"Retrogression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... civilization. The character of the religious belief of man is, to a certain extent, the true test of his progressive {13} nature. His faith may prove a source of inspiration to reason and progressive life; it may prove the opposite, and lead to stagnation and retrogression. Upon the whole, it must be insisted that religious belief has subserved a large purpose in the economy of human progress. It has been universal to all tribes, for even the lowest have some form of religious belief—at least, a belief in spiritual beings. Religious belief thus became the primary ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and that he did not pretend to dogmatise about other races, also that he was dealing not with all societies but all that had any permanence. He argues that the promiscuous horde, where and when it is found, is to be explained as an abnormal case of retrogression due to a fortuitous scarcity of females resulting in polyandry, and he opposes to the theory of its predominance the potency of sexual jealousy which might serve as only another name for the patriarchal power. On ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... head, bit her lip, and rustled out of the room in a huff. She reported her ill-success with 'Maryllia Van' to her husband, who, in his turn, reported it to Lord Roxmouth, who straightway conveyed these and all other items of the progress or retrogression of his wooing to Mrs. Fred Vancourt. That lady, however, felt so perfectly confident that Roxmouth would,—with the romantic surroundings of the Manor, and the exceptional opportunities afforded ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... "Oh, you Beauty!" and then went off into various inarticulate sounds, which I recommend to the particular study of the new philosophers: they cannot have been invented after speech; that would be retrogression; they must be the vocal remains of that hairy, sharp-eared quadruped, our Progenitor, who by accident discovered language, and so turned Biped, and went ahead of all the other hairy quadrupeds, whose ears were too long or not sharp ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... with progress rather than with retrogression. Most newspaper men admit that this is true, but declare that the public will not buy the kind of papers which all sensible people approve. Just as soon as such papers can be made to pay, they say, we shall have them. One of the objects of this course is to create a taste ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... like the human race itself, run ever on? Quien sabey? Eras of barbarism have overtaken civilizations as pretentious as our own— intellectual nights in which the patiently acquired learning of ages was lost. Petrifaction as in China, retrogression begotten of luxury as in Athens, submersion beneath an avalanche of human debris as in Rome, ignorance-breeding despoliation as in Ireland—these be the lions in the path of civilization. No race or nation of which we have any record ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... contrary, Mr HAGERUP mentions that such decisions would be calculated to stamp Norway as a dependency, according to international and common law principles, and declared that from a national point of view, it indicates a very great retrogression on the present arrangement of the Consular Service[34:1]. In this, he forgets that Mr BOSTROeM'S conditions refer to exceptional decisions and do not touch the Norwegian Consul's normal position as being a Norwegian civil ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... served to condition and mold him as a writer. Salem had reached its highest prosperity in all lines and was just beginning its retrogression in Hawthorne's time; the primeval forests of Maine produced a subtle and lasting influence on him during his sojourn in Maine for his health; transcendentalism was the ruling thought at the time when Hawthorne was in his most plastic and solitary age; his interest in Brook ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... this singular change in character. He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all, merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now of redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. Not only was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember. His idea was that a man laboring under a great wrong, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... transportation.(867) All this supposes great progress of the mining countries in civilization in general; and yet, thus far, Mexico's republican independence etc., as compared with the later years of the Spanish colonial system there, is a great retrogression. The conquest of Spanish America by the United States would give a vast impetus to economic improvement; and here, again, the increase of production would be attended ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... to your objection of a multitude of still living simple forms, I have not discussed it anywhere in the "Origin," though I have often thought it over. What you say about progress being only occasional and retrogression not uncommon, I agree to; only that in the animal kingdom I greatly doubt about retrogression being common. I have always put it to myself—What advantage can we see in an infusory animal, or an intestinal worm, or coral polypus, or earthworm ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... what happened at the concert, when, for the first time, the notes of that matchless symphony fell upon the ears of the world: when the supreme desolation of the magnificent, crashing retrogression of the finale held a thousand people in breathless, trembling stillness; the tears of Ivan's boundless yearning: the passions of the true Weldschmerz glazing every eye. Accounts of the mad storm of applause which finally rose into a chorus ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... also left in doubt. It may be true; such things have happened ere now. This particular writer's credibility, however, is none of the best; he has been convicted over and over again of forcing the note in his diatribes against what he calls "retrogression into idolatry." There was certainly a good deal of unrest in the country during the period of the ex-monk's ascendency; no less than 13,783 persons had been banished to Siberia, and 3,756 executed at his orders. Yet nothing, it seemed, could shatter his position when, with appalling suddenness, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... unified aesthetic impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has been, present to consciousness is ipso facto unified aesthetically. The result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical method. