pretence of friendship, therefore they are said ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... ossification of these cartilages are several. No doubt there exists a predisposition to this condition for it is of such frequent occurrence in heavy draft types of horses. Concussion plays an important role and, according to Moeller's[28] theory, which is sound, high heel calks prevent the frog from contacting the ground, and as weight is placed upon the foot "the lateral cartilages ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... such a commotion of spirits, another book could allay it—the ordinary illusion of those who do not consider that the vogue of a printed appeal depends, not on the contents of the appeal, but on a predisposition ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... of darkness, nor the cold world could depress the spirits of Charles Stevens, the merry lad of Salem. In fact, he was so merry that, by the straight-laced Puritans, he was thought ungodly. He had a predisposition to whistling and singing, and was of "a light and frivolous carriage." He laughed at the sanctity of some people, and was known to smile even on the Lord's Day. When, in the exuberance of his spirits, his feet kept time to his whistling, the good Salemites were horrified ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... in man, then, to begin with. Here is this universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, merely, and maintain his form—which is nature's first law, they tell us—but to 'better himself' in some way. As Hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks advancement'; and advancement ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... square-built, coarse-featured, uncouth-looking creature, from the fjord region north of Stavanger, who called himself Nils Buvaagen, but whose name had been changed by the others to Uvaagen (not-awake), on account of his evident predisposition to sleep. He was incredibly naive and communicative, especially on the subject of his wife and children (of which latter he apparently had his nest full), and had soon become the butt of the ship. Salve was the only ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... may well be excused from having children; so too may they be excused whose poverty cannot keep a family; excused too is the inveterate drunkard, and all habitual criminals, by the principle of heredity, lest they transmit to posterity an evil bodily predisposition; but the healthy and the virtuous, men sound of mind and limb, of life unspotted, and in circumstances easy, the flower of the race,—none of these surely should omit to raise up others to wear his lineaments: we want ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... reply has not been recorded. Enough that half an hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other evidence of mental and moral disturbance. His cordiality and oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress in the doorway, who waved to him a silent but ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... temperature of the bath, that must, to a great extent, depend upon the conditions of life, and the predisposition and susceptibility of the individual; but the cold bath should always be employed in preference to the warm bath, when conditions permit. The cold bath is a powerful stimulant to the sympathetic nervous system. and as that is the great regulator of nutrition, the value of cold bathing to those afflicted ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... thinkers like Levi ben Gerson we find the further attempt to carry out more boldly the implications of the philosophical point of view, which, as the latter thought, Maimonides left implicit by reason of his predisposition in favor of tradition. Hasdai Crescas went still farther and entirely repudiated the authority of Aristotle, substituting will and emotion for rationalism and logical inference. Not knowledge of God as logically demonstrated is the highest aim of man, but love of God. But even in his opposition ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the fighting Barrents backward through subjective time, to those stress points in the past where death had been near, where the temporal life fabric had been weakened, where a predisposition toward death had already been established. Conditioning forced Barrent-2 to re-experience those moments. But this time, the danger was augmented by the full force of the malignant half of his ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... of Edmund you see, as soon as a man cannot reconcile himself to reason, how his conscience flies off by way of appeal to nature, who is sure upon such occasions never to find fault, and also how shame sharpens a predisposition in the heart to evil. For it is a profound moral, that shame will naturally generate guilt; the oppressed will be vindictive, like Shylock, and in the anguish of undeserved ignominy the delusion secretly springs up, of getting over the moral quality of an action by fixing the mind on ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... he wrote it," said the young marchioness: "only insanity could excuse such presumption. Men don't go mad from disappointed love, or women either, I believe, unless there's a predisposition to madness. He must have had that, and any other accident in his life would have brought it out as well as his foolish fancy for me. If he had been thrown from his gig, or had two or three of his patients die on his hands at once, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... result of reason, instinctive action is purposeful to the extent that it shows a predisposition on the part of the organism to react in an effective ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... like a slap in the face. With every possible predisposition to look favorably on its teachings, I was unable to find anything in them but the prejudiced judgments of a one-sided thinker, fond of brilliant general propositions which really had nothing serious to rest upon either in fact or reason. The following ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... more important avocations be granted, I will handle the matter more at large in an appendix to the present volume. In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness for alliteration, assonance, and even rhyme, in which natural predisposition we may trace the three degrees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to its culmination in the poetry of Pope. I would not be understood as questioning in these remarks that pious theory which supposes that children, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... affected, I tell you. What she's got to have is high, dry air—like Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. And right out in the open—live like an Injun for a year or two. Radical change of climate—change of living. Another year of office work will kill her." He stopped and eyed Peter pityingly. "Predisposition—and then the grippe—her mother went that way, ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... my work is to render it as serviceable as possible to my readers, I must not omit some cautionary remarks upon the tradespeople of Paris; an opinion has generally existed of their predisposition to overcharge the English, and in a great many instances it has been the case, when they first came over to France; an idea existed that they were extremely rich, and a bad feeling prevailed of making the wealthy pay: even amongst their own country people, they do the same, it is a common phrase ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... one afar off. The recollection never failed to move him. Later on he had decided on becoming a priest in order to satisfy that craving for a superhuman affection which was his sole torment. He could not see where greater love could be. In that state of life he satisfied his being, his inherited predisposition, his youthful dreams, his first virile desires. If temptation must come, he awaited it with the calmness of the seminarist ignorant of the world. He felt that his manhood had been killed in him: it gladdened him to feel himself ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. There may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... highly probable that a certain quantity of contagion, much beyond the proportion of other popular assemblages less uniformly wretched in their composition, was here to be found all day long; and doubtless my excited state, and irritable habit of body, had offered a peculiar predisposition that favored the rapid development of this contagion. However this might be, the result was, that on the evening of the second day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison, (consequently the night preceding the second public ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, why is it that a boys' school should be placed beyond the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life, that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? Have boys so strong a predisposition to grace, that society can afford to take them away from home and its influences, and turn them loose with dozens of other boys into a bare and battered boarding-house, with its woodwork dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything narrow ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... themselves.