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and retrogression, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... this tendency began to show itself in the Middle Ages, it found in the theological spirit, then personated by the Roman Church, its most bitter and most powerful enemy. The church, which had hitherto been a teacher and guide, became the champion of barbarism and the genius of retrogression. Instead of adapting herself to the growing wants of mankind, instead of preserving her influence and power by inward progress proportionate to that which she saw advancing without, she sought, stationary herself, to keep the world stationary, and to stamp out in blood the progressive ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... frustration and to perverse misapplication—in that potent space of time, so varied in its intellectual and social manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression—this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some rich ore—how much or little mattered not ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... struggle for life. But if the evolution of the animal world were based exclusively, or even chiefly, upon the survival of the fittest during periods of calamities; if natural selection were limited in its action to periods of exceptional drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or inundations, retrogression would be the rule in the animal world. Those who survive a famine, or a severe epidemic of cholera, or small-pox, or diphtheria, such as we see them in uncivilized countries, are neither the strongest, nor the healthiest, nor the most intelligent. No progress ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... would be against unmeaning punishments inflicted a hundred or a thousand years after an offence had been committed. Suffering there might be as a part of education, but not hopeless or protracted; as there might be a retrogression of individuals or of bodies of men, yet not such as to interfere with a plan for the improvement of the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... not born a telepath, John," I told him. "He has been deliberately trained to make use of the latent power in his brain. And I don't think I'm 'stuck' either. We all know we've been slowly slipping into retrogression ever since '63. None of us like it, but there isn't anything we can do to halt it—yet. We don't want our children, or their children, to keep slipping backwards. If we don't stop it in our lifetime, we may not be able to stop it ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... coincidences of these different phenomena of organic reproduction than did Hering. With much that is untenable, Butler's writings present many a brilliant idea; yet, on the whole, they are rather a retrogression than an advance upon Hering. Evidently they failed to exercise any marked influence upon ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... were once in a barbarous condition. To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... progress of the last two centuries. I hold it as a great truth that nature points to her uses and ends; that to observe these and follow them is to promote the greatest happiness to the human family; and that wherever these aims are diverted or misdirected, retrogression and human misery are the consequence. In all matters, experience is a better test than speculation; and to surrender a great practical utility to a mere theory is great folly. But it has been done, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... intellectual,—which has resulted to the race of man upon earth from Spanish domination in America. I have tried to think of one in vain. It certainly has not yielded an immortality, an idea, or a discovery; it has, in fact, been one long record of reaction and retrogression, than which few pages in the record of mankind have been more discouraging or less fruitful of good. What is now taking place in Cuba is historical. It is the dying out of a dominion, the influence of which will be seen and felt for centuries ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... essentially a theory of progression, it is in reality only one of gradual change. It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organization is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression, should ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... influence on the development of the milk glands. According to Lane-Claypon and Starling, if the ovaries and uteri are removed from a pregnant rabbit before the fourteenth day the development of the mammary gland ceases, retrogression takes place, and no milk appears in the gland. If, on the other hand, the operation be performed after the fourteenth day, milk appears within two days after the operation. It is to be concluded from this that the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather a retrogression. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression—in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... flowed on a level with the surroundings suddenly plunged into a deep mud canyon. This canyon had been cut back from far below by the undermining action of the falling water, and it was plain to see that it would continue its retrogression till it eventually reached the mouth of the great canyon several miles above, but I did not dream that it could accomplish this work as rapidly as it actually did years after. During a great flood it washed a canyon not only to Kanab but for miles up the gorge, sweeping away at one master ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... sure that He has risen and lives for ever, we have a better presence than that. He is gone from our sight that He may be seen by our faith. That 'now we see Him not' is advance on the position of His first disciples, not retrogression. Let us strive to possess the blessing of 'those who have not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a fault on the right side. That we have been far too slow to improve our laws must be admitted. But, though in other countries there may have occasionally been more rapid progress, it would not be easy to name any other country in which there has been so little retrogression. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... we now pass on to the consideration of Lyly's allegorical plays. The absence of all allegory from Campaspe shows that Lyly had broken with the morality: and we seem therefore to be going back, when two years later we have an allegorical play from his pen. But in reality there is no retrogression; for with Lyly allegory is not an ethical instrument. I have mentioned examples of plays before his day which employed the machinery of the morality, for the purposes of political and religious satire. The old form of drama seems to have developed a keen sensibility ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... some shallow-pate, With smallest brain possession, He uttered no filosofy On Nature's retrogression. To ancient types, by Darwin's rule, He simply said, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... perhaps ten days or more, since time measurement had lost its meaning, Cal lived among the colonists, watched their complete retrogression into a state of unawareness. Even the speech which they had retained seemed now to thin and falter as the simplifying of their idea-content no longer ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... without a murmur, and the Mohawk applied it with a power and skill that made the retrogression much faster than was the progress in the other direction. When the deepest portion of the channel was reached, Lena-Wingo used the implement with a great deal more cleverness than Ned Clinton had displayed, and it was crossed in considerably less time than before. ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... the word evolution may be used equivocally. It is not evident that all evolution is in the direction of a life, brute or human, that we commonly recognize as higher. There is retrogression, as well as progress, where such retrogression is favored by environment. We may call this, if we please, devolution. Were the conditions of his life very unfavorable, man could not live as he now lives; and, indeed, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one estate, or with a gradual retrogression. Suppose, for example, a return of the glacial epoch and a spread of polar climatal conditions over the whole globe. The operation of natural selection under these circumstances would tend, on the whole, to the weeding out of the higher organisms and the cherishing of the lower forms ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... itself aloof from other countries and is ignorant of the affairs of the world; the only object sought has been to give ourselves the least trouble, and by daily retrogression we are in danger of falling under ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... dislike. He was wholly out of sympathy with his surroundings, impatient of the necessity that brought him into contact with what he would have chosen to avoid. He looked about with eyes grown hard and contemptuous. The very building seemed to be the embodiment of retrogression and blind superstition. He was filled with antagonism. His face was grim and his figure drawn up stiffly to its full height when the door opened to admit the Mother Superior. For a moment she hesitated, a faint look of surprise coming into her face. And no antagonism, however intolerant, could ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... of science at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved: failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... end of, say 'every ten thousand years,' all the same events which have been happening throughout the period may begin to happen over again in the same order as before. Such a succession, however, would involve quite as much of retrogression as of progression, and the continual advance so boastfully spoken of would be nothing else than a tendency of society to return to the condition from which it had originally emerged. But, even on this uncomfortable hypothesis, there could be no regularity ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to the convention in October in 1829, said that Virginia was in a state of "moral and political retrogression" and proceeded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... itself. Its equivalent in our day would be an excessive development of the passion for amusement and excitement, destroying the dignity and seriousness of life. The wealthy and fashionable classes led the way, as they generally do in periods of moral retrogression; and the worst symptom of all was when the womanhood of the country surrendered itself to the prevailing tendencies. This last feature of degradation had developed itself in Isaiah's day; and he attacks it with a strange combination ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... at the bottom of all progress or retrogression, of all success or failure, of all that is desirable or undesirable in human life. The type of thought we entertain both creates and draws conditions that crystallize about it, conditions exactly ...
— Thoughts I Met on the Highway • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Paul—"the German Kultur—has thrown us back to the earliest savagery of which we hold record. All that education has done for us is to hold the savage in check for a time. He is still there. Spiritually humanity's record is one of retrogression." ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... is a well established fact in the very nature of things that it would be impossible to grow if there was no possibility of a decline. If there be no retrogression, there can be no progression. The beloved John from the lonely isle writes unto the church of Ephesus and tells them that God had somewhat against them because they had left their first love. He tells them to remember from whence they are fallen and repent. ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... knit his brows; Shakib shakes his head, biting his nether lip; and here and there in the audience is heard a murmur about retrogression and reaction. Khalid proceeds with his allegory of the Muleteer and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching. Strange retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an illumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather than sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the blood of rams ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... for the succession this liberty wholly disappeared. If the Wars of the Roses failed in utterly destroying English freedom, they succeeded in arresting its progress for more than a hundred years. With them we enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression in which the slow work of the age that went before it was rapidly undone. From the accession of Edward the Fourth Parliamentary life was almost suspended, or was turned into a mere form by the overpowering influence of the Crown. The legislative powers of the two Houses ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... never a gentleman," he went on, "and in the bony stage of retrogression, with his skeleton through his skin, and his character outside his manners, does not look like one. The female is less vulgar, and has a little heart. But, the restraints of society removed, you see them now just as they are and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... care of the infant. The only