[52] And, indeed, M. Maury is the first to allow that there is a fundamental opposition between the Biblical tradition and the legend of Brahminical India or of Hesiod. In this last, as he himself remarks, we see "no trace of a predisposition to sin transmitted by inheritance from the first man to his descendants, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... grandmother, who happened to be on a visit to her son-in-law. The doctor said it was a kind of nondescript fever with cerebral and typhoid symptoms, to which young people not acclimatized to Marseilles were very liable on settling there. In Richard's case there had been a predisposition on account of the hard work he had gone through for the Agregation. He had looked as if he bore it easily while it lasted; but the strain had been more severe than he was aware of; and two years after his recovery he told me that he had never felt ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... another school, which Coningsby had at command, still they were, unconsciously to the recipient, materials for thought, and insensibly provoked in his mind a spirit of inquiry into political questions, for which he had a predisposition. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... misinformed, he certainly understood the other fellows to say this; he certainly never heard the teacher forbid that; handsome, reasonable, self-respecting, he won approval on all sides, and because of this mysterious predisposition toward what was right and just, came safely to the years when he was his own master and could live unchallenged by the high moral standard he ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... of this sort upon my wife's side," I whispered the little lord; "her uncle's symptoms were identical. Dr. Peterson says that the sunstroke was only the determining cause. The predisposition was already there. I may tell you that the footman will always be in the next room, so that you can call him if you need ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... level roof supported by amorphous piers—might be extended indefinitely into the interior of the hills, and its outer facade continued almost without term along their flanks—the solid mass of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props instead of columns. Hence the predisposition to attempt in the built temple the expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous architrave ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... with its exposition of the phases of the eye explains everything. A small eye is a sign of strength; a large eye is a sign of languor. A small oblique eye (the Chinese eye), when associated with lateral development of the cranium, and ears drawn back, indicates a predisposition to murder. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of the school. But on further inquiry it appeared: first, that the mother of the girl had always been subject to menorrhagia, and it is well known that this often occurs exclusively as the result of hereditary predisposition. Second, that just before the entrance to school, and the disturbance of menstruation, the girl had been living in a malarial district, and had suffered from malarial infection, which is again a frequent cause of menorrhagia. Third, that the studies pursued at school ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... farmer patron feels he must have. Even after making money enough to be classed well-to-do, the farmer persists in his acquired mental habit—he tests every 'offer' put up to him by his need for it—or rather whether he can get along without it. This predisposition on the part of the audience to which the letter is addressed is to be borne in mind constantly—that the farmer ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... clutches of economic and commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that old New England ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... in order to pierce wood and to bore its galleries in an old rafter, employs "the same utensils which in others are transformed into picks and mattocks to attack clay and gravel, and it is only a predisposition of talent that holds each worker ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... extravagant vision before me? The ideas which I conceived of men and things, of my own fortunes, and the fortunate exercise of my own powers, were of an order which, in my calmer days, have often made me smile; yet what is the whole early life of man but a predisposition to fever? and I was then throbbing on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... dear sir, your child is dying because she does not wish to live. People who write novels call it dying of a broken heart; but it does not make much difference about the name. Your child is acutely sensitive, and has an extremely delicate constitution—predisposition to consumption. Separation from the young man she desires to marry has prostrated her to such an extent that she is practically dying. Under existing circumstances she will not live two months, and, to be brutally frank, you will have killed her. I understand that the young man ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... must ever remember, of peculiar organization. He is a being born with a predisposition which with him is irresistible, the bent of which he cannot in any way avoid, whether it directs him to the abstruse researches of erudition or induces him to mount into the fervid and turbulent atmosphere ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... ever so pompously set out) Vertue appears founded only upon nice, or subtle Speculations. But some Men there are so far from approving of any Notion or Theorem being advanc'd with respect to Deists whereby, as such, they may be induc'd to the love of Vertue (which is the best predisposition to the entertainment of Christianity) that they are ready to treat as not being themselves Christians if not as Atheists, any one who in the view of gaining thus much upon these Men assert Vertue by any other Arguments than such as they will not admit ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... idiosyncrasies of temperament that no one can foresee. But one may say that a Court does not lightly grant permission to presume death. There will be a rigorous inquiry—and a decidedly unpleasant one, I suspect—and the evidence will be reviewed by the judge with a strong predisposition to regard the testator as being still alive. On the other hand, the known facts point very distinctly to the probability that he is dead; and, if the will were less complicated and all the interested parties were ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... either of specific experience or general reasoning; but those more frequent cases in which simple inspection creates a presumption in favor of a proposition; not sufficient for belief, but sufficient to cause the strict principles of a regular induction to be dispensed with, and creating a predisposition to believe it on evidence which would be seen to be insufficient if no such presumption existed. This class, comprehending the whole of what may be termed Natural Prejudices, and which I shall call indiscriminately Fallacies of Simple Inspection or Fallacies ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... in their veins, Senorita Isolda was a most charmingly ingenuous, unsophisticated girl, frank and open as the day; furthermore, she had been so long accustomed to hear Jack spoken of admiringly by Carlos that she had insensibly acquired a strong predisposition in his favour; and, finally, and quite contrary to rule, when at length she met him in the flesh she instantly decided that this stalwart, handsome young Englishman was all that Carlos had represented him to be—and ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... with life. No one can read the many treatises[12] on hereditary disease and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, Omnes Graeci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent. of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
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