special treatment after childbirth is to sit with the back close to a fire, so as to heat it as much as can be borne. The delivery is sometimes aided by tightly binding the body above the gravid uterus in order, it would seem, to prevent any retrogression of the process. While the mother goes about her work in camp, the infant is usually suspended in a sling of bark-cloth from a bent sapling or branch, an arrangement which enables the mother to rock and so soothe the child by means of an occasional ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... of her boundless love for this one glorious man, and to whom the memories of a less harmless past seemed like wicked dreams sent by the Tempter to molest her chastity. This self-deception, or rather retrogression of her instincts, led her into touches of mysticism. The story of little Sonia who had fallen in love with the ten-year-old Wilhelm at first sight, to die shortly afterward with his name upon her lips, made a deep impression on her, and set her dreaming. "When sweet little ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being, dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three elements, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... questioned them about the museum of old machines, and the cause of the apparent retrogression in all arts, sciences, and inventions. I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... which now follow it will possibly be thought that our history, so far as incidents of special interest are concerned, somewhat languishes. Yet it may be wrong to regard this period as one of stagnation or retrogression. ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... for the health, comfort, and convenience of employes in general. It cannot be said that the labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. On the whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade unions—something which can be said of very few special interests for whose benefit our legislatures ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... convince you," said he. "Look at the French—the most brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples. Where are they in the race to-day? The evolutionist sees in them familiar symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way. Look at the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... motions of these evanescent spectra, either before or after the body is at rest. From all which arguments it is manifest, that these apparent retrograde gyrations of objects are not caused by the rolling of the eyeballs; first, because no apparent retrogression of objects is observed in other rollings of the eyes: secondly, because the apparent retrogression of objects continues many seconds after the rolling of the eyeballs ceases. Thirdly, because the apparent retrogression of objects is sometimes one way, and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... (1) grade, gradual, graduate, degrade, digress, Congress, aggressive, progressive, degree; (2) gradation, Centigrade, ingress, egress, transgression, retrogression, ingredient. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... make peace and make war—not a sovereign, not the whim of an individual, not the ambition of a single man; but the sentiment, the friendship, the affection, the feelings of this great throbbing mass of humanity, determine peace or war, progress or retrogression. And coming to a self-governing people from a self-governing people, I would interpret my fellow-citizens—the great mass of plain people—to the great mass of the plain people of Brazil. No longer the aristocratic selfishness, which gathers into a few hands all the goods of life, rules mankind. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... its aim and goal, although with an enthusiasm for that which is raised above the change of the days,—an enthusiasm which commands all respect, and in which the hackneyed newspaper categories of Progress and Retrogression are ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... itself, burst out in him with generous ardour. This man suffered intensely at what to him, as to Byron and to Shelley (we must recollect the introduction of the Revolt of Islam), seemed the battle between progress and retrogression; and suffered all the more as he was too pure and just-minded not to feel the impossibility of complete sympathy with either side. Mme. d'Albany answered his letters with Olympic serenity. What was it to her which got the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... mode of action, and, when they are not modified by outward changes, reduce life to its simplest phases. Changes of growth are effected by those apparent hardships to which life is subject; and progression in new directions is effected by retrogression in previous modes of growth. The old leaves and branches must fall, the wood must be frost-bitten or dried, the substance of seeds must wither and then decay, the action of leaves must every night be reversed, vines and branches must be shaken by the winds, that the energies and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... misgiving and disquietude to those, like ourselves, who favour the extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though we cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... us near to the period of the "Men and Women;" and displays, for the first time in Mr. Browning's work, a situation quite dramatic in itself, but which is nevertheless made by the characters, and imagined for them. It is a story of moral retrogression; but, setting aside its very humorous treatment, it is no "tragedy" for the reader, because he has never believed in that particular "soul," though its proprietor and his friends are justly supposed to do so. The drama is divided into two acts, of which the first represents the "poetry," ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... him was inexhaustible in providing him with the treasures he dispensed so lavishly. But the expansion of that energy caused in him the destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had not scrupled to repress in him. And he never perceived that his whole life was a steady retrogression of all his faculties, of his hopes, his joys—a species of gradual renunciation—and that the circle was slowly but inexorably ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... couple or more months of absolute freedom every year, control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it. You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his mother has ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her—first along the route originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... powers of initiative and selection as being the true line of evolution—in a word they would realize that the principle of Creative Progression, when it reaches the level of fully developed mental man, necessarily implies the Resurrection of the Body, and that anything short of this would be retrogression and not progress. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... contemptible by it. I have some of the play-bills of John Kemble's last performances before me, and there is none of this fustian: the fact, the performance, and the name are simply announced. If our taste improves in some respects, it does not in this; it is a retrogression—a royal theatre sinking back into the booth of a fair. Shakspeare's and Byron's texts have been converted into the showman's explanations of panoramas: to what vile uses they may be next applied, there is no guessing. Poor Shakspeare! how I have pitied him, and you too, Mr. Editor, as I have ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... are really forges for forming new structures of matter or forms of energy, rather than quarries from which they are cut, and we seem to get a glimpse of the origin of life, perhaps itself the cause of "retrogression" in the material, coming through from the Reality, the Infinite beyond the ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... have no patience with people who voice such objections. If this country had not been one of the few privileged places on our planet where the experiment of a sudden change of institutions and ideals has been carried on most successfully, without paralyzation or retrogression, disorganization or destruction, I would say that the apprehension and fears of those who oppose ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... complete solution of it.... Admitted facts seem to show ... a general, but not a detailed progression.... It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organisation is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression should ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... houses during their absence, and my business agent and myself agreed that this would be an excellent thing for me to do. If the house were let to a suitable family it would yield me a considerable income, and the place would not present on my return that air of retrogression and desolation which I might expect if it were left unoccupied and in charge of ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... their present boundaries, far from having been catastrophic, was marked on the contrary by periods of repose more or less frequent, which caused the formation of a series of concentric moraines which even now indicate their retrogression. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... department officers, which has since become a part of the national regulations, and which, from its inception in this department, has contributed so largely to the efficiency and growth of the organization. With the retrogression of the western departments, Massachusetts in this year went to the front in point of numbers, as confessedly also in perfection of organization and completeness of Grand Army work, and held that ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... themselves. That honourable ambition would not have to be sacrificed. With the universal adoption of Colour, all distinctions would cease; Regularity would be confused with Irregularity; development would give place to retrogression; the Workman would in a few generations be degraded to the level of the Military, or even the Convict Class; political power would be in the hands of the greatest number, that is to say the Criminal Classes, who were already more numerous than the Workmen, and would soon ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we that nation? If not, have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas on the terrace, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... what we also maintain: The establishment of the theory of Descent in general, and the continual retrogression of Darwinism in particular. Wigand was entirely right when he said that Darwinism would not live beyond ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... request, now became the very curse of his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a moment avail to coax or to coerce them into the counter direction. Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into progress, we excelled in that; it was our forte; we could have backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least to distinction—sic itur ad astra; unfortunately, it was not the way to Dublin. Consequently, on ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... our recent fiction it is obvious that we ought to remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our prevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature is never in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to the development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The literary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic and realistic, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... reached in the autumn of 1886. But in the early months of 1887 a reaction became visible. By July 1, the membership of the Order had diminished to 510,351. While a share of this retrogression may have been due to the natural reaction of large masses of people who had been suddenly set in motion without experience, a more immediate cause came from the employers. Profiting by past lessons, they organized strong associations. The main object of these ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... properties which secure this result, I have enumerated them in my recently published book[6] to which I have already referred. Furthermore the passage of nature enables us to know that one direction along the series corresponds to passage into the future and the other direction corresponds to retrogression towards the past. ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... stony and gradually descending trail, and we are making our way across the usual chequered area of desert, patches, abandoned fields, and old irrigating ditches that so often tell the tale of decay and retrogression in the East. These outlying evidences of decay, however, soon merge into green fields of wheat and barley, poppy gardens, and orchards, and flowing ditches; and two hours after obtaining the first view of Herat finds us camped in a walled apricot garden in the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... protested that architecture was not his trade. Over and over again he repeated this to his Medicean patrons; but they compelled him to build, and he applied himself with the predilections and prepossessions of a plastic artist to the task. The result was a retrogression from the point reached by his immediate predecessors to the vicious system followed by the pseudo-Gothic architects in Italy. That is to say, he treated the structure as an inert mass, to be made as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details agreeable to the eye. At the beginning ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of psychic retrogression that takes place in manifold ways in the dream (and related psychic events). The dream reaches back towards infantile memories and wishes. [Sometimes this is already recognizable in the manifest dream content. Usually, however, it is first disclosed by psychoanalysis. Strongly ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... of rapid retrogression under new unfavorable geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer. The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... more or less outwit her as it were? Come, come!—don't look so puzzled about it!—you have only done what all so-called 'reasonable' human beings do, and think themselves justified in doing. But now, in your present state,—which is an advancement, and not a retrogression,— you have begun to gain a little wider knowledge, with a little deeper humility—and I am inclined to have ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... and Inbreathing of Brahm," as the Brahmans word it. Universes are created; reach their extreme low point of materiality; and then begin in their upward swing. Suns spring into being, and then their height of power being reached, the process of retrogression begins, and after aeons they become dead masses of matter, awaiting another impulse which starts again their inner energies into activity and a new solar life cycle is begun. And thus it is with all the worlds; they are born, grow and die; ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... purpose of imitating them: and yet we do not consider that we thus in any way bind ourselves to adopt Roman, or Greek, or Egyptian, or Scandinavian costumes or customs; nor in our use of the Arts of Antiquity do we perceive any demonstration of retrogression ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... experience is more reliable than physiological theories and opinions.... The history of the advance of the cure of disease is in the history of empiricism, in the best sense of that much-abused word. The history of retrogression in the art of curing disease is that of the so-called Physiological Schools of Medicine... Physiological theory, based on experiments on dogs, wishes us to believe that mercury does not excite a flow of bile; ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... and fishers, speedily lose somewhat of their hardly won culture—for civilization is the product of labor. Whenever a people from necessity or choice abandon one form of labor for another demanding less skill to triumph over nature, a retrogression in culture ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... life; and when I reflect now upon my lack of real knowledge at five and twenty, I am amazed at the futility of an expensive education which had failed to impress upon me the simple, basic fact that life was struggle; that either development or retrogression is the fate of all men, that characters are never completely made, but always in the making. I had merely a disconcerting glimpse of this truth, with no powers of formulation, as I sat beside my mother in the bedroom, where every article evoked some childhood scene. Here was the dent in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood. There is no opportunity for military training—for more than six months in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors—and the officers complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be compensated ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... no use denying that the last half-year has been one of retrogression. Seven months ago this Colony was perfectly quiet, at least as far as the Orange River. The southern half of the Orange River Colony was rapidly settling down, and even a considerable portion of the Transvaal, notably the south-western districts, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... establish truth and lead men. In a general way, however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tuebingen positions. Harnack's Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 1893, and his Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur, 1897, present a marked contrast ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... is excused by the embarrassed condition of the capital of the islands, an exceedingly imprudent measure, since, in order to provide for an uncertain danger, the Visayan Islands were left exposed to another which was more immediate and real—to say nothing of the retrogression that must necessarily result to our domination among the natives of Mindanao, where at that time over seventy thousand Christians lived. The pirate who could cause such a panic in the authorities ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... the roadside, overshadowed by gigantic trees, overrun with plants and creepers, and closely backed by the gloomy forest, he is struck by the solemnity and picturesque beauty of the scene, and is led to ponder on the strange law of progress, which looks so like retrogression, and which in so many distant parts of the world has exterminated or driven out a highly artistic and constructive race, to make room for one which, as far as we can judge, is ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... with the addition of colouring matter, to be replaced by a perfect leaf, one in which all three constituent parts, sheath, stalk, and blade, are present, it surely can hardly be said that there has been any retrogression or arrest of development in the formation of a complete in place of an incomplete organ. The term retrograde here is used in a purely theoretical sense, and cannot be held to imply any actual degradation. ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... and for the decayed and destroyed civilizations; for the general facts as to the rise of civilization, and for the petrifying or enervating force which the progress of civilization has heretofore always evolved. It must account for retrogression a well as for progression; for the differences in general character between Asiatic and European civilizations; for the difference between classical and modern civilizations; for the different rates at which progress goes on; and for those bursts, and starts, and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard and fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... those of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" than the thoughts of Berowne upon things in general are those of Hamlet, or Hamlet's those of Prospero. But before it is possible to point out the nature of this difference, and to show that the change is a natural growth of thought, not a mere retrogression, a few ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the Baltic ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... observing the ambition, the selfishness, the party spirit, the unworthy intrigues, and the irregularities of moral conduct, which modern rulers and statesmen sometimes exhibit to mankind in their personal and political career, to believe in a retrogression and degeneracy of national character as the world advances in age, will be very effectually undeceived by reading attentively a full history of this celebrated dynasty, and reflecting, as he reads, that the narrative presents, on the whole, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... outlived their usefulness as cruisers were one by one taken out of commission and were not replaced. Thus the navy moved steadily on a downward plane. Through the seventies and into the eighties this retrogression continued. The lowest ebb was reached in 1882, when the entire naval force numbered only thirty-one vessels in commission, all but four of which were built entirely of wood. They were old-fashioned ships, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... you—what of that? The true men are still with us, and the struggle must not be abandoned, even though our soldiers should be compelled through the over-zeal of United States officers to abandon the present campaign. There is no turning back for us, my countrymen. Our movement must and will advance. Retrogression would entail certain infamy and bring a deeper stain upon your country and race, and it is as legitimate for you to attack English power in Canada as it was for England to attack France there, or France ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... rebel. He then digressed to recent political measures, and expressed himself strongly upon the advantages which tranquillity at home, as well as peace abroad, must ensure to the kingdom; after which, as if by some process of mental retrogression, he became suddenly more gloomy in his discourse; and observed, as if despite himself, that although he would struggle even to the end of his existence to secure these national advantages, he nevertheless felt that as the Queen had given him no son, all his endeavours ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... this question, of comradeship between black and white laborers, there is a call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial community—and that means our entire community. It is one of the most hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of large brain, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the widest sense—faith in ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... new amendment to the theory of evolution: We are told that the huge Saurians (reptiles) overworked the development idea, and became too large and cumbersome, and hence are now extinct. Prof. Cope says:—"Retrogression in nature is as well established as evolution." It seems that man also has, contrary to all former conceptions, reached the limit of his development, if he has ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... awake behind them. No one has ever been seen to have driven off Time from him. Ancient and eternal, and the embodiment of justice, Time is uniform in respect of all living creatures. Time cannot be avoided, and there is no retrogression in its course. Like a usurer adding up his interest, Time adds up its subtile portions represented by kalas, and lavas, and kashthas, and kshanas, and months, and days and nights. Like the current of a river washing away a tree whose roots are reached by ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... anger, should he be angry; put up with his continued opposition, should he resolutely oppose her; bear all that the countesses of the world might say to her;—for it was thus that she thought of Lady Cantrip now. Any retrogression was ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... idleness or ignorance) that the undertaking which year by year had been carried forward with so much energy and success, should after a while come to a standstill; and the commonest observation of life will suffice to remind us that when progress ceases, retrogression is almost certain to set in. The immense zeal and unflagging enthusiasm of Junipero Serra and his immediate followers could not be transmitted by any rite or formula to the men upon whose shoulders their responsibilities came presently to rest. ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... been the way. This Psalmist is no exception to the devout souls of his time. For though, as I have said, externalisms and ritualisms filled a place then, that it is an anachronism and a retrogression that they should be supposed to fill now, still beneath all these there lay this one ancient, permanent relation, the relation of trust. From the day in which the 'father of the faithful' as he is significantly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... be made in behalf of women, therefore, is liberty, as untrammelled a choice of occupation and mode of life, as free a range of individuality and spiritual fruition, as is granted to men. But would this really be an advance, or a retrogression? Many maintain that it would be subversive of the genuine progress of civilization, to abandon the prejudices and throw down the bars which have hitherto restrained women from a full share in the chosen avocations and ambitions of men. All improvement is marked, they say, by an increase of differences, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... doubts as to the stability of Darwinism, I have seen so many immortal truths die young. I verily believe that the cocksureness of our century is destined to be the amusement of the next, which may not impossibly believe that the ape is descended from man by retrogression. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... probability have lost too much of its heat and light by then, and will have begun to grow dark and therefore cold, as other stars have done. The conditions of existence here, which are now apparently in their prime, will have become rigorous and increasingly so, and there will be retrogression towards lower types, until the simplest form of life shall have wholly disappeared from the ice-bound surface. The whole living world will then have waxed and waned ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... protest against this retrograde movement; that we earnestly hope that better counsels will prevail; that, at a time when so conservative an institution as the British Medical Association has voted to open its doors to women, the stigma of retrogression will not be allowed to rest upon the foremost school in the ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... France, which is the most highly cultivated Romanist country—are, like those which the Jesuits built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less Gothic. The former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of a new fantastic Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a real retrogression from Gothic towards earlier and less natural schools. Next, that the Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and the English Nonconformists, as they are becoming more cultivated—and there are now many highly cultivated ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutes visits per day to the sick room. And found what I have learned to expect—retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye which betrays the secret ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... What is known as religion —that is to say, a system by which this world is wasted in preparation for another—a system in which the duties of men are greater to God than to his fellow-men—a system that denies the liberty of thought and expression—tends only to discord and retrogression. Of course, I know that religious people cling to the Bible on account of the good that is in it, and in spite of the bad, and I know that Freethinkers throw away the Bible on account of the bad that is in it, in spite of the good. I hope the time will come when that book will be ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... born a telepath, John," I told him. "He has been deliberately trained to make use of the latent power in his brain. And I don't think I'm 'stuck' either. We all know we've been slowly slipping into retrogression ever since '63. None of us like it, but there isn't anything we can do to halt it—yet. We don't want our children, or their children, to keep slipping backwards. If we don't stop it in our lifetime, we may not be able to ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... infinitely more uncomfortable. Seven gentlemen and two ladies went inside, in a space where six would have been disagreeably crowded. Mr. Sandford preferred the outside, where he could smoke his cigar without molestation. The road was very hilly, and several times our progress was turned into retrogression, for the horses invariably refused to go up hill, probably, poor things! because they felt their inability to drag the loaded wain up the steep declivities which we continually met with. The passengers were therefore frequently ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... through heaven above and earth beneath. Does He not show us new materials for His building? Does He not give new forms to His design? Does He not surprise us with novelties, extraordinaries, and mysteries? In a word, the world is in progress, not in retrogression. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Improvement with Lycurgus means retrogression with us. He wished, perhaps ignorantly, to arrest the progress of civilization and substitute a slovenly ideal of his own. His purpose was to cancel the civilization which the race had gained during ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... cardinals drove again in gilt coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take for granted that superstition and ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... that here the remains of the glacier mark a process of retrogression; for had these successive walls of loose materials been deposited in consequence of the advance of the glacier, they would have been pushed together in one heap at its lower end. That such would have been the case is not mere inference, but has been determined by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... occupied by the most powerful of its adversaries. Not only Amida and Carrhae, but Antioch itself, trembled at a loss which was felt to lay open the whole eastern frontier to attack, and which seemed ominous of further retrogression. Although the fear generally felt proved to be groundless, and the Roman possessions in the East were not, for 200 years, further curtailed by the Persians, yet Roman influence in Western Asia from this time steadily declined, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... distinct social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the point of light depressed the most, to the time when the uppermost portion of the Sun's disc was released by the eastward motion of the Moon, and the light from that uppermost portion was again manifest, was about 20 minutes, and this, therefore, was the time during which the phenomenon of retrogression on the "steps" would have been exhibited to the King's eyes. Assuming then that the time when the ascending shadow had travelled upwards to the tenth step coincided, or nearly so, with the time when the Sun had reached its highest altitude ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... the traitor spy, who had taken that one fatal step, from which in this life there is no retrogression—that one plunge in infamy from which there is no receding—that one treachery for which there is no earthly forgiveness; and, think you, he hesitated about a prejury more or less to secure present pay and future patronage? Here was one to whom existence offers now ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... did not encourage the Radicals. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana voiced the sentiments of the opposition, defeating Galusha A. Grow, speaker of the House, and seriously threatening the Radical majority in Congress. This retrogression, accounted for by the absence of soldiers who could not vote,[857] suggested trouble in New York, and to offset the influence of the Seymour rally in Brooklyn a great audience at Cooper Institute listened ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... to seem to succeed. We shun and dread the appearance of failure. When a church begins to rot instead of grow it is natural for us to do our utmost to find out some way of excusing the retrogression without admitting our failure to reach men with the gospel. There are evangelists, who in the palmy days of their power had wonderful, heaven-gladdening revivals, who have ceased to wield "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon," and, in order to cover their spiritual nakedness, are forced to resort ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... extent and hopelessness of your retrogression from all good that you should presume to ask such a question," answered Moretti, growing white under the natural darkness of his skin with an impotency of rage he could scarcely suppress, "Your sermon this morning was an open ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